/nwg/ - Naval Wargames General

That is one ugly submarine.

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That's the 2nd or so Soviet attempt at a cruise missile sub, right?

It looks even less maneuverable than teh Japanese sub floatplane carriers.

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>Dat flying bridge

I love pre-dreadnought designs, so much.

If you're in Athens then I'd say it is, even though it isn't as open as the HMS Belfast for example. Just a short hop on the subway and bit of a walk to get there. You also have the Velos there as a bit of a bonus.

It's part of the US 'why not build this, we have 24 fleet carriers already' and missed some potential glory at Leyte. If only that radio station at Manus was a little better, Halsey would either have the battle line obliterate Yamato and Musashi in a gun duel, or have the Iowas chase down and sink 4 Japanese carriers that they were only ~80 miles sailing from before having to pull back.

A lot of what-ifs really, but the main one that suggests they'd have been decent is that at that phase of the war, no japanese surface combatant was good at anything. Losing 3 CAs for 2 US DD and 1 DE is not a good trade.

Until mid war US radar was reliable and accurate enough, the IJN had possibly the best surface fleet for night operations.

>Until mid war US radar was reliable and accurate enough, the IJN had possibly the best surface fleet for night operations.

By at least Leyte that gap had been closed, I think.

What does night fighting have to do with Leyte?

While it's easy to derp over "magical" radar, the situation was far more complex. By the end of the Solomons Campaign, both material attrition and the high tempo of ops had fatally effected the IJN's abilities while the USN's learning curve was starting to peak. The US was doing nearly everything better with better weapons (aprt from torps) and better ships. Radar was only one aspect and I'd argue that hi-freq TBS comm had more of an impact.

Tameichi Hara's book "Japanese Destroyer Captain" is a nice overview of the period in question. The IJN's light forces see continuous action until the ships and crew are beyond worn out while capital units squat in Truk. The situation is so bad that the officers & crews affected begin grousing about it, despite the IJN's ferocious discipline.

>Radar was only one aspect and I'd argue that hi-freq TBS comm had more of an impact.

Hell, even if you're just talking in the context of a late-war USN BB fire control system, the radar is just one part of what made it what it was.

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>floating fortress
I really do like the Brutalist aesthetic of pre-dreads and British BBs: something about unbroken flat slabs of armor makes me think of castles on the sea...

Even the availability of fuel vastly changes how you operate. TF34 steamed 35 knots flank speed to chase Kurita. It failed, but the Japanese couldn't bloody catch 18 knot CVEs with their battle line and cruiser force due in part to fuel economy issues.

Technology or not, the IJN was a beaten force by then and would have lost any battle badly, as was evidenced by how they literally threw Fuso and Yamashiro in the trash, and Musashi went down against CVE flight groups.

Also on the topic of decapping plates: There's great evidence that a 14 inch barbette hit on SoDak during Guadalcanal would have gone through the barbette armor and taken out the turret, if not for the decapping plate which just made it instead leave a simple gouge in the armor. That stuff worked.

H-hey guys, can I be a carrier too? I use coal and am a paddleboat, but that doesn't mean I can't be like you, Enterprise-chan!

>Even the availability of fuel vastly changes how you operate.

There's a great article at combainedfleet dot com examining IJN fuel issues with regards to the Solomons campaign. As early as '42, IJN ops between Truk and the Slot were handicapped by a lack of bunker crude.

>Also on the topic of decapping plates: There's great evidence that a 14 inch barbette hit on SoDak during Guadalcanal would have gone through the barbette armor and taken out the turret, if not for the decapping plate which just made it instead leave a simple gouge in the armor. That stuff worked.
There is a huge difference between what happend with the shell that hit SoDak's barbette and what the decapping plates were supposed to do to shells.

>There is a huge difference between what happend with the shell that hit SoDak's barbette and what the decapping plates were supposed to do to shells.

To my knowledge, they're not really meant to prevent penetration, just prevent *effective* penetration, which is kind of what happened there IIRC.

They're meant to do what the name implies: Remove the AP cap.
Which they probably do, if a shells passes through them at a certain angle. They were placed to protect against waterline hits, and would likely have helped the Iowas survive hits in that area.

