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Post by cormallen on Jan 27, 2023 12:46:07 GMT -6
Historically, the post Dreadnought "Heavy/Armoured Cruiser" is almost entirely a child of the Washington Treaty environment. A few minor navies built them, as being the strongest thing they could afford I presume, but aside from evolutionary "Trade/Imperial Defence" cruisers (Hawkins class etc?) they are rather pointless...especially in RTWs world of Battlecruiser Swarms! I wouldn't go so far as to call them pointless, only slightly too restricted. If the limit was 12000 tons, I think most nations would have been able to build a decent 8in cruiser, its just very difficult to do on 10k. Part of the trouble is that the game tonnages are "Full load" (full fuel and ammo etc) rather than something closer to the Treaty defined "Standard"... 12-15000 allows a fairly close modelling of the "10000-tonners" and is not too unreasonable for an all up weight?
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Post by zederfflinger on Jan 27, 2023 15:14:27 GMT -6
Its actually kind of funny, cause while it certainly seems to be full load for certain ships, for others, it seems more like standard. You can make a very good 10k cruiser when it was unfeasible in reality, same with the 35k fast battleship. So something is wrong with weights, but I'm not sure what. Might be the armor weight issues.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 27, 2023 15:25:03 GMT -6
Its actually kind of funny, cause while it certainly seems to be full load for certain ships, for others, it seems more like standard. You can make a very good 10k cruiser when it was unfeasible in reality, same with the 35k fast battleship. So something is wrong with weights, but I'm not sure what. Might be the armor weight issues. On a battleship, armor can take up as much as 40% of the total displacement of the ship. I know that KGV class had about 33% armor weight. Hood's percentage was about 35.4% in the 1942 time. The light cruiser Arethusa was about 7%. It does vary especially after upgrades. I wonder if we could use these figures to check the game designs out.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 27, 2023 16:02:44 GMT -6
I made some changes to one of my heavy cruiser designs. Originally the total weight of the armor was 47% of the total displacement and for a heavy cruiser that is too much. So, I increased the speed to 30 knots, decreased the conning tower armor to 6 inches, a dded a magazine box and inclined armor and added Torpedo defense up to 4. This put the armor percentage to 27%. I used flat deck on top and the percentage went down 26%. The final percentage after deleting the torpedoes was 25%. I noted that if I changed the fuel type back to coal, the armor percentage would go down to 25%. I did not leave it at coal. I changed it back and the percentage returned to 26%. I also increased the Rounds per main gun from 95 to 150. The armor percentage went down to 25% I think we can do more of these kinds of modifications and develop what I would call, a standard percentage for a type of ship.
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Post by zederfflinger on Jan 27, 2023 16:59:04 GMT -6
Here is my estimation of what a KGV would look like close to the war's end. The year is too late, but with all the additional tonnage it might work out alright.
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Post by vonfriedman on Jan 28, 2023 4:59:05 GMT -6
Perhaps the unit machinery criterion can be applied to KGVs.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 28, 2023 7:49:22 GMT -6
Here is my 1951 Super Battleship design: There are some areas I would modify. 1. Reduce the conning tower armor to 7 inches 2. Reduce rounds per gun to 150 3. Add secondary guns, probably 8 for AAA purposes. 4. Reduce Medium Anti-Aircraft guns to 10 possibly 5. Eliminate Unit Machinery 6. Increase Speed if possible to 27 or 28 knots.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 28, 2023 8:51:15 GMT -6
Here is another design from a 1956 German game which has ended.
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Post by zederfflinger on Jan 28, 2023 9:33:36 GMT -6
Would you consider 50ish thousand ton vessels to be super battleships? I'd put the mark at 60,000 and up myself. The first design isn't too bad, but it really needs secondaries and better speed.
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Post by zederfflinger on Jan 28, 2023 9:46:59 GMT -6
I don't know how difficult this might be to add, but I think it would be a neat bit of realism for ships with elite crews/machinery focused officers to be able to exceed their design speeds for a certain period of time. This happened on occasion historically, and I think it would be a nice touch.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 28, 2023 9:59:11 GMT -6
Would you consider 50ish thousand ton vessels to be super battleships? I'd put the mark at 60,000 and up myself. The first design isn't too bad, but it really needs secondaries and better speed. I reduced the secondaries to 5 inch dual purpose, autoloading guns to give the ship more AA. In this time period, aircraft are more deadly than other battleships. The second design sacrifices the main armament but does increase the speed to 31 knots. I like the second.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 28, 2023 10:46:00 GMT -6
I decided to move away from battleships and design a Guided Missile Heavy Cruiser. It only has two SAM mounts but thats ok.
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Post by maxnacemit on Jan 30, 2023 9:18:45 GMT -6
Would you consider 50ish thousand ton vessels to be super battleships? I'd put the mark at 60,000 and up myself. The first design isn't too bad, but it really needs secondaries and better speed. I would, the largest I would realistically need is about 40k. Anything above that is large; anything above 45k is a super-battleship.
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Post by zederfflinger on Jan 30, 2023 11:46:29 GMT -6
Would you consider 50ish thousand ton vessels to be super battleships? I'd put the mark at 60,000 and up myself. The first design isn't too bad, but it really needs secondaries and better speed. I would, the largest I would realistically need is about 40k. Anything above that is large; anything above 45k is a super-battleship. So nearly all fast battleships built in the 30's and 40's are large battleships, and Iowa's and above are super battleships? I suppose that works with historical ships, but in almost any other timeline most ships built after 1920 will be super battleships by your definition, and that doesn't seem right to me. It is possible to get away with 40k ships in standard RTW 2, but I suspect that you would have a hard time of it when playing RTW 3 or modded RTW 2. A 60+ thousand ton vessel should have no problem taking out 40k ships, even if outnumbered.
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Post by cormallen on Jan 30, 2023 14:01:52 GMT -6
Would you consider 50ish thousand ton vessels to be super battleships? I'd put the mark at 60,000 and up myself. The first design isn't too bad, but it really needs secondaries and better speed. I would, the largest I would realistically need is about 40k. Anything above that is large; anything above 45k is a super-battleship. Remember that the game's tonnages are Full load, so the historical "35000ton Treaty" designs are nearly all over 45000... Even the ones that didn't cheat wildly! The properly big things like Yamato or Montana are over 70,000. I find that a 27+ knot battleship with 9x18s and a useful immune zone (a proper one, not reliant on "box protection shenanigans"!) inevitably reaches that sort of size.
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