Are big guns unproportionally better? An opinion and discussion starter.

[Steeltrap]

On 11/16/2019 at 5:31 AM, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

Secondaries are completely useless. Doesn't matter how many you cramp on the ship, they won't hit.

This is, as far as I understand, because the accuracy is calculated mainly by range vs maximum range of the gun.

This is arguably wrong from both historical and gameplay perspective. A much better model would be the accuray mainly given by range vs fire control capability and then the caracteristics of guns modelled as relatively minor bonuses/maluses.

Don't entirely agree about the secondaries being useless, but the rest I think is pretty much what we all tend to agree on in various flavours.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly how the game does add all those bonuses down the left side of the screen to the main, secondary and casemate guns, because I keep seeing numbers for accuracy under each of my gun types that don't quite seem to add up.

Be interesting to see what the next update does as it's specifically mentioned.

[Verdant]

I've had the odd magazine detonation on an AI with 2" and 4" guns, but that's an exception, not the norm. I've generally found that with the main batteries on the BB/BC/AC lines that going with the main gun with the best tech is the better option than going with the biggest caliber. After all, you can't hit what you can't hit, no less that they take forever to load comparatively. There's missions where I've taken a Mk3 or Mk4 13" or 14" over a Mk1 or Mk2 16" after that didn't work for me to much better effect. You put more rounds down range, damaging superstructure and taking enemy ships out of the fight so you can close on them where they'll absolutely penetrate the belt. I always go for tech over absolute damage after my first go through of the Naval Academy, just because it seems to be the more well rounded option and less reliant on chance criticals.

[Wowzery]

I've only been playing the game for a few days.  But I"ve noticed a lack of accuracy when it comes to smaller guns.

I was doing the unarmed merchant mission (which I have yet to win) and tried a mixed armament.  Main guns was 13" I think and a secondary of 3 and 5" guns.  I was seeing reports of the 13" hitting but watching the smaller guns shoot all over and might get a report of a hit, but nothing compared to the large guns which got reports each salvo.

Perhaps there needs to be some rangefinders for the secondaries to help them out.

[Cptbarney]

Hopefully the new secondary chanages should help see a major improvements in secondary performance, would be kinda miffed if they didnt too be honest.

[Verdant]

On 11/20/2019 at 5:39 PM, Wowzery said:

I've only been playing the game for a few days.  But I"ve noticed a lack of accuracy when it comes to smaller guns.

I was doing the unarmed merchant mission (which I have yet to win) and tried a mixed armament.  Main guns was 13" I think and a secondary of 3 and 5" guns.  I was seeing reports of the 13" hitting but watching the smaller guns shoot all over and might get a report of a hit, but nothing compared to the large guns which got reports each salvo.

Perhaps there needs to be some rangefinders for the secondaries to help them out.

Always keep an eye on the techs, and be aware of the accuracy figures as well. I don't think the 3" guns can do anything beyond like 2km, and the 5" guns will at most do superficial damage to the superstructure at like 4km out. It's an actual limitation of the rounds themselves, not the guns. For best effect, set it to secondaries and hope for some infernos!

 

On 11/23/2019 at 11:54 AM, Cptbarney said:

Hopefully the new secondary chanages should help see a major improvements in secondary performance, would be kinda miffed if they didnt too be honest.

 

I have pretty good luck with the 5" and 6" guns, but honestly never really mess with anything smaller than that. They're ineffective even against things like TBs and DDs.

 

Edited November 25, 2019 by Verdant

[RAMJB]

On 10/23/2019 at 3:39 PM, Hardlec said:

Nelson's 16 inch guns had pierced Bismarck's citadel. KG5's 14 inch guns had not. 

 

That was the result of sheer luck and internal ricochetting. Bismarck's layered turtleback was impervious to Nelson's 16'' guns at the ranges that happened in that battle. Truth be said the NElson's 16'' guns were pretty dismal (for guns of that caliber) in penetration values. Yet those two hits happened - they were reported by german survivors after the battle.

what happened is that when Rodney fired, Bismarck was listing towards the opposite side. The shells (fired at pretty much point blank range) went through the vertical external protection, ricochetted against the slightly angled middle deck and was bounced off almost directly on top of the armored deck proper with more than enough energy to go straight throug it. Think of shot-trap on tanks, similar scenario here. 