But that hit into SoDak's barbette went through the deck at an extremely shallow angle. The fact that it lost its AP cap has mroe to do with the IJN's weird AP cap design

>IJN's weird AP cap design

This. All American botes were and are shit. It's just that the IJN botes were even more shit.

The only country that has objectively good botes during the 20th century has been Britain.

>The fact that it lost its AP cap has mroe to do with the IJN's weird AP cap design

That whole conical, crh/infinity design they had? Yeah I always wondered what was up with that. Was that part of the whole "diving shell" plan?

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>Was that part of the whole "diving shell" plan?
Yes, AFAIK that was the reason.
They consciously accepted the drawbacks of their AP cap design and adopted their rather extreme fuze delay to make underwater hits more probable.

Ironically, the one time it REALLY worked and an AP shell went straight into a magazine the inrushing water extinguished the fire before the ship blew up.
That was thanks to the stable USN propellant, though.

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Beautiful old bitch. Your backdrop has been ruined since I was last aboard though. That bridge is mighty useful but its an eyesore and ruins whats left of the old harbor.

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>breastwork superstructure
>tumblehome hull
>gunports for cannons?
>diverse caliber armament
>ridiculous masts
Just need funnel cancer and it's predread bingo!

The historian in my is morbidly curious to see just how many kinds of fucked up the magazine layouts were on some of those old pre-dreads.

Most simple modern ruleset that includes helis and subs?

Obviously not Harpoon, just looking for something quick and deadly.

>NAVWAR don't have an email or online order form

Wow... pity, they have a great range.
Might keep shopping around for 1:3000 moderns. Any recommendations? Looking for Falklands ships and submarines of both side

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Only France can make something so ugly and imprctical and fascinating.

>Kebab removal edition

The last years of the Ottoman Navy were some amazing shit.

>Around the Golden Horn, kebab removes *you*

I'd attribute that more to the complete incompetence of the Royal Navy that to the ability of the Ottomans.

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Looks like something out of a Ghibli film.
I think it looks cool.

Give them their due, the Turks and the Germans brought an A game to the Dardanelles, by anybodies standards.

The British and the French, aside from their customary institutionalized bloated sloppiness had this strange combination of strategic recklessness and tactical cowardice that managed to capture the absolute worst of both worlds. Either alone may have worked. Combined they got a series of spectacular disasters.

>not only not leading with the minesweepers, not putting them anywhere near front
>doing the Polish Minedetector thing with battleships, but *stopping* after you've cleared a lane that way, pulling back, and letting the kebabs regenerate a line or two every night so it's all to do over again next time around, while spouting off about mythical "floating mines"
>NO, YOU LITERALLY TURN OVER THE BATTLEGROUND TO AN OPPONENT THAT *ACTUALLY IS* AS INNOVATIVE AND DARING AS YOUR FANTASIES ABOUT YOURSELF AND THAT'S WHAT THEY CAN DO WITH A BOAT, A CREW, AND A FEW STOLEN HOURS
>oh and congratulations on losing a gun-duel between a super-dread and pre-dreadnought, top marks there limey

That is WW1 for you, somewhat decent ideas brought down by incompetence, bad luck, or just lacking tech needed to execute it properly.

More Operational recklessness. Strategic misguidance. Not the best thing you could be doing with all those men and all those ships, even just limiting your activities to the Eastern Med theatre.

French boats are cute!

Cuuuuuuuuuuute!

rtw 2 coming out when?

Every time someone asks...it gets delayed a month.

It is coming out in sometime next millennium then.

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Scenario: You spend the rest of the night reading a good history book on the Pacific War, plus some primary source articles on some website so you've got that plus your existing knowledge. Then, space aliens abduct you. They tell you you need to win the war for Japan to correct the timeline.
You wake up as Isoroku Yamamoto, in 1937, with access to what he knows. What do you do?

Coup Japan, remove the IJA from power, ally the US against communism. Win the Cold War. Fin.

Argue to switch sides and offer support to the allies against the Soviets.

Yamamoto's power isn't enough to do that by far. He was nearly assassinated by militarists, after all. All he can do is influence how the navy operates.

