Anger of the Hellenes Edition
Talk about botes, bote based wargaming and RPGs, and maybe even a certain bote based vidya that tickles our autism in just the right way.
Games, Ospreys and References (Courtesy of /hwg/)
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Nice looking piece of woodwork there. I wound up reading about her after seeing the pic. It got me wondering though how they kept them dry in high seas. Did they have canvas around the lowest tier of oars, or something else to keep out water? And for that matter, did ships like this have any sort of bilge and hand operated bilge pumps? Know next to nothing about this period of ship construction.
>did ships like this have any sort of bilge and hand operated bilge pumps?
Not OP but at least, as far as I know which really isn't that much when it comes to boats to the ancient greek and roman times, there are references to bilges in ancient texts that mention seagoing boats and that stuff like buckets or Archimedes' screws were used to remove water from it.
It wasn't so muhc a dedicated bilge, but the space where tehy stowed the stone ballast served that purpose.
And yeah, they had pumps.
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Which guns were best? Tirpitz 15, Colorado 16, Nagato 16.1?
statistically, KGV 14"
12"/50 Mk8
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I will admit that the KGVs 14s were pretty sweet, aside from interlock problems, but I'm seriously looking for an answer about those 3 guns, since I have a wehraboo and a Wapanese that both claim the Colorado's guns sucked balls compared to the Biz and Naga.
They were all functional. The 38cm SK C/34 is a bit of an oddball, comparatively higher velocity with a service life of 210 rounds at best, 110-ish at full charge, with a liner-type construction. The 41cm/40 was wire-wound for most of its length modeled after RN designs, but lighter due to the fact that they were not wire-wound their entire length. Their service life at full charge was at worst 250 rounds. The 16"/45 was also a liner-type design which was revised several times from their initial build, which increased use life to about 320 rounds by the Mk 5. The chromium-plated liners of the Mk 8 increased service life to nearly 400 rounds.
So as-built, the Bismarck's guns were unremarkable and their high velocity shells chewed through them. Nagato's and Colorado's were comparable at first, but the USN continuously updated their construction methods which resulted in incremental improvements in use life.
In terms of accuracy and striking power the shells themselves were far more significant than the guns.
So shell wise, which would be top dog?
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>It got me wondering though how they kept them dry in high seas.
They didn't. As the others have explained, they pumped and bailed continually while afloat. Triremes and other vessels of the period rarely spent nights at sea and instead were beached.
Shells? US/UK again because of the continuous improvement as seen with the guns.
After studying Bismarck's hits on PoW, the UK was happy to realize that KM shells had major fuse problems and those problems which weren't fixed during the war.
The IJN got fixated "diving' shells, that is shells with a shape which theoretically allowed them to travel through water and hopefully turn very near misses into underwater hull hits. Their fascination with that possibility meant they didn't pay attention to designing shells which did their original job very well.
Depends which camp you fall into: slow, heavy, accurate rounds or fast, small, high-penetration but potentially inaccurate rounds. 38cm was functional, a better expression of that type of round than the Italians fielded, but their effectiveness depended on her opponent. Personally I don't buy into the design paradigm they went for when the USN produced excellent shells following more traditional "big and slow" thinking while SIMULTANEOUSLY increasing barrel life.
16"/45 and 41cm/40 were roughly speaking comparable when produced, but 41cm/40 Type 91 was again a different design paradigm that stressed diving capacity to the moderate detriment of performance against vertical face-hardened plates. They'd work well against contemporary dreadnought/post-Jutland armor schemes, against homogeneous armor (deck and turret roof plates), and in cases where they shorted (which IJN gunnery training stressed the value of). But the USN's more modern battleships had vertical armor that could defeat the 41cm/40 Type 91 on a flat trajectory and used propellant charges that weren't particularly susceptible to a diving round setting them off. In other words the IJN fielded a round which was sound on paper and could have worked in practice... against ANY navy but the one they ended up fighting, which was their principle strategic rival. Still, the 41cm was the IJN's only (in my mind) "acceptable" big gun for its caliber.
