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Post by maxnacemit on Jan 31, 2023 13:29:39 GMT -6
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. I happen to be an RTW 3 beta tester. Trust me, 40-50k ships work just fine. A 60+k vessel would just be a larger target for torpedoes
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 31, 2023 14:24:25 GMT -6
I don't have much faith in the immune zone idea. Nice name, but a warship will get hit, despite the immune zone concept. Large displacements are costly and generally require docks that can handle their weight and size. They also force the engine machinery to be bigger and provide more power for speed. Again expensive and hard to protect and maintain. As we get farther into the aviation time, heavy warships just make nice targets.
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Post by zederfflinger on Jan 31, 2023 21:03:34 GMT -6
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. I happen to be an RTW 3 beta tester. Trust me, 40-50k ships work just fine. A 60+k vessel would just be a larger target for torpedoes Lucky! Do you just use greater numbers of smaller ships to deal with big opponents, or do you find airpower to be a better counter? As for the idea of an immunity zone, I will agree with you that it isn't necessarily as good as it might sound. However, real navies evidently thought the drawbacks of extra large battleships to be outweighed by the manifest advantages, so I think that they still play a role.
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Post by dorn on Feb 1, 2023 1:40:37 GMT -6
Immunity zone has some value but it needs to be understand that citadele box is not homogeneous and there are still a lot of weak points which come from design balance or just simple fact that a lot of systems need go through.
In ww2 just too many battleships got golden hit blowing them or disabling them or limiting them otherwise. And a lot of important systems are outside citadele protection and thus vulnerable.
Increasing size of ship and increasing thickness of protection cannot remove these weaknesses so it seems to me that the most advantage it has is ability to absorb more damage.
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Post by zederfflinger on Feb 1, 2023 7:39:30 GMT -6
Immunity zone has some value but it needs to be understand that citadele box is not homogeneous and there are still a lot of weak points which come from design balance or just simple fact that a lot of systems need go through. In ww2 just too many battleships got golden hit blowing them or disabling them or limiting them otherwise. And a lot of important systems are outside citadele protection and thus vulnerable. Increasing size of ship and increasing thickness of protection cannot remove these weaknesses so it seems to me that the most advantage it has is ability to absorb more damage. Your point about the golden bb's interests me. Other than Hood, the only instances I can think of would be torpedo hits, and that doesn't have much to do with citadel protection. Is there something else I'm missing?
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Post by cormallen on Feb 1, 2023 8:18:13 GMT -6
Here is my 1951 Super Battleship design: View AttachmentThere 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. #glasscannon If you fight two of these against each other, how long before one explodes?
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Post by oldpop2000 on Feb 1, 2023 9:30:24 GMT -6
It depends on good leadership during the engagement and luck. Seriously, all ships have weak points, figure them out, and you can win. I don't know which one would be best. The 18 inch guns gives the super a better chance of engaging outside the range of the 16 inch. guns, so it might have a better chance, however the second ship has thicker belt armor, so it might be able to decrease the range until she can do some real damage. I would begin by hitting the superstructure first, reducing the efficiency of the fire control and maybe getting lucky with a machinery hit. Hard to know.
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Post by dorn on Feb 1, 2023 11:38:58 GMT -6
Immunity zone has some value but it needs to be understand that citadele box is not homogeneous and there are still a lot of weak points which come from design balance or just simple fact that a lot of systems need go through. In ww2 just too many battleships got golden hit blowing them or disabling them or limiting them otherwise. And a lot of important systems are outside citadele protection and thus vulnerable. Increasing size of ship and increasing thickness of protection cannot remove these weaknesses so it seems to me that the most advantage it has is ability to absorb more damage. Your point about the golden bb's interests me. Other than Hood, the only instances I can think of would be torpedo hits, and that doesn't have much to do with citadel protection. Is there something else I'm missing? I will list some of them, mostly knowledge is about European battleships. HMS Hood - blew up KM Bismark - torpedo hit jammed the rudder dooming the ship Roma - hit by FritzX and sunk (it can be argued that this is practically missile hit but a lot of other ships even smaller got hit by FritzX and did not sunk Scharnhorst - hit by KGV through weak point slow her down and sealed her fate
HMS Prince of Wales - shaft hit with all consequences practically doomed the ship
This seems to me quite a lot compared how many hits (torpedo, shell, missiles) European battleships received.
