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Post by generalvikus on Sept 6, 2020 9:24:32 GMT -6
Generally, I have found that, when recreating historical ships in the appropriate year and with generous technology, the listed 'standard' and 'normal' displacement figures are too light, and deep load is the closest match. For the London Treaty, 45,000 tons seems like a good approximation. However, I've noted that - for example - while most built - to - spec treaty cruisers hover around the 12,500 ton range at full load, the full displacement figure listed for the County class is a full 40% higher than standard displacement, at 14,000 tons. I'm interested in finding a figure which roughly corresponds to the historical 10,000 ton WNT limit for a historical playthrough; what do you guys think about this issue?
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Post by director on Sept 6, 2020 10:25:29 GMT -6
I sympathize with your desires to simplify and to bring order to the chaos that is ship displacement. I'm just not sure how to go about it since the Washington Treaty displacement was an artificial limit designed to obfuscate and to tilt the table in favor of one of the major powers, while everyone played games with Treaty provisos and fudged the official displacements. Adopting 'full load' displacement might make it clearer to us but nothing I can think of is going to reconcile all of the displacement figures in use.
A system of displacements that allows a warship to both be at 10k and at 14k tons simultaneously is designed for confusion, by experts who were skilled in warship design and masters of confabulation. I fear we are stuck with guesstimates, conversions, squinting hard and making a sour face, and other methods of coping.
You have my best wishes. I'll be watching and hoping you come up with a solution.
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Post by jwsmith26 on Sept 6, 2020 11:42:59 GMT -6
Source information on displacement can suffer because of the various usages for "ton". There is the American (and Canadian) "ton" which equals 2000 pounds (907 kg), sometimes referred to as a "short ton". There is the British ton which equals 2,240 pounds (1,016 kg), sometimes referred to as the "long ton". There is the "tonne" (or "metric ton" in the US), which is equal to 1,000 kg (2205 pounds).
To add to the confusion, often tons are abbreviated as "t", which is the official symbol for both the British ton and the tonne, and is also one of the abbreviations used to designate an American ton. It is great when the source uses a more precise designation such as "long tons" when listing a ship's displacement.
When designing a ship template to match an historical ship or attempting to create a historical design I will first set the displacement to the standard displacement and then set all the parameters such as armor and weapons to the historical levels. Often this pushes the ship into an overweight condition. I then adjust the displacement to allow the design to save successfully. This usually places the displacement somewhere between the standard and full load displacement. There are many levers that a real-world ship designer can pull to adjust weight that are not present in the game (including simply lying about weight), making it difficult to match historical designs exactly.
If you are creating a template rather than an in-game ship, it should be noted that the game will seldom use a template exactly as it was designed, rather the game will add or subtract armor, weapons, aircraft, displacement, etc. within a certain percentage of what the template has specified, so the expectation should be that the game will create a design that is similar to the historical design but seldom matches it exactly.
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Post by aeson on Sept 6, 2020 13:18:18 GMT -6
I would add that even when the displacement figures are not intentionally deceptive or outright fabrications there can be issues reconciling displacement figures, because ships within a class are generally not more than nominally the same displacement and so class displacement figures tend to be estimates based on paper designs, averages of measured displacements, or perhaps correct for a chosen ship of the class, and also because two displacement numbers given for a ship are not necessarily simultaneously appropriate to that ship. Most of the ships of the Kent group of the County class, for instance, gained a 4.5" armor belt amidships in mid- to late-'30s refits and were modified to carry radar and increased AA armaments during the war - all of which could have made the ships heavier, which brings up the possibility that the ~14,000-ton (full load) figure is more correct for a 1940s County while the ~10,000-ton (standard) figure is more correct for an early-'30s County. It is also possible that whoever authored the source from which you're pulling your figures found a full load displacement for, say, Kent and a standard displacement for, say, Australia and reported these numbers as the full load and standard displacement figures for the class, which could at least partly account for the discrepancy you note if Kent is heavier than average and Australia is lighter than average for the class, or if the full load displacement is a measured value for a specific ship while the standard displacement is a nominal value for the class.
Also, if you're looking to try and compute a ratio between standard and full load displacement, I would strongly suggest attempting to track down reasonably accurate standard (and full load) displacement(s) for the class - or for specific ships - rather than going with the 10,000 tons set by the naval treaties as it's not particularly likely that any historical cruiser displaced exactly 10,000 tons (standard) in more than a fairly loose nominal sense even on paper.
Displacements are traditionally given in long tons and the treaties specified the long ton as the unit of measure used in the definitions, so unless otherwise specified it's usually safe to assume that if a ship is "10,000 tons" then it's 10,000 long tons; even if the displacement is given in metric tons, the difference is only ~1.6% and so for the purposes of Rule the Waves displacement figures you're not going to be off by more than maybe six or seven hundred tons outside of really big ships like Yamato and Shinano or the US supercarriers.
Another issue that can come up is if you're looking at a ship for which the listed number of tons might be something more like gross register tonnage rather than displacement, although that is not particularly likely for warships.
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Post by durhamdave on Sept 7, 2020 6:14:46 GMT -6
I have heard part of the reason for using a 'standard displacement' in the treaties was so that colonial powers with the need for long ranges on their ships weren't sacrificing fighting power to get that range, compared with a country that didn't need long range ships. Hence not using full load.
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Post by director on Sept 7, 2020 20:25:48 GMT -6
The first and only goal of any treaty is to get a better deal than the other fellow.
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