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Post by bcoopactual on May 4, 2019 6:50:14 GMT -6
None of which are going to stop us from trying to build them Yep, definitely going to build a 4-ship class of 90k ton 26 knt battleships with 20" main battery and 16" secondaries! Might even fit a couple of catapult-launched fighters to it! Pretty sure a post like that needs to have something like this added to the end of it.
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Post by bcoopactual on May 3, 2019 5:05:11 GMT -6
A more recent and barely less tragic example is Fukushima, where - if my memory serves me right - what we can talk about is ultimately a complete failure of any form of cooling and thus the meltdown of the operational cores. Unfortunately, that disaster probably models fairly well what happens if a nuclear plant / engine gets seriously pounded, be it tsunami or wartime engagement. The Fukushima Daiichi individual reactor plant capacities were similar to the A4W and A1B reactor plants used on Nimitz and Ford-class carriers but they were significantly larger than the A2W plants used on Enterprise and on submarines. Enterprise would be a more appropriate model for the immediate after-game time period. Because of their smaller size, they produce less decay heat when shutdown so the cooling requirements, while significant shortly after shutdown if there was a high power history prior to, are less than what you see for civilian plants. That includes the fact that naval reactors don't have spent fuel rod pools that require cooling as well. While I can't speak for other navies, there are systems and procedures on USN vessels for providing emergency cooling to a shutdown reactor that don't require electrical power. We can use stored, high pressure air to push water into the reactor vessel or even rely on natural circulation (hot water naturally rises and cooler water descends so if you design the piping systems correctly you can get water flow through the core just from that). Navy reactors on ships have the advantage that they are sitting in the water so while salt water is a desperate last resort it will always be available. While battle damage is the great unknown, in general if the ship has been damaged so badly in the first place that those emergency systems aren't available then it is probably on the way to being sunk or scuttled anyway and so once submerged (unless it takes place in very shallow water) the chance of a melt down has pretty much been eliminated. Since pressurized water reactors have multiple systems of very high temperature water/steam in them the primary concern to the crew initially in any battle is the possibility of a steam rupture either from the steam system piping itself or from the primary coolant water as it flashes to steam upon being exposed to atmospheric pressure if either systems' piping is damaged. The other problem is if the reactor shuts down either due to loss of electrical power or mechanical shock then the ship is going to be dead in the water as the ship loses steam pressure and can't power the propulsion turbines. For game purposes the damage model really wouldn't be that different than for a conventional ship. The true differences would come in radiation exposure to the crew which wouldn't be modeled in-game anyway and the increased cost and complexity of performing repairs. Ships that suffer significant damage to the reactor compartment would take much more time and money to repair and return to service than for conventional ships that take similar levels of damage to their boiler rooms. [Edit - You could have some unique critical hits though such as if the ship uses a water tank as part of the radiation shielding and it is punctured, the increasing radiation levels in the engine room could cause the reactor to be shut down until entry to the reactor compartment is made and the damage to the tank is repaired. The in-game effect would be similar to what you already see when a loss of electrical power critical hit occurs if it is a one reactor ship or the maximum speed might just be reduced if it is a multi-reactor ship.]
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Post by bcoopactual on May 1, 2019 13:05:02 GMT -6
Can you spot ships using coal earlier/farther than ones using oil because of the smoke? Does it depend on the weather? I couldn't find it in Fredrik's Tidbits but I thought this was something that had been confirmed by the developers. I know it could historically but I believe the smoke from coal powered ships can be seen over the horizon earlier than the smoke from oil powered ships in-game as well. Weather (and time of day) is a factor though because for it to make a difference the sight range has to reach the horizon.
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Post by bcoopactual on May 1, 2019 12:15:28 GMT -6
I understand that all well and good, my main question was as to how significant a difference the accuracy penalty is for each side. So for your picture, if North Dakota was firing at an enemy downwind, yes her spotting would be hampered by her smoke. But how badly would her enemy, firing at her, be hampered by North Dakota's smoke? Especially in a battle line scenario, I could see a situation where it's difficult to spot rounds landing if they are producing significant smoke clouds. I didn't intend to be patronizing so if it came off that way I apologize. I don't know what the hard numbers are for accuracy penalties for the two sides are in-game. There was a thread where one of the forum members wrote down the accuracy modifiers he saw for a number of battles. I'll try to find it and provide a link because it's been too long ago to remember the details. [Edit - Found it. jwsmith26 put the data together. Looking at it I'm guessing that the smoke penalty only applies to own ship smoke but it could be worked into the penalty for ships fouling the range.] While target smoke certainly doesn't help, I'm not sure how much of a significant hindrance it would be. Shell splashes from larger caliber guns are described as being masthead height or higher so they would extend above the target ship's superstructure even when the shells land over. Part of the problem with giving you a good answer is most of the references I've found like this one are from WW2 after navies had switched to oil fuel and therefore the ships did not produce nearly as much smoke.