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Post by cwemyss on Feb 1, 2023 11:41:17 GMT -6
Immunity zone has some value but it needs to be understand that citadele box is not homogeneous and there are still a lot of weak points which come from design balance or just simple fact that a lot of systems need go through. In ww2 just too many battleships got golden hit blowing them or disabling them or limiting them otherwise. And a lot of important systems are outside citadele protection and thus vulnerable. Increasing size of ship and increasing thickness of protection cannot remove these weaknesses so it seems to me that the most advantage it has is ability to absorb more damage. Your point about the golden bb's interests me. Other than Hood, the only instances I can think of would be torpedo hits, and that doesn't have much to do with citadel protection. Is there something else I'm missing? Funny... my first thought was the total electrical power loss on one of the US BBs (SoDak?) fighting Kirishima. Bismarck's damage (rudder?) would fall in a similar category. Honestly... I wonder how many ship losses historically were more "golden BB" leading to cascading failures, than overwhelming mass of fire and a "sinks through progressive flooding". (Sorry for the uncertain references... going off memory)
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Post by zederfflinger on Feb 1, 2023 12:29:05 GMT -6
Your point about the golden bb's interests me. Other than Hood, the only instances I can think of would be torpedo hits, and that doesn't have much to do with citadel protection. Is there something else I'm missing? I will list some of them, mostly knowledge is about European battleships. HMS Hood - blew up KM Bismark - torpedo hit jammed the rudder dooming the ship Roma - hit by FritzX and sunk (it can be argued that this is practically missile hit but a lot of other ships even smaller got hit by FritzX and did not sunk Scharnhorst - hit by KGV through weak point slow her down and sealed her fate
HMS Prince of Wales - shaft hit with all consequences practically doomed the ship
This seems to me quite a lot compared how many hits (torpedo, shell, missiles) European battleships received.
Like I said, Hood certainly counts. Bismarck and PoW, both rather unlucky, but I wouldn't consider it to be on the same level as Hood. If I'm not mistaken, some design flaws with both vessels made the catastrophic damage possible, otherwise these would just be yet another run of the mill torpedo hit. Isn't Roma's fate due to having more armor than other ships hit by FritzX, and thus triggering detonation inside the ship? Italia only took one hit, I wouldn't be surprised if two would sink her, same with Warspite. Doesn't seem like a golden bb, just a nasty anti ship weapon. I don't know as much about South Dakota, but wasn't that crew error/new ship issues? Scharnhorst is the closest to Hood on the unlikeliness scale, but still not as bad. I really don't think that any battleship sunk during WW2 suffered a critical hit anywhere near as unlikely as Hood. There aren't really that many instances where battleships fought a surface action in WW2, so it might be better to consider cruiser actions to see if you find more instances of a golden bb occurring.
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Post by dorn on Feb 1, 2023 13:21:49 GMT -6
I will list some of them, mostly knowledge is about European battleships. HMS Hood - blew up KM Bismark - torpedo hit jammed the rudder dooming the ship Roma - hit by FritzX and sunk (it can be argued that this is practically missile hit but a lot of other ships even smaller got hit by FritzX and did not sunk Scharnhorst - hit by KGV through weak point slow her down and sealed her fate
HMS Prince of Wales - shaft hit with all consequences practically doomed the ship
This seems to me quite a lot compared how many hits (torpedo, shell, missiles) European battleships received.
Like I said, Hood certainly counts. Bismarck and PoW, both rather unlucky, but I wouldn't consider it to be on the same level as Hood. If I'm not mistaken, some design flaws with both vessels made the catastrophic damage possible, otherwise these would just be yet another run of the mill torpedo hit. Isn't Roma's fate due to having more armor than other ships hit by FritzX, and thus triggering detonation inside the ship? Italia only took one hit, I wouldn't be surprised if two would sink her, same with Warspite. Doesn't seem like a golden bb, just a nasty anti ship weapon. I don't know as much about South Dakota, but wasn't that crew error/new ship issues? Scharnhorst is the closest to Hood on the unlikeliness scale, but still not as bad. I really don't think that any battleship sunk during WW2 suffered a critical hit anywhere near as unlikely as Hood. There aren't really that many instances where battleships fought a surface action in WW2, so it might be better to consider cruiser actions to see if you find more instances of a golden bb occurring. It is true, that these hits were not killing the ship but they did such damage that their sinking was practically certain and that these ships except Roma were designed against such hits even if designers know that they cannot design unsinkable ship.
And this is exactly what I consider as really unlucky hit - the hit that is fatal for the ship and is the reason why such ship was sunk.
We cannot use cruisers as they are not designed to be protected against other cruisers too well.
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Post by zederfflinger on Feb 1, 2023 14:16:50 GMT -6
It is true, that these hits were not killing the ship but they did such damage that their sinking was practically certain and that these ships except Roma were designed against such hits even if designers know that they cannot design unsinkable ship.
And this is exactly what I consider as really unlucky hit - the hit that is fatal for the ship and is the reason why such ship was sunk. We cannot use cruisers as they are not designed to be protected against other cruisers too well.
I just see it as poor ship design for the most part, not luck.