Build a ship, name it 'Japan' and sell it to the US.

>plus your existing knowledge

Start the Manhattan Project. No other hope than that.

His ostensible mistakes I think were just flavors of the essential turd sandwich.

Plan 1: List"proved" modern resource deposits in the existing Japanese sphere and get them officially "identified" with geological missions.

Plan 2: Set up a "Seize Dutch and French possessions for Democracy!" initiative, for when the time comes, leaving the US and UK completely out of it. More of a dice roll but you're screwed anyway- not going in that direction was something Yamamoto influenced as is, worth a shot trying the opposite.

You are NOT going to get the army to jump the Soviets when their back is turned no matter what. You're damned lucky not to have been assassinated being as much as a squeaky wheel as you were already (you are publically known as Mr. London Naval Treaty, it's a miracle you have a career, much less haven't been stabbed by some lieutenant or another). You're probably not even going to be able to avoid Nagumo being put in charge of stuff. You managed to get a six-carrier coordinated striking group assembled and trained up already- that is goddamned amazing, and I'd be afraid of screwing it up on a do-over.

Suppose the German and Soviet navies got into a direct fight in the Baltic. How bad of a cripple fight would that end up being?

Lobby like fucking hell to ignore the US Pacific Fleet and the Philippines.
Sell it as a cunning plan to lure the USN into the Philippines, and then crush them as they are far from their big base in Hawaii.

Lie, beg, steal and sell my own daughters to get operational support from Dönitz to teach the IJN how to uboat.
While we're at it, fake up reports that 'prove' how the Allies are reading Enigma and pretty much all IJN codes, and fix that shit ASAP.

Proceed to kick the shit out of the RN in the Indian Ocean. Invade Ceylon. Force France to cede Madagascar.

in the end, there is no way outside of Hitler using literal Nazi Magic to defeat the US in WW2.

Without US help, MAYBE Germany can fight Britain to a standstil by sinking enough merchant tonnage, MAYBE Germany can fight the Soviets to a stalemate somewhere along the Volga.
Japan can take most of SE Asia from Britain and the other European powers that are busy learning German. Japan can threaten India, and put a lot of pressure on Britain that way.

But once the US go, they win. It's the simple, brutal truth.
And ironically, Yamamoto was one of the few men who understood this at the time.

What do they mean by 'win'? Total defeat and occupation of allied nations? Or would preventing the occupation of Japan be enough? What about avoiding conflict with western powers all together?

While the Kriegsmarine had a lot of problems, most notably in ship design, they'd still stomp the Soviet "navy" in an afternoon, and be home for a nice kartoffel and sauerkraut dinner.

I think the dream maneuver would be to get the Allies to sign a devil's bargain to join the war on their side when they're desperate enough and snapping up axis puppet-state colonial possessions like it ain't a thing. But you'd need the Army on board a long time beforehand, and there's only so much Japan is good for in the European theatre. They could easily turn you down. You can't keep the British economy from drowning, and you can't fight Germans in Europe, much less beat them.

And without the US they'd all probably lose, even with the Japanese Army showing up on the Eastern Front. Pearl Harbor was the greatest blow for democracy anybody ever struck, in a weird way.

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>win the war for Japan

The best way for Japan to "win" is to lose the war as fast as possible.

As others have pointed out, this is not only an impossible job but you've picked the wrong man to attempt it. From the London Naval Treaty onward Yamamoto is lucky to wake up alive every morning. His opposition to the tripartite pact led the IJA to assign MP "guards" to him who were really spies. Yonai only appointed Yamamoto as CinC of the Combined Fleet in order to get him to sea and make it harder to kill for the Army to kill him.

There's no single "Hitler" in Japan of the 20s and 30s. There's no one man you can kill to substantially change the political landscape and foreign policy. If you want to divert Japan from it's course, you're going to have to kill 1000s of military officers and politicians. Japan was so screwy during the 30s that when the Guards division in Tokyo mutinied to protect the Emperor the troops refused to obey orders broadcast over loudspeakers by Hirohito himself.

