Why are my designs not making their design speed?

[malthaussen]

This is starting to bug me a lot.  I will design a ship for, say, 32 knots, but when they are completed the entire class will forever only make 31 knots without any warning or explanation.  It also appears that if even one ship of the class fails (on a random chance) to make its design speed, it influences the entire class to fail to make speed, and any ships built to that design in the future.  (The converse is also true: I had a CV designed at 32 knots that got a random roll to increase speed one knot, and her sisters and all future builds of that class make 33 even though designed for 32. But that's the only time that happened, whereas the speed loss is chronic).

This is especially frustrating when I'm trying to squeeze out every possible knot for a DD and the game just arbitrarily decides that the entire class will lose a knot.  There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it: I designed two classes of DDs on the same date and with the same tonnage and engines, but different configurations of weapons, and one class lost a design knot and the other didn't. 

Is this just a random FY from the game designer, or is there some way to compensate for it? Besides, of course, the obvious fix of going into the save game and manually correcting the speed.

  -- Mal

[ludovic]

I think the check only happens for the first ship to be completed, and it will then affect the rest of the class. The more unused tonnage in the design, supposedly the less likely you are to get a randomly slow design and the more likely you are to get a randomly fast design, but I have not paid close attention to the math on this except to note that when my design is actually overweight, I think it is more likely to be slower.

[aeson]

Jun 17, 2023 18:50:50 GMT -6 ludovic said:

The more unused tonnage in the design, supposedly the less likely you are to get a randomly slow design and the more likely you are to get a randomly fast design

As far as I am aware, this is incorrect; there is no benefit to designing your ships underweight beyond the free tonnage it leaves available for future refits. Designing your ships overweight, however, does increase the likelihood of getting a negative trials result.