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Post by bcoopactual on Jul 21, 2016 11:05:50 GMT -6
I've gone through the data for max range and belt/deck penetration values provided in the ship designer page's 'gun data' button and made a spread sheet. It provides a quick and simple way to compare guns of various calibers and quality without having to keep changing values in the ship designer and re-selecting the 'gun data' button. Here is an example pic. I've made three pages, one each for the years 1900, 1914 and 1922 that includes data for '-1', '0' and '1' quality guns. All data is based on research being complete for all tech areas up to and including the year in question. i.e. all techs with a date of 1914 and earlier were marked as completed in the save game file for the 1914 page. The tech level completed, particularly for Fire Control (max range) and AP shells (Penetration) will affect this data so you could most certainly see different numbers in game depending on where your tech research is at at the time. This isn't intended to be an absolute authority or to account for all possible combinations of year and tech levels that you could see in game. However, it should provide a effective comparison between shells of similar caliber and quality and so can help to get an idea of whether it's worth it to go with a larger, low quality gun or a lighter, high quality gun. [Edit - I've added a page for 1904 because upon reflection I believe that it would be more useful than the 1900 page since 1904 is about when dreadnought construction begins.] Gun Data Range Penetration RTW v. 1.32b1.xls (70 KB)
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Post by admiral on Jul 21, 2016 13:49:01 GMT -6
Amazing! Good work!
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Post by axe99 on Jul 21, 2016 16:35:16 GMT -6
Great work BCoop .
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Post by flyingtoaster on Jul 22, 2016 3:16:17 GMT -6
Awesome! Out of interest, when I get home in a few days I'll check some of these against Friedman's Naval weapons of WW1 to see how some real weapons fit into the game.
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chz
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by chz on Jul 22, 2016 4:08:43 GMT -6
Some interesting takeaways from that...
Sometimes a +1(x) gun is better than a -1(x+1) gun. Sometimes not. Exception being that long range plunging penetration is always better on the larger gun (though it's not always relevant).
It would seem silly to build "modern" heavy cruisers (not ACs) with guns larger than 7". That should shred any CL or CA you'd run into, and you'd need 9"+ to even think about doing any harm to a BC. At which point your own BC seems a better plan.
As pretty much everyone expects, guns over 16" aren't good for much more than bragging rights.
2" guns are completely useless due to range considerations. 3" guns continue to out-range torpedoes for quite a long time though.
Fully upgraded 12" guns seem plenty beastly enough to handle most things by 1925. There is probably a point in the game where your average gun size goes down a notch or two if you're keeping an eye on things. Dropping from 16" to more 14" barrels looks to make late-game sense. Build your own KGV!
It's a wonder that any B/BBs are sunk by gunfire before 1910. Even if you managed to have 15" guns in 1904, you'd have to be point blank to use them.
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Post by thatzenoguy on Jul 22, 2016 4:12:35 GMT -6
I find personally that 12inchers might penetrate some weaker BB's and such lategame, but they lack the sheer OOMTH which makes 16 inchers deadly.
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chz
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by chz on Jul 22, 2016 7:10:54 GMT -6
Oh I agree. I wouldn't go below 14. It's just that they're surprisingly relevant. You'd expect them to be completely obsolete by then - not able to penetrate the thicker armour, but still way too slow-firing to be a reliable threat to cruisers.
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Post by thatzenoguy on Jul 22, 2016 7:19:08 GMT -6
I find 12 inchers LETHAL against cruisers.
They won't causes 1-2 hit kills like the big boy shells.
But they will destroy engine rooms, turrets, and more in a couple hits.
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Post by bcoopactual on Jul 22, 2016 7:35:34 GMT -6
Some interesting takeaways from that... Sometimes a +1(x) gun is better than a -1(x+1) gun. Sometimes not. Exception being that long range plunging penetration is always better on the larger gun (though it's not always relevant). It would seem silly to build "modern" heavy cruisers (not ACs) with guns larger than 7". That should shred any CL or CA you'd run into, and you'd need 9"+ to even think about doing any harm to a BC. At which point your own BC seems a better plan. As pretty much everyone expects, guns over 16" aren't good for much more than bragging rights. 2" guns are completely useless due to range considerations. 3" guns continue to out-range torpedoes for quite a long time though. Fully upgraded 12" guns seem plenty beastly enough to handle most things by 1925. There is probably a point in the game where your average gun size goes down a notch or two if you're keeping an eye on things. Dropping from 16" to more 14" barrels looks to make late-game sense. Build your own KGV! It's a wonder that any B/BBs are sunk by gunfire before 1910. Even if you managed to have 15" guns in 1904, you'd have to be point blank to use them. Thank you all for the kind comments and thanks chz for pointing all of the above out. I haven't really gone through it much myself because I got tired of looking at it after a while, haha. I've noticed that sometimes even two inch smaller high quality guns have better penetration than a two inch larger poor quality gun. The one thing these pages can't tell you though is the damage potential of each shell. Obviously, larger shells with more volume and more bursting charge are going to do more damage but by how much there is no way that I know of to see for ourselves. For your last comment about early designs, in my new game I'm going to try a tactic Fredrik suggested and go a heavy percentage of HE shells on early designs. Use HE instead of AP and instead of trying to penetrate the old B's, I'll try to start a bunch of fires and kill them that way.
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Post by bcoopactual on Jul 22, 2016 8:00:58 GMT -6
Awesome! Out of interest, when I get home in a few days I'll check some of these against Friedman's Naval weapons of WW1 to see how some real weapons fit into the game. I'd be interested to see the comparison. Just keep in mind that the data in game is just that, for a game. The 'Max range' is directly affected by the Fire Control tech level (but interestingly not by the actual fire control you install on the ship) so it's more of an 'effective range' that you could conceivably hit something with than the physical maximum range of the barrel/shell/powder combo despite the title. And AP Techs have the same effect on penetration so it might be hard to find the exact combo in game that matches real world data. That's not saying that the developers just made stuff up but that they had to fit real world data into their game so it might not scale exactly the same as real life.
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Post by tortugapower on Jul 22, 2016 11:53:59 GMT -6
Extremely useful, bcoop. I plan to keep this windowed nearby while playing
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Post by bcoopactual on Jul 22, 2016 17:16:18 GMT -6
Extremely useful, bcoop. I plan to keep this windowed nearby while playing That was the exact idea I had in mind when I made it. Glad people are finding it useful.
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Post by ddg on Jul 22, 2016 19:49:12 GMT -6
I'm in the process of reformatting this information a bit for my own use. With your permission, bcoopactual, I'd like to add it to my public RTW information sheets. I'll include whatever credit you'd like, naturally.
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Post by bcoopactual on Jul 22, 2016 22:37:25 GMT -6
I'm in the process of reformatting this information a bit for my own use. With your permission, bcoopactual, I'd like to add it to my public RTW information sheets. I'll include whatever credit you'd like, naturally. Go right ahead. As far as credit, I'm not really concerned about it. Whatever you feel is appropriate for how much you use it.
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Post by jwsmith26 on Jul 22, 2016 23:02:12 GMT -6
ddg, there's another possible national characteristic that you might want to add to the "Nations" section of your information sheet at some point. It appears that there is a national rating for accuracy that shows up as a hit modifier. For instance, when I examined the hit modifiers for France I saw this repeatedly: Nation accuracy: 10.
I haven't done any further research on this but the brute force way of determining the values would probably require getting into a battle as each nation to determine the values for each nation, unless there is a section in one of the data files that lists these values. I suppose it's possible that this value is not fixed; it might change over time.
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