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Post by bcoopactual on May 1, 2019 7:25:11 GMT -6
One thing that's somewhat confused me, is smoke interference affected by distance and if so how? If the wind is blowing from the North and me and the enemy are moving E-W, with my force to the North (thus, my smoke is being blown between us), who is more affected by my smoke? Is it the same? aeson is correct (as usual). Imagine in the above picture if they were firing downwind instead of upwind. The exhaust smoke from the ship the picture was taken from would be drifting into North Dakota's engaged side field of view, instead of back towards the unengaged side, and the smoke from the guns would also linger between the battlelines so the preceding ship's gunfire would leave a smoke cloud that North Dakota would steam up to and then could have their picture of the enemy target blocked possibly causing them to not see shell splashes for corrections or lose contact entirely if visibility is not great.
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Post by bcoopactual on Apr 30, 2019 7:10:49 GMT -6
In general I would concur with the argument that if you were at war, developing an atomic weapon would be the higher priority than creating a nuclear propulsion plant. Particularly since you have to be concerned that the opponent could be developing a weapon of his own which was one of the primary motivators behind the Manhattan Project.
However, I could see a case in peace time for the propulsion plant to be developed first or simultaneously with a weapon.
One of the differences between nuclear propulsion plants and atomic weapons is that you don't need to enrich the uranium as much to use it for a stable, heat generating reaction. The original S2W core for Nautilus was enriched to 20% U-235. The core used in the first refueling was increased to 40% U-235 since production capability had improved in that time frame*. Modern American submarines use weapons grade enriched uranium (>85% U-235) so that the cores can last the life of the hull (approximately 30 years).
So, if your bottleneck is producing U-235, you can save up material to complete a couple of bombs or you can build several reactor power plant cores. In that case, the submarines may be more decisive and useful if tensions are rising with a possible adversary but you don't own any strategic airfields in range of the future enemy.
Although technically I'm a No on the idea, if the developers really wanted to add it for whatever reason but didn't want to include atomic weapons you could just call it a variable tech scenario where weapons grade U-235 is very difficult to produce and the technical difficulties of a plutonium implosion-type device (e.g. Fat Man) have proven to be unsolvable.
*Just for reference, the first refueling overhaul started in early 1957, just over 2 years after its first underway. The ship had steamed 62,562 miles in that two years. It would have taken over two million gallons of diesel fuel for an equivalent diesel-electric boat.
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Post by bcoopactual on Apr 27, 2019 10:04:14 GMT -6
Was its name Discovery?
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Post by bcoopactual on Apr 26, 2019 6:52:41 GMT -6
USS Nautilus SSN 571 commissioned in 1954 was the first nuclear powered warship. Sorry, as a former submariner I couldn't let that pass, LOL.
I'm sure it would be possible but I don't know how much benefit it would provide for a surface ship in the game. For a fleet unit like a carrier it wouldn't matter much because the rest of the fleet uses oil and would need resupply anyway. If aviation fuel and supplies are tracked in some manner than a nuke carrier could carry more of that but I don't know if that is a thing in-game or not. Food and spare parts and the crew's efficiency would still be limiting factors.
A nuclear powered surface raider would be very difficult to run down unless you had ships that were significantly faster (or aircraft carriers available) because you can't starve the raider for fuel.
But really, nuclear power was true game changer mostly for submarines because it essentially made them invulnerable to contemporary ASW tactics and surface fleets could no longer just run away from them once they were spotted.
If it would be doable within the team's budget it's a good idea to add at a future date but the effect on submarines really has to be looked at closely because it was truly an unbalancing technology.