Completely unorthodox result out of the very particular scenario of that battle. And for the record, KGV's 14'' guns could perfectly have had similar effects without too much problems if by chance they had achieved similar hits. It didn't happen because (If I'm not mistaken), KGV was engaging Bismarck on the other side (so the deck was angled away from her, making such a lucky bounce impossible).

But other than that not even Yamato's guns were powerful enough to go through Bismarck's lateral armor at close range. The added effective armor of the sequential protection given by the external belt plus angled deck, plus armored bulkheads in between was more than what the 460mm guns could penetrate just after leaving the muzzle.


 

On 10/27/2019 at 2:42 AM, Sir_Wulfrick said:

Larger guns were generally better, both in terms of penetration and range. The fact that the larger guns in the game appear to be more accurate may be a product of the fact that accuracy appears to be a function of range to target versus maximum firing range, thus larger caliber guns that have very large maximum ranges are getting better accuracy at typical engagement ranges.

I think it has rather more to do with the fact that heavier projectiles conserve their trajectory much better. Not only they tend to slow down slower than lighter projectiles (inertia really helps a projectile punching through the air), but they are less affected by environmental effects, such as wind, and they conserve a larger portion of their energy at long ranges (inertia being calculated by 1/2 times mass time velocity squared means that once velocity drops, the heavier projectile retains more energy).

It's a combination of many factors, but yes, barring other factors (such as propellant quality, muzzle velocity, barrel wear, and muzzle interference, which depend on other things) larger guns tended to offer much superior long range accuracy because the shells they fired were heavier, and heavier projectiles tend to have much better terminal ballistic performances than lighter ones.


 

On 10/27/2019 at 3:43 AM, Latur Husky said:

5" gun from 1914 should be less accurate than 1940 version of same caliber gun. Same should apply for larger calibers so different variants of same caliber gun should have different values and statistics, and sometimes newer model of lower caliber gun should have better stats than bigger caliber counterpart.

Inherently and in a gun per gun basis maybe yes. But one has to be careful when thinking like this. Newer guns could be inherently more reliable than older ones, but there are a lot more things that have to go on a gun mount beyond the gun alone, because the end result of a newer mount with a newer gun could end up being far less accurate than an older iteration on the gun on an older mount.

A good instance of it would be the US Standards that mounted the triple 14'' turret. The gun was an evolution of the one used on the Texas class, which was pretty accurate for it's day. Yet mounting three of those newer guns in the new triple turret had to be done by packing them very closely together in order for them to fit on a turret small enough to make the class viable within the designed tonnage. What ended up happened was that when those guns were fired there was a severe case of muzzle interference between the shells as fired, and the result was an ungodly ammount of random dispersion. So you ended up with newer mounts and newer guns, but far less accuracy.
Of course as time went by measures were implemented to remedy this problem (such as a timer device to fire the guns in a very quick ripple, yet with enough delay between each barrel as to no interfere with the others - this was later implemented in all the other US battleships, as it benefitted them all, but the ones with the triple 14''s had the best improvement out of it).


 

[RAMJB]

On 11/2/2019 at 2:14 PM, Lobokai said:

First of all HMS Nelson never fired on Bismarck so any sourcing discussing that get questionable and Bismarck wasn’t sunk by shells anyway and second, while bigger is better, when looking at WW1 ships (far more relevant to this game)

Rodney did fire on Bismarck. Quite a lot. And she was a Nelson class battleship.

And Bismarck was sunk by gunfire. Yeah, I know about the scuttle story. Doesn't change anything from the fact that the ship was a sinking wreck and already going down by the time the order was issued. And she was a sinking wreck because she had been shot to kingdom come, and then back again.

The scuttling order only accelerated the process, didn't define it.

