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Post by christian on Apr 13, 2021 2:43:02 GMT -6
As can be seen in the pictures i am paying an exorbitant price for just a 5.5 inch flight deck The price of an Unarmored carrier comes in at 22 months 3342 which is 73524 total this is extremely cheap The armored carrier which for reference only has a 5.5 flight deck difference (everything else is identical) 24 months 5.213 total is 125112 When you take into the fact that bombs can ignite fires Dud bombs and non penetrative bombs can also start fires and that 5.5 inches is barely enough to protect from 1000 lb AP bombs which penetrate over 50% of the time (99% of the time bombers in 1940 are loaded with 1200 1400 or 1500 lb AP bombs) most of the time carriers sink to fires and a bomb detonating on the flight deck starting a fire (even if no aircraft are being readied or ready) leads to a dead carrier TLDR: Flight deck armor is not that useful and rarely saves a carrier even if it stops a bomb. On top of the fact carriers with flight decks are significantly more expensive The example carrier is 1.7 times more expensive with a 5.5 inch flight deck For every armored carrier i could get 1.7 unarmored ones Attachments:
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Post by janxol on Apr 13, 2021 3:04:20 GMT -6
There is a point here.
Personally I like armored carriers, I want to use armored carriers. But from a purely gameplay perspecitve I can't really justify it other than RP. The needed armor is just far too heavy and if I'm not mistaken it's also far heavier than IRL, while at the same time not being very effective.
Seems to me like AP bombs are far too common, which is another thing of its own, and carriers, while undeniably highly flammable, appear to be little bit too flammable in-game. Now someone should fact-check me on this, but wouldn't it make more sense for armored carriers to be a lot less likely to catch fires, while unarmored carrier would get a bonus to firefighting (I recall reading that firefighting on US carriers was easier due to their construction, can't be entirely sure if its the armored vs unarmored hangar difference).
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Post by christian on Apr 13, 2021 3:25:18 GMT -6
There is a point here. Personally I like armored carriers, I want to use armored carriers. But from a purely gameplay perspecitve I can't really justify it other than RP. The needed armor is just far too heavy and if I'm not mistaken it's also far heavier than IRL, while at the same time not being very effective. Seems to me like AP bombs are far too common, which is another thing of its own, and carriers, while undeniably highly flammable, appear to be little bit too flammable in-game. Now someone should fact-check me on this, but wouldn't it make more sense for armored carriers to be a lot less likely to catch fires, while unarmored carrier would get a bonus to firefighting (I recall reading that firefighting on US carriers was easier due to their construction, can't be entirely sure if its the armored vs unarmored hangar difference). Even if carriers are highly flammable (which isent that unrealistic provided a hit to a flammable part like avgas) it seems fragments or anything even in the wrong hit location will light a carrier on fire I have had fragmentation hit the firecontrol station only to light a fire which somehow spreads to the carrier and suddenly i have fire status 9 on my carrier and its lost Also pulling a franklin or Bunker hill in RTW is far more unlikely as damage control is just not that strong Attachments:
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Post by captaintrek on Apr 13, 2021 4:37:31 GMT -6
There is a point here. Personally I like armored carriers, I want to use armored carriers. But from a purely gameplay perspecitve I can't really justify it other than RP. The needed armor is just far too heavy and if I'm not mistaken it's also far heavier than IRL, while at the same time not being very effective. You're not mistaken at all. The Illustrious-class' historical 3 inches of flight deck would be utterly useless in RtW. On top of that, deck armour is so heavy that it's virtually impossible to emulate Illustrious' historical design on its historical displacement. Indeed, I did some emulations of historical battleship designs for fun a while back, and I had to halve the historical deck armour thicknesses to make any of them work. Both deck armour weight and AP bomb penetration could really stand to be addressed... On the flipside, even my CVLs get torpedo protection IV, and it works, too. As for fires, christian pretty much nailed it. In RtW, fires either go out near-instantly or sink the host ship, with any sort of middle-ground between those two extremes being exceedingly rare (part of what makes Donau's survival in I&I so noteworthy), and a carrier that gets successfully bombed is almost always a dead carrier (there are plenty of reasons my carriers carry 75% fighters and I tend to have 24 DPs on all my big ships and even 4-6 DPs on every destroyer on top of that, and this is one of them). I actually never use floatplane catapults for exactly this reason - the catapults (not the floatplanes themselves - specifically the catapults) are insanely flammable, and have, in my early campaigns where I did use catapults, had a bad habit of putting 50K tons of steel on the bottom. Indeed, I once lost a carrier that had never been shot at once to a random "avgas explosion!" event. It caused a catastrophic fire which, of course, the ship had no chance of putting out. I save-edited away that particular golden nugget of BS...