USN shells were pretty much reliable across the board and just got better as the war wore on, culminating in the 16" superheavy for the newest battleships. While the Colorados could never handle the superheavy their shells benefited from that same development trajectory, albeit to a lesser degree.
From my perspective it's 16"/45 that gets the nod, with 41cm and 38cm still being functional albeit designed along different lines which make it difficult to make a direct comparison.
Quick question, why does almost every naval game give the Colorado shit shells/guns compared to the Nagato and Bismarck?
No clue, really. Bismarck is a newer ship with faster shells that penetrate more, so I guess there's the logic. Nagato's are more comparable: the Type 91 was a bit heavier and a bit faster, with a slightly smaller bursting charge. But nothing that would demand significantly different effect on target unless the developers were giving the Type 91 some buff for its unusual diving capability.
Because designers can be weeaboos too.
Unless you're playing autism-heavy games like Harpoon or Seekrieg, you're playing a game which was designed more with "common knowledge" than technical data. Furthermore, the granular and/or coarse rating & resolution systems used in most games aren't "fine" enough to model many of the minor differences we're posting about. Look SPI's Dreadnought for example.
Each counter's attack rating is supposedly derivation of gun performance AND shell performance AND fire control AND rate of fire AND ship stability AND doctrine AND a dozen of other things all crammed into a single factor.
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I'd argue that the RN wasn't exactly happy about the fact that two German duds had prevented PoW from suffering major damage.
Because game designer do not study the development of guns over time. If you're lucky, they read through the wiki article about the ship class.
Colorado and her guns+shells in 1921 are very different from Colorado and her guns+shells in 1943.
Nagato is in the opposite situation, here it's very obvious taht she was redesigned, and got new shells withe very special, very specific idea behind thme (diving under the enemy belt)
That is easy to understand, sounds cool in conceptso it gets included in stats.
Bismarck and the 38cm SK C/34 are the odd one out, which probably explains why tehy get treeated in a somewhat special way.
For the theatre they were meant to operate in, the concept appears to have performed well.
Also, I cannot help but think that they were built with a very specific hit-and-run concept in mind that would result in not even shootign enemy BBs all that much but instead killing thin-skinned things.
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Arguably those shells, based on where they penetrated PoW, should have exploded in the water, not in the ship. The fact they made it into the ship at all was due more to the absolute crap fuses the germans had, then any inate ability in the shell itself. A hit way below the waterline from hood or PoW would have penned Bizy the same way, if the RNs fuses hadn't worked.
HMS Get Fucked Jerry!
The guns could have had a 360° firing arc (kinda like a tank) if the tripod had been welded to the turret roof and the funnel/superstructure cut down to below the barbette rim...
Bismarcks were funky also in that the last part of the powder bag was brass sleeved to help seal the whole affair in the barrel, something about the style of breach used. So I'd count some points off for logistical and mechanical complications.
>I'd argue...
Are you retarded?
Yamato v Iowa/Montana arguments are boring. But let's shitfight. Off in an accidental encounter on the high seas, we have a duel between comparable WW2 capital ship garbage, like if Nevada encounters Fuso and they must gun duel. What the hell happens?
>What the hell happens?
You'll need to specify more conditions. This isn't a fucking boxing match with them slugging it out one-on-one. What other ships are present? What scouting has been done and is being done? Time, date, year, location, weather, sea state? Etc., etc. etc.?
There's a reason questions like yours are simplistic shit fights.
Nevada loses. Nevada loses twice as fast in a night battle.
fuso has to pray its ~2knot speed advantage can allow it to escape before it splits in half
This peaceful merchant ship vs a heavy cruiser, who wins?
Peaceful?
Let's come up with scenarios. Replace historical vessels with them.