>There's no single "Hitler" in Japan of the 20s and 30s. There's no one man you can kill to substantially change the political landscape and foreign policy
This. You'd have to go back to at least WW1 and Versailles to alter Japan's momentum, probably earlier. By the 40s it was more or less inevitable that Japan would end up going into a war it couldn't win and get crushed. Imperial Japan in particular (and to a degree the Axis in general) serve as a good example of why you shouldn't pick a fight with someone bigger than you.

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>You'd have to go back to at least WW1 and Versailles to alter Japan's momentum,

Their momentum at the time was fine. What happened is all the old guys that cleaned up at Versailles and remembered how it was starting from nothing, when to win and when to lose (even though you'd won) died, and their legacy was misinterpreted. The Old Men would have fucked back to Manchuria and tried again later once the sanctions started piling up. (They'd done as much to get Manchuria in the first place!) They knew how to endure humiliation while staying on the track for victory.

The young born in good times are fucking catastrophe-baiting morons in any political system.

>What happened is all the old guys that cleaned up at Versailles and remembered how it was starting from nothing, when to win and when to lose (even though you'd won) died, and their legacy was misinterpreted

This is an interesting way to put it. I do wonder what the old Genro and people like Togo would actually think of the behavior of Japan during the 1930s and 1940s if they were around to influence it in any major capacity.

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>Imperial Japan in particular (and to a degree the Axis in general) serve as a good example of why you shouldn't pick a fight with someone bigger than you.
I dunno they did pretty well against China for the entire war. They annihilated British forces and the empire spanned 1/5th of the globe at its zenith. Picking a fight with the US was incredibly retarded - adding one even larger giant to the list of giants they were fighting. We can blame Tojo for being a douche and threatening to quit unless the high command carried out his plan to attack Pearl Harbor (which very few people in the Japanese high command thought was a good idea...)

If Tojo was assassinated though... would Japan have focused on China and India, or perhaps invaded Australia? War with the US seemed inevitable, but could the Japanese empire have built itself up with enough territories and production to actually hold its own in a war of attrition? (I somehow still doubt it - US was huge in terms of pure production - but they were also huge on staying out of wars that concern them - and profiting by selling stuff to both sides...)
What if the Japanese had invaded Russia from the east with everything they had at the same time Hitler had invaded from the west? Imagine an axis powerhouse spanning from Spain all the way through Russia and China to Japan. That would certainly be something that could rival the US in production: Europe + Russia + China + Japan

What are you talking about, even without the USA once Germany failed to pull off Sealion and bogged down in Russia it was only a matter of time until the Allies won.

>I dunno they did pretty well against China for the entire war.

Huh? While Japan won most of it's battles there, it had no chance of ever winning the war. Chian was a strategic incubus where the majority of Japan's armed forces were employed with no concrete results.

>>We can blame Tojo for being a douche and threatening to quit unless the high command carried out his plan to attack Pearl Harbor

That was Yamamoto, not Tojo.

>If Tojo was assassinated though... would Japan have focused on China and India, or perhaps invaded Australia?

They couldn't even pacify those regions of China they occupied but you're having them taking India and Australia too? Un-fucking-believable.

>What if the Japanese had invaded Russia from the east with everything they had at the same time Hitler had invaded from the west?

Nothing except more resources diverted for no result. After Nomohan even the fire eaters in the IJA recommended not attacking the USSR and, before you or some other fuckwit brings it up, the Soviets didn't strip troops out of the Far East to fight the Germans. The USSR actual reinforced the Far East during the course of the war. The "Siberian" troops the Germans faced outside of Moscow were from Central Asia.

If you're going to think about how history can go sideways, it's important that you actually know history to begin with.

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>The "Siberian" troops the Germans faced outside of Moscow were from Central Asia.
There were divisions transferred from the Siberian MDs, as well as the Trans-Baikal MD and the Far-Eastern Fronts. But in a fairly small number (iirc less than 20 in 1940-1941, during the second half of 1941 the Soviets mobilized 500 division equivalents).
The Soviets never considered the two Far-Eastern safe and due to local mobilization and units transferred east (mostly after being destroyed by the Germans and re-created from cadres) strength increased each year through out the war.
But yeah, most 'Siberian' troops came from Central Asia and the Ural MDs.