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Post by andrewm on Feb 2, 2023 16:18:58 GMT -6
I would say torpedo hits are generally in a different catagory, you cannot adequatly protect the propulsion and steering behind armour. So the hits on Bismarck , Prince of Wales and Vittorio Veneto which crippled them were known weaknesses which could not be protected against. Barham took a lucky hit from a torpedo which sank her quickly but she was an older ship and the modern torepdo was more powerful than she was designed to take hits from. Sharnhorst was not particularly unlucky she was hit by a shell at a range when it was expected to defeat her armour protection and cripple her so the sort of hit which was to be expected. And Duke of York was a vastly superior ship she could not face and win against South Dakota if anything was lucky with the damage she took a 14 inch ap shell which if it had hit properly would have penetrated her turret barbette potentially fatally hit just wrong. The electrical failure was system failure/maintenance issue nothing to do with enemy fire. Hood should not have been destroyed by a single hit so that was definetly a luck golden BB hit. Arguably Bismark was crippled in its final engagement because the links between fire control and turrets were not armoured and were wrecked very quickly contributing to her abysmal gunnery against KGV and Rodney. Roma and Arizona were sunk by heavy bomb hits which their armour was not expected to stop , they were unlucky in that the got hit in magazines, Warspite surived a Fritz-X because nothing vital blew up. Only Hood was killed by a single lucky shell hit she should have been protected against. In WW1 at Jutland 2 of the 3 British BC sunk should not have been, but luck and poor practices killed them, one of the German BC at Dogger bank was lucky to survive a similar hit. Many German ships were lucky that British AP shells were faulty
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Post by dorn on Feb 3, 2023 0:13:50 GMT -6
You are right but my point was that there were so many hits that was lucky (Hood) or in areas you cannot protect again so what is the point to make battleships super protected as Yamato if there are too many areas still vulnerable.
My conclusion is that reasonable protected battleships seems better than super battleship as the super battleship needs much more resources but the chance that some hit will be outside protection scheme but still fatal is relatively high. note: KGV was superior to Scharnhorst but the hit was still a lucky one as it went through weak spot of Scharnhorst directly to machinery.
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Post by cormallen on Feb 3, 2023 2:20:30 GMT -6
I suspect WW1 experience, with many ships taking a dozen or more heavy hits with only gradual reduction in capabilities and only a, relative, few having catastrophic consequences from "Critical hits" is largely due to a combination of poor RN shell design (at least until after the major ship fights) and German lighter guns? Once everyone starts using better penetrators fired out of powerful weapons the task of protecting a capital ship against major damage gets a lot harder! Even Bismarck, famously durable though she demonstrated, was largely stripped of firepower quite quickly...
The point being that designing capital ship protection was always a game of playing-the-averages, an average Battleship's target profile is about 10-15% MA turrets, 30-ish% Engines, 5% FC etc...the rest is less vital stuff (at least "vital in the heat of combat", see Graf Spee for example of a less obvious "Mission-kill"). So about half of hits have the potential to do something significant that you might want to avoid.
By the twenties most design teams had processed this and were concentrating on providing some resistance to these sort of hits. The risks of "Flash Fires" from turret hits were more understood and being dealt with by better ammo feed design and practices so the main areas are Guns, Engines, Control and Mags. Engine and Mags are mostly below WL so harder to reach with viable penetrators but also the most dramatically critical. Bridge and FC are obviously really important, but they are mostly high up in the ship so much harder to provide with enough armour to keep out the big guns so there was a decided trend to reduce a lot of their protection to much lower levels (enough to keep out cruisers etc?), though a heavy conning tower was still quite popular (to cheer up the Command crews?)
Choices were driven to be made between emphasising defence of the ship's magazines vs the engines, there seems to have been discussion is some circles as to whether a ship chasing or running from an enemy might be able to rely on the angle of target ship to incoming fire for additional effective protection? (a ship not square-on to the enemy will be receiving fire at often sufficient angles to make straight up penetrating hits of belt armour less likely.) The difference between Mag and Engine protection though was rarely more than an inch or so, never the 50% level the game's version of "Box Protection" gives...
The dangers of torpedo attack and the drive for defence against underwater damage meant huge amounts of weight was absorbed by this though so proofing much of the citadel against 16 Inch plus penetrators was a huge challenge. The Germans, at least partly due to a lack of knowledge regarding other options, continued with their "WW1" style of schemes (basically S+G/B+T are enlarged 1916 Badens in most respects) giving good resistance to sinking but relatively poor protection above WL (Guns and FC appear to have been quite vulnerable?) and arguably against plunging fire. (most RN ships were very retro too, in their case because they were actually just really OLD...Goodall, then DNC, commented that no one should have been too shocked by Hood's fate as it would have been like taking an early pre-Dreadnought to Jutland!)
In game, there is always a fairly steep gradient of relative effectiveness between your fleet's last few years Battleship production and the rest of your inevitably aging battleline. So building a whole lot of 40-50kton, modern fast battleships in the thirties can look quite appealing but this should always be tempered by a knowledge (only slightly meta-gamed, as IRL it was a definite known threat) of the rise of Airpower perhaps?
The games own bias towards "Balanced Battles" does tend to favour smaller numbers of premium warships so that's another thing to keep half an eye on...
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