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Post by christian on Apr 13, 2021 5:14:41 GMT -6
There is a point here. Personally I like armored carriers, I want to use armored carriers. But from a purely gameplay perspecitve I can't really justify it other than RP. The needed armor is just far too heavy and if I'm not mistaken it's also far heavier than IRL, while at the same time not being very effective. You're not mistaken at all. The Illustrious-class' historical 3 inches of flight deck would be utterly useless in RtW. On top of that, deck armour is so heavy that it's virtually impossible to emulate Illustrious' historical design on its historical displacement. Indeed, I did some emulations of historical battleship designs for fun a while back, and I had to halve the historical deck armour thicknesses to make any of them work. Both deck armour weight and AP bomb penetration could really stand to be addressed... On the flipside, even my CVLs get torpedo protection IV, and it works, too. As for fires, christian pretty much nailed it. In RtW, fires either go out near-instantly or sink the host ship, with any sort of middle-ground between those two extremes being exceedingly rare (part of what makes Donau's survival in I&I so noteworthy), and a carrier that gets successfully bombed is almost always a dead carrier (there are plenty of reasons my carriers carry 75% fighters and I tend to have 24 DPs on all my big ships and even 4-6 DPs on every destroyer on top of that, and this is one of them). I actually never use floatplane catapults for exactly this reason - the catapults (not the floatplanes themselves - specifically the catapults) are insanely flammable, and have, in my early campaigns where I did use catapults, had a bad habit of putting 50K tons of steel on the bottom. Indeed, I once lost a carrier that had never been shot at once to a random "avgas explosion!" event. It caused a catastrophic fire which, of course, the ship had no chance of putting out. I save-edited away that particular golden nugget of BS... I dont really mind the random fire event it happens that sometimes accidents happen and fires start due to it Its just 99.9% of the time its not instantly and catastrophically deadly even when multiple aircraft ignite. (see enterprice cv-65 fire and cv-67 fires during vietnam war) Where as here my CV got hit by one 1500 lb DUD bomb and it instantly ignited my ship and within 30 minutes was on fires status 11. Even when the ship had crew level 2 which should massively help Second carrier now sinking but it took a rather nasty bomb through the 5.5 inch flight deck and into the machinery (through the 1 inch deck so 6.5 inches pen) and detonated setting fire. Ship also had crew level 2 Attachments:
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geroj
Junior Member
Posts: 76
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Post by geroj on Apr 13, 2021 7:46:21 GMT -6
Yes, that and armored deck weight is ridiculous. Pykrete airfields master race
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Post by aeson on Apr 13, 2021 10:06:04 GMT -6
You're not mistaken at all. The Illustrious-class' historical 3 inches of flight deck would be utterly useless in RtW. On top of that, deck armour is so heavy that it's virtually impossible to emulate Illustrious' historical design on its historical displacement. Generally speaking, if you want to replicate a historical design within the game you should use the ship's full load displacement. The Illustrious-class aircraft carrier HMS Victorious, for example, had a full load displacement of 28,619 tons full load as built, according to the Wikipedia article on the ship. It would appear to me that it is feasible to build an approximation of the Illustrious-class aircraft carrier on its historical displacement within the game.
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Post by janxol on Apr 13, 2021 10:37:07 GMT -6
Unrelated note brought about by aeson's illustrious: Does deck park work in the current state of the game? (was checking illustrious' aircraft capacity and read that it would be improved from 36 to 57 in late WW2 by use of deck park). Or does the checkbox do nothing?
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Post by director on Apr 13, 2021 12:21:50 GMT -6
I can't see that flight-deck armor (as opposed to deck armor) is of any value in the current state of the game. I just lost a 34k-ton carrier with 80 aircraft, 2" deck and 3" flight-deck armor and an elite crew to one 600-lb bomb hit that set off catastrophic fires... I know that carriers are basically floating cans of ordinance and av-gas, but the actual damage record of carriers in WW2 shows the difference between damage that harms the structure of the ship (like Lexington and Taiho) and damage that leaves the basic hull and machinery operable (Franklin, Shokaku, Illustrious). RtW currently models carrier warfare as it was envisioned in the 1930s by the USN - one hit on a carrier equals one kill.