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Post by bcoopactual on Apr 22, 2019 17:43:24 GMT -6
I don't know about selling but you will see reports in the turn messages that one AI nation is reportedly spying on another AI nation. While I don't think (but can't be sure) that selling tech from one AI to another is a thing, one of the principles of the game is tech dispersion. Once a technology or a concept (like using triple turrets) is demonstrated by one nation, it tends to spread to the other naval powers fairly rapidly in the attempt to keep pace. There is at least one game mechanism for it that I know of (the Y/N entry in the Research Areas file for the various techs) but there could be others including espionage between AI's. It's not ahistorical and it allows smaller budget nations to remain competitive with larger budget nations during the course of the game.
I would assume that if you sell a tech to an AI expect it to become known by most other AI nations a little faster than they otherwise would have through research of their own.
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Post by bcoopactual on Apr 22, 2019 7:32:33 GMT -6
Play in captain's mode to correctly simulate the fact that you are representing 20+ thinking brains, and not just one thinking brain leading a bunch of incompetents that should never even have the right to drive much less graduate from the naval academy. LOL. To be fair to the AI, I believe it gets much better as your Fleet Tactics technology improves during the game but I understand that one person's "good" doesn't necessarily meet the same standard for someone else. But it might not be as much of an aberration compared to real life as you may think. If you haven't already read it, I highly recommend Andrew Gordon's Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command. It's hard for me to do it justice but essentially the Royal Navy was a victim of its own success and going into the beginning of the 20th century it had been unchallenged at sea for the better part of 100 years. Because they didn't have a challenger in all that time they lost the spirit of Nelson and the RN organizationally and culturally stifled all initiative. The result was still felt at Jutland.
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Post by bcoopactual on Apr 10, 2019 8:07:07 GMT -6
so with that aim in mind a few questions that probably have super obvious answers but which I have no idea about: what should I try to do? should I try to run parallel to the enemy so I can broadside him? JagdFlanker designs his ships a little faster than I do but he's right about speed. It's very helpful to be at least as fast as the AI's ships. He also makes an excellent point of putting at least one torpedo on your battleships and armored cruisers so you can see the torpedo range circle (advice aeson 's also given to me in the past). Just keep in mind that from about the middle of the game on, the enemy could have better torpedoes and so his effective range is actually greater than the circle that surrounds your ships. There is no way for you to be sure so keep a cushion outside of your own torpedo range circle. Like garrisonchisholm pointed out, early battles are very, very rarely going to be decisive. As was also posted earlier, if you are in a fleet battle try to get between the enemy and their closest home port and then run parallel to them just outside of torpedo range and pound them until one or more of their ships falls out. Then when you have it cut off from the rest you can adjust tactics based on the wounded enemy's speed. If it is still steaming above 10 knots then what I like to do is follow behind it and cut across its wake back and forth. Effectively making multiple "crossing the T" maneuvers, you are just doing it behind the ship instead of in front of it. Stay away from the broadsides if you can because that is generally where the majority of the ship's firepower can be brought to bear against you. If the ship is moving at less than 5 knots just circle it and fire on it until it goes fully motionless. You don't ever want to just stop. You become easier to hit and also a torpedo magnet. Pound it for another few minutes (keeping an eye out that the AI hasn't circled his fleet back around to re-engage) to make sure it is actually sinking and then turn to see if you can track down any more stragglers. For one on one cruiser action types they are usually a stern chase one way or the other. Again, if I can get the speed advantage I'll follow and criss-cross the enemy's wake to minimize my exposure to the enemy's broadside where the majority of his firepower is. That's usually where early ships mount their submerged torpedo tubes as well but be wary that ships can have fore and aft tubes as well. If I'm the one running, I'll usually try to run towards the east if I can and it's near sunset so I can use the darkness to disengage. Otherwise I try to minimize turns that slow me down unless the enemy starts getting hits and then I'll make a 30-45 degree turn to screw up his fire control solution. An important point for fleet actions is your ordered speed. You generally want to steam your lead division at 1-2 knots below your slowest battleship's maximum speed (not counting injured stragglers that you had to detach and send home). That way the follow-on divisions will be more able to keep on station behind the lead division. [The one to two knot below maximum speed was actual standard doctrine of the Grand Fleet.] If you move at maximum speed then every time you change the lead division's track the follow-on divisions will get further and further behind because they will not be able to make the same precise turns and they won't have that 1 or 2 knot margin to catch up and regain station. You will lose your line's cohesion faster than it is going to happen anyway (communications sucks in the