Also this game has a scenario named "the modern battleship", in which you design a battleship on what looks like a Yamato hull which you can make bigger than 70.000 tons. That looks very WW2-ish to me. So the idea that "WW1 ships are far more relevant to this game than WW2 ones" doesn't look one that's founded on any solid evidence.


 

On 11/4/2019 at 3:07 AM, Steeltrap said:

it's hard to justify the big guns being so accurate compared with the smaller ones when firing at ranges for which the smaller ones were intended, at least until some more advanced centralised fire control benefits come along for the main battery but not secondary.

While I agree that the gunnery system in game needs some work, I don't necessarily agree with this assessment. I don't think the ingame representation of the mounts and guns accuracy is based so much on the guns themselves as it is on the equipment they'd had on the turrets they were mounted. Please note that in game you read the accuracy ratings of gun MOUNTS, not of the gun themselves, and the way things are presented I strongly suspect the effects of centralized fire control (which is a different thing from what later were directors) are inbuilt in their accuracy values.

Which leads me to the point I'm trying to make: To put it in simple terms, large turrets had gear to make them more effective, than smaller guns on small mounts did not. From better rangefinders to proper interruptor gear to ensure the firing of the gun at the proper listing angle on moving seas. List is pretty long. On top of that even before directors proper were a thing, centraliced fire control already existed, and main battery guns took full advantage of it.

Meanwhile secondary guns were mostly fired on local control - until the advent of secondary directors, and that was a pretty late addition in historical terms; they only became common in the 30s. Given that most of the scenarios the game has represent encounters with ships that look like WW1 vintage ones (easy to see given the hulls you're given the chance to work with in each scenario), most people might be expecting far too much from their secondary mounts. Historically those weren't there to hit enemy battleships, they were seen mainly as an anti-torpedo boat measure and given the range of torpedoes of the time (meaning, destroyers and torpedoboats had to come quite close to let them loose), them being next to unable to hit at anything at long ranges was not seen as a problem at all.
 
Even when secondary directors became a norm, those were of lesser capability than the primary ones (the ones the main battery would use), because they relied on smaller rangefinders, and had nowhere near the plotting equipment the main directors did. So, again, the secondaries would have an inherent disadvantage in practical accuracy even with those compared with the main guns, even if overall they'd be a lot more accurate than what they had used to be up to that point.

Now I'm not saying accuracy values are perfect. I feel that IN GENERAL, all guns (both secondary and primary) are too innacurate at very close ranges (2km and below). But players should always be mindful that until secondary directors become a thing (and again, that was quite late in the big gun battleship era), secondaries will generally be only good for very close range protection, and that even after their introduction, they still won't be very useful at anything beyond short-mid ranges.

Of course a venturous player can decide that mounting those guns in their capital ships is a waste of weight, cost and space, and just don't bother with them in the campaign. Then when he finds a determined torpedo boat flotilla he might change his idea about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of those "guns that are unable to hit anything" ;).

Edited November 25, 2019 by RAMJB

[RAMJB]

Phwew, and after answering to those points...

Yes, big guns are extremely powerful. And the bigger, the more. Barring aside the obvious data mistakes here and there (Such as those 18'' shell sizes spoken about in the thread ;)), shell size didn't increase linearly with caliber. A representative 8'' shell weighed 100kg. A 11'' shell (3 inches more), 280kg. A 15'' one weighed around 880kg. A 16'' "standard" shell was averaging 1020kg or so...the superheavy variant weighed 1230kg.

of course those are "representative" averages, there were lightweigh shells, heavy and superheavy, etc. But that's more or less the averages.

Also keep in mind that the damage dealt by a given weight of shell doesn't increase linearly either. 300kg of shell won't do three times the damage than a 100kg one. And 900kg of shell won't do three times as much as a 300kg one...it will do A LOT more (mostly because the explosive filler of the shell is heavier on the larger shell, and explosive effects scale A LOT with the mass of the explosive that's going off, up to an upper limit that IIRC is around 1000kg after which it's all deminishing returns. Not sure about this last number, someone correct me if I'm wrong).