>lease a ship called Royal Sovereign to the commies
Perfidious Albion strikes again

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Why did the Germans stick with 30.5cm for so long?

because it's superior to 13'' when your bursting charges actually work like they're supposed to and theirs don't

There is some misunderstanding here.
What the Germans called 'Siberia' is better described as 'all of Russia east of the Urals'.

And there was a noticeable difference in combat performance and equipment between existing formations transferred west and those that were freshly mobilized and thrown at the enemy, especillly during the first ca. 18 months.

>We just got 13(-1)! Why haven't you scrapped all that 12(+1) junk in the pipeline!

Cost reasons and the fear of escalating the arms race with the Royal Navy even further.
It was also a pretty good gun for its size.

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Had that been an RN vessel however it would have worked, because iirc the RN was still using similar charges to the IJN at that point.

The IJN simply got too creative. The end result was an APC that did what it was designed to do, but what it was designed to do wasn't as useful as it was believed.

>the Kriegsmarine had a lot of problems, most notably in ship design
Can someone elaborate on this? I've read the article about the changes to their ship design bureau between the world wars, but what are some specific examples of problems in the ship designs (e.g. Japanese ships often being overly top heavy or lacking in damage control)?

The single most obvious design problem they had was that they didn't have a clear mission for the ships they were building.
The Deutschland class panzerschiffe were clearly meant to go on a global commerce raid against France, and by the end 20s/early 30s they were actually pretty good for that given the limitations theywere built under (most notably, 10k tons)

But then Hitler comes to power, and suddnely it looks like bigger ships are on the menu.
Everybody, their dog and their grandmother now wants to have their idea put into a design, and why not modify what we have on the slipways, and der Führer wants his battleships yesterday, oh fuck let's just go to the archives and meddle a little and throw all our cool ideas at a basic design from 1916.
So the Scharnhorsts happen. Calling them a clusterfuck is doing clusterfucks injustice, and they ended up looking damn sexy.
They had the guns meant for the next generation Panzerschiff but in a turret ring desinged to accept teh next generation turret, medium artillery designed for commerce raiding, an armor concept straight out the last HSF design (Bayern and L20alpha, more or less), electronics so cutting edge they literally needed a physics doctor and an AA suite that was added on with the full knowledge that they wouldn't just need to update it but replace it completely with something that actually worked.

And then Hitler signs the Angle German naval Agreement, wants bigger battleships with bigger guns, and they decide let's build the next BB class the same way right now and replace all the shit that doesn't work later, and we can replace the gun turrets on the Scharnhorsts later when we build the guns for the followup class of battleship.
Cue Bismarck class.

And then they run out of time, it's war and they are so completely unprepared that they make the RN look good in comparison.

I think the Scharnhorsts might have made their Reichmarks back in Pounds. That's something, at least.

So to draw a comparison to armor development, the KM was basically the naval equivalent of if all your tanks were designed Ferdinand Porsche? That's a pretty horrifying prospect.

Oh, they were fast, and their fire control systems were good and rapidly produced straddles. Even their radar was pretty good, though fragile as fuck.
Also, the KM did train their crews well.

That being said, they never fixed their AA setup, the armoring scheme was shit on a stick and they had a bunch of structural problems becasue they finished the designs under pretty extreme time pressure.
The above is true for the Scahnrhorsts, Bismarcks and Hippers.

Well, not really.
This was mostly a result of not haivng the twenty or so years of BB design analysis and development in the same way the USN and RN did, and then going from the Deutschlands (which were pretty damn innovative and modern) to a bunch of battleships with zero time to actually go through the normal development process.
So they just grabbed something they had in the archives and ran with that, though they did add a bit more protection agains plunging fire and updated the metallurgy.

Porsche's tank designs ended up as shit because he just ignored what was needed and requested, what his tech could do, and that a theoretically optimal design may not be the best on the battlefield.

>This was mostly a result of not having the twenty or so years of BB design analysis and development in the same way the USN and RN did
So does that mean that their cruiser and destroyer designs ended up fairing better in comparison?