beginning of the game. You get numerous "misunderstood signals" events and such early in the game. That goes to what JagdFlanker also posted about putting Fleet Tactics in high priority. There are techs that reduce those kinds of snafus.) Your ammunition state and the number of secondary guns you've lost will usually determine whether you really "need" to get on the other side and use your other broadside guns. If the guns on one side are running out of ammo or you've lost several to battle damage then you should definitely attempt to switch to the other side. Stay out of torpedo range. Ramming is rare (the ships are actually smaller than the sprites used in-game so just because two sprites touch doesn't mean the ships collided) and you are just asking for a torpedo in the gut. It was mentioned already but your destroyers aren't good at torpedo attacks early in the game. However, attacking a motionless ship is something they can usually accomplish if you set them for flotilla attack. Otherwise just circle or comb the enemy's wake until they stop moving and then keep hitting them to make sure they didn't just suffer a critical hit and will be able to restore propulsion. Not really. If you have the money you can build a battleship that is as fast as a battlecruiser, with heavy guns and armor and plenty of secondary guns, all with director control capable of quickly sinking any destroyer that even thinks about getting too close. So this is more like real life and not a RTS or arcade game like WoWS. The balance comes from the tremendous size and cost to build those superships. And if you are playing a small nation facing off against the UK with a massive budget, well, life is sometimes not fair, lol. Luckily, most capital ships are going to have tradeoffs somewhere so if they have a weak secondary, then maybe a destroyer swarm will work. The AI however, to my recollection, rarely builds capital ships without strong secondary or tertiary batteries. Even better, that megaship master-of-all-trades battleship still can't see in the dark (no radar in RTW1) so it can still be taken down by torpedoes launched at close range before its gunners have a chance to react. Not that there aren't other strategies you can try against a larger nation like trade warfare. Players on the forum have used several different strategies will success. Generally their sighting range is the same as yours because it's based on the weather and time of day which applies to both sides equally. Some things that might affect sighting range that would advantage one side instead of both is if one side has a superior crew quality. Also in good visibility during the day, coal powered ships can be seen from further away because they produce more smoke (which can be seen over the horizon) than oil fueled ships. At night if one nation has chosen to emphasize Night Fighting then their crews should have an advantage in sighting range and reaction time at night. Also ships on fire can be seen further away at night. Not sure, I've never tried it.
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Post by bcoopactual on Apr 10, 2019 0:20:07 GMT -6
oooohhhh so its just like an auto function? Welcome to the forum. And yes, FS status is there to somewhat automate the foreign service requirement and to help with some of the micromanagement, particularly for Great Britain. You have to periodically take your ships and send them for refits. If you do that for a ship that is stationed outside of your nation's home areas (e.g. Southeast Asia for the USA), the ship immediately disappears from the map (no longer counting towards meeting your tonnage requirements) and will reappear in your build area (the primary home area where your new construction ships appear) when the refit is complete. So having the FS mode available lets you refit overseas ships without having to move the replacement ship to the applicable ocean area first. FS mode will let the ship so designated count towards your overseas tonnage requirements and will automatically move the ship where it is needed. If you want it to stay in the new area you need to take it back to Active so the computer doesn't maintain control of the ship's movement.
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Post by bcoopactual on Apr 8, 2019 6:35:25 GMT -6
IIRC (this from a reading many many years ago) there was a merchant that a u-boat holed a number of times at the water line with its gun (after graciously putting the crew off) but it refused to sink...they discovered it had a full load of maize that expanded when wet and plugged the holes enough to prevent sinking. Can we add "Corn" to the tech tree? Not sure if that's armor or damage control..... Popcorn could be the next level up. When the torpedo explosion and fire heats it up it pops and expands to reduce its density even further and push all of the oxygen out of the space putting out the fire.
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Post by bcoopactual on Apr 5, 2019 18:02:30 GMT -6
I don't really pay attention to those files. I'm not even sure they are used by the game.
A number of data files were ported over from Steam and Iron to RTW. However, because of the differences in ship design between the two games, mostly centered around the fact that RTW has a tech tree and SAI assigns set qualities to ships based on the historic year of the scenario, not all of the files are actually used or their data is modified by the RTW game engine. ROF is certainly one of the qualities that is affected by tech progression in RTW.
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Post by bcoopactual on Apr 2, 2019 18:33:34 GMT -6
cogsandspigots , love the avatar picture. I'm sure if there is an afterlife, Sir Horace Hood and Sir Jackie Fisher have been having a nice long "discussion" on that very subject.
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