There was a very good reason that once proper reloading mechanisms were created for the 12'' gun that allowed for those guns to be fired rather quickly fleets worldwide went crazy about increasing firepower. And the standard way to do it was increasing caliber, and the craze became very real because by the time ships of a given caliber were being standarized and entering service, the next batch with larger guns was already on the way. In a grand total of 10 years (1905-1915) the standard gun sizes for navy scaled up from 12'' (305mm) to 15'' (381mm), and work was on the way to bring the 16'' generation alive. And BEFORE that generation was alive, there was already plans to move up to 18'' guns. It didn't happen only because the Washington Treaty put a stop to the whole race. But even then, after almost 20 years, when 18'' guns finally did happen (the japanese 18.1'' in fact)...guess what, the Japanese already were planning for superYamatos with 20.1'' guns.

Given how much heavier the bigger guns were, and how the warship tonnage and costs shot up to the stratosphere as a result of the constant upscaling needed to mount the ever bigger main guns, that craze for bigger calibers must have been because of some really good reason.

And the reason was simple: Because, yes, big guns were OP compared with smaller ones. The increase of penetration, lethality and power that a gun of a couple more inches of caliber than another was just devastating. Devastating enough to cause a crazed arms race where fleets were constantly trying to outgun each other, and themselves, apparently to no end.

So them being OP here too is just the normal outcome expected out of a game that tries to replicate naval design of the era :).

Edited November 25, 2019 by RAMJB

[Hardlec]

Apologies for confusing HMS Nelson and Rodney.

One thing I missed was the variance in advancing technology.  The 12 inch guns used in 1890 would be vastly inferior to the designs of 1940.  Even among guns of the same caliber,  there is lots of variance.  Others have pointed out that there is also considerable difference in the effect of the same gun with different ammunition.  I strongly agree.

Within the same technological epoch, bigger guns tended to be better.  Even so, there are plenty of exceptions. As a general rule, bigger is better holds up pretty well.  History shows guns got bigger as well as better as time wore on. but size only matters so much.

Armor and protection schemes got better, too.  Iron passed to Steel, Steel improved, laminates came, went, and came again.  

 

In game terms, just as there are multiple grades of armor, so, too I think there should be multiple grades of guns for the same caliber. 

 

The joker in the deck, however, was illustrated by a landlubber:  Von Clausewitz.  A gun must do three things:  Hit the target, hit the target and hit the target.   

[RAMJB]

On 11/28/2019 at 7:06 PM, Hardlec said:

The 12 inch guns used in 1890 would be vastly inferior to the designs of 1940.

 

That's absolutely true, and that's an important thing to bear in mind when comparing ships of widely different eras (for instance a british Revenge against a Bismarck).

But in what regards to the game in it's current state, it's mostly a non consideration. When you're building a brand new ship you're going to fit it with brand new weapons, you're not going to go to the warehouses to rescue weapons 25 years old to put them on your battleship. Whatever guns you'll want to fit on it will be your latest generation ones - and those should be compared with contemporary ones to decide which ones you mount. And all things being equal (same date, same generation), bigger guns are much more powerful than smaller ones. 

And yes, I know about Vanguard, but that's kinda the exception that confirms the rule. The british hand was forced given their failure to make a new 16'' turret viable design that could be built in a short enough timespan. For them it was either those 15'' turrets or no battleship at all. Given that right now all we have in game are scenarios (and that the campaign won't probably go into such detail as to replicate the conditions that forced the way Vanguard was completed), that exception bears little meaning for this debate ;).

And even Vanguard's turrets were notably improved from their original state - refurbished mechanisms and more importantly both increased elevation *AND* the use of supercharges made those turrets far more effective than what they were when they were originally built.

At any rate as a rule of thumb, and again, weapons being of the same generation, upscaling weapons by one step of caliber gives such a bigger punch than the extra cost and associated weight requirements seem really attractive. As I already mentioned there was a very solid reason for the historical "caliber race" that took place in the battleship era, that one being that lagging behind on gun sizes would really detract from the actual viability and effectivity of a battleship in an encounter against an opposite number with bigger guns.

Edited December 2, 2019 by RAMJB