H.M.S. Warspite - the Royal Navy certainly got value for money from her (and her sisters!)
I hit a snag, thought about it, then overcame it - that is in a nutshell what happened last night as I continued with the great Jutland type-fest. My plan to use a system of column shifts to allow for guns of larger or smaller calibre rather than adjusting the number of gunnery hit boxes has been abandoned because it does not allow for ships that have gone down to a small number of boxes to be able to fire at all - or for ships of larger than usual calibre to not be able to fire. Essentially as it stands column shifts could take a ships guns to below 0 when they still have guns available to fire.
To get around this I shall be using the original Jutland approach and using gunnery boxes adjusted upwards for weapon calibre when larger than 11 or 12". these boxes are then divided as equally as possible into the number of applicable turret groupings. For example, our old friend H.M.S. Warspite armed with 8 x 15" guns in four twin turrets has a total of 12 hit boxes in the game, split as three boxes per turret.
Weapons smaller than 11" tend to be fudged rather more so that most armoured cruisers tend to have a single box per turret - Blucher for example, has 12 x 8.2" in six turrets so has six gun boxes. This has also been used for some of the older German coast defence battleships sporting a 9.4" main battery. By virtue of the fact hat I have a lot of additional original ship game specifications from the all the variants published I reckon that the numbers I have been arriving at are more or less correct so the temptation is to just go with what is published and save myself a lot of work into the bargain. I would be happy to do this but would prefer to understand exactly how these were arrived at.
The only outstanding issue at this time is the question of secondary batteries carried by the Capital Ships and also provision for Light Ships and how they fit into the system.
It is not difficult to do but does take a certain amount of time and comparison because I am having to select the best options from among many options.
No pressure then....;-)
2 comments:
Your essay on modelling gunnery is the perfect example of why some of us in the hobby seem slightly distracted. There are days I do more equations playing a game than I did in a semester of math at college.
It does seem that you are on the right track for rating your guns.
BTW, I seem to have built an extra Seydlitz...perhaps the Turkish Navy could use it. Send me an email with your address and I'll put it in the post next week.
-Steve grigor0@att.net
Hi Steve,
Rules for naval gunnery have given me more headaches over the years than anything else I can think of - which is why I am really keen on the simplicity of the Jutland system!
I would be delighted to accept your offer of the spare Seydlitz - as would the Turkish Navy - just as soon as I have built it!
Email to follow and many, many thanks.
All the best,
DC
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