What I find particularly frustrating is not the loss of a carrier but the fact that my crews are never able to learn anything from the disaster: every carrier remains as vulnerable in 1950 as they are in the 1920s. I could accept the loss of an otherwise savable ship (like Lexington or Hornet) if that led to better fire-fighting and damage control, or the provision of fleet tugs, or something of that type. But carrier warfare now is basically a game of building lots of disposable, cheap units that can't carry much in the way of an air wing but which don't hurt much to lose. Investing the money and three years of construction in a ship that can't take even one near-miss, and which can never ever be protected to any meaningful degree, is... well, I'll say 'deeply frustrating' and 'not cost-efficient' and leave it at that.
To the best of my knowledge the deck park, deck-edge elevator and angled flight deck improvements may be operable in the future but are not enabled now.
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Post by stevethecat on Apr 13, 2021 13:25:37 GMT -6
You're not mistaken at all. The Illustrious-class' historical 3 inches of flight deck would be utterly useless in RtW. On top of that, deck armour is so heavy that it's virtually impossible to emulate Illustrious' historical design on its historical displacement. Generally speaking, if you want to replicate a historical design within the game you should use the ship's full load displacement. The Illustrious-class aircraft carrier HMS Victorious, for example, had a full load displacement of 28,619 tons full load as built, according to the Wikipedia article on the ship. It would appear to me that it is feasible to build an approximation of the Illustrious-class aircraft carrier on its historical displacement within the game.
That has only 36 aircraft, all of the Illustrious class would eventually end up carrying aircraft numbers in the mid 50's. Illustrious herself would get into the 60's in 1944, but then drop back down to 57 due to the bulkier Avengers being used.
Be careful with airframe numbers on British carriers, the Admiralty only counted internal hanger stowage spaces as the complement, whereas the US and IJN included deck parked, and even in some cases dissembled spares were included in the total airframe numbers.
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Post by aeson on Apr 13, 2021 14:06:34 GMT -6
That has only 36 aircraft Which is what the Illustrious class was designed for. Which appears to be the case in the game, as Deck Park does not appear to do anything.
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Post by seawolf on Apr 13, 2021 15:02:29 GMT -6
That has only 36 aircraft Which is what the Illustrious class was designed for. Which appears to be the case in the game, as Deck Park does not appear to do anything.
All other carrier types can easily make their deck park air wings. Its only armored carriers that are limited to such low values. Try building Implacable in game with its full air wing Not to mention, aircraft carriers in game almost certainly store aircraft on deck, based on the damage model- if you hit(without penetrating) the deck when no aircraft are being readied you can still set them off, indicating they are being stored in a deck park
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Post by aeson on Apr 13, 2021 15:37:53 GMT -6
Which is what the Illustrious class was designed for. Which appears to be the case in the game, as Deck Park does not appear to do anything.
All other carrier types can easily make their deck park air wings. Its only armored carriers that are limited to such low values Yes, I can see how "easily" other carriers make their deck park air wings. Look - Yorktown, Ranger, and Wasp are only one, two, and three thousand tons overweight on roughly their historical full load displacements with nominal air wings of 90, 76, and 90 aircraft. Very easily achieving their historical air wing including deck park, there.
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Post by andy3536 on Apr 13, 2021 15:39:02 GMT -6
The problem isn't that you can't replicate them. It's that they don't appear to be as strong as they should.
As pointed out above, 5.5 inches of armour doesn't on the face of it seem that effective. Yet, HMS Victorious with it's 3 inches. recieved 2 direct hits from Kamakaze aircraft 5 days apart. And, on each occasion was operational within hours and remained on station.
In game, i've never bothered with armour. Just get more aircraft on there. Carriers best defence is a strong CAP. So, that's the only real way i find of protecting my carriers rather than building strong ones.
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Post by seawolf on Apr 13, 2021 16:55:01 GMT -6
All other carrier types can easily make their deck park air wings. Its only armored carriers that are limited to such low values Yes, I can see how "easily" other carriers make their deck park air wings. Look - Yorktown, Ranger, and Wasp are only one, two, and three thousand tons overweight on roughly their historical full load displacements with nominal air wings of 90, 76, and 90 aircraft. Very easily achieving their historical air wing including deck park, there. There's a lot of things that notably influence weight in game, in this case particularly you can notice the HP of the American carrier examples to be much higher than real life. I understand where you're coming from. But the possible airgroups are closer to the deck park figures than their hangar storage figures And not to nitpick, but the Yorktowns only carried around 80 aircraft max by the time the Illustrious class were commissioning, but they also had torpedo defense so it balances out roughly. Ranger was cramped and had horrible seakeeping, so I'd give her both Cramped and low Freeboard. Wasp though...she had a 1" belt, and an airwing in the mid 70s. Only way she could get to 90 was as an aircraft transport or something. Maybe the listed figure was for biplanes. She had an air-group of 69 when she went down.
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