Such as... South Dakota loses power at Guadalcanal and gets hammered by Kirishima. She's out of the fight completely let's say. But instead of Washington obliterating Kirishima, there was California there instead.
how do I build a water board? I only found some aussie talking about one but Im not too keen on the results, and Im a little far from Gitmo at the moment
Still too vague.
Is Willis Lee, the USN's foremost gunnery expert, in overall command? Has he been in command of the BATDIV long enough for his training methods and expectations to have had effect? Does California have the same radar installation as Washington did? Are radar operators as skilled? California's speed is ~8 kn slower than Washington's. Does that mean Halsey dispatches them sooner so they can reach the Sound in time? Or do they arrive later? Or would California even be working with SoDak given the speed disparity? (Which was one of the reasons for building the Standards in the first place.)
Once again, you thinking in simplistic boxing match terms and not in plausible operational terms. Which is why these "What if X fought Y" questions are little more than shit.
>Does California have the same radar installation as Washington did?
This is a good question, I've been trying to find info on how the fire control systems on the Standards got upgraded after their refits.
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Nobody wins.
The peanut gallery does.
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>What? Postwar ships look gre-
Looking at adding second US and IJN carriers to my 1/1800 naval collection.
I currently have USS Wasp and IJN Shoukaku.
Which botes would you add to this and why?
USS Ranger and HIJMS Ryūjō.
I think the second hit wasn't underwater, it was one by Prinz Eugen into a 5.25" shell handling room. If that one had exploded, it might've caused serious damage, but it would probably not have crippled the ship.
Or was there a second underwater hit by Bismarck?
Hornet and Zuikaku.
Do you really think the RN was /happy/ to learn that one of Bismarck's shells had almost penetrated into machinery spaces?
The shell doesn't have to explode to cause flooding, and it just has to impact any part of the turbine to knock it out.
What do you think would've happened if PoW had lost a turbine while attempting to withdraw out of range at Denmark Strait?
Sure they probably breathed a sigh of relief that the Germans were not encoutnering teh same fuze problems the RN had 20 years earlier, but I doubt they were happy.
>Which botes would you add to this and why?
You're using them for gaming right? Then you need more iconic frontline types.
IJN - Soryu/Hiryu
USN - Essex class
I've wanted to play some sort of victorian era pre-dreadnought naval wargame for a very long time, but where do I start? My flgs doesn't even play any, and no one there has any good references. I just want to battle of tsushima.
>Do you really think the RN was /happy/ to learn that one of Bismarck's shells had almost penetrated into machinery spaces?
Yes.
See since the only thing those penetrations proved was that the germans still couldn't get their fuses right despite 20 years of advancement.
>Do you really think the RN was /happy/ to learn that one of Bismarck's shells had almost penetrated into machinery spaces?
Hell yes, you complete fucking idiot.
The shell hits, penetrates, and then one of 2 things can happen: It explodes or it doesn't explode. In this case, the KM's poor fuse design meant it didn't explode causing more damage which would place the ship in a dangerous situation.
The RN - especially the PoW's crew - were very happy to learn than KM fuses sucked.
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WTJ's Battlefleet 1900 could be a decent starting point; the rules are fairly simple and available for free on the internet, plus it is designed to be capable of supporting fairly wide selection of models.
Take a look at Grand Fleets, GQ3: Fleet Action Imminent, and Ship Blows Up! In the OP mediafire for rules of varying levels of complexity.
Very cool thanks, I'll take a look at it.
>Two pairs of superfiring aft guns
I'm guessing amidships turrets were too difficult to figure out?
Not really, the Wyomings were followed by the New Yorks, which had an amidships turret.
That said the Wyoming's arrangement worked all right in practice. Better than the Delawares and Floridas. I mean seriously look at this shit.
Two of those turrets are amidships.
>I'm guessing amidships turrets were too difficult to figure out?
They weren't stupid. They were working as well as possible under many different design, budget, and technical constraints than you and I can even imagine.
>I mean seriously look at this shit.
IIR Friedman C, Florida's two aft turrets shared the same magazine. It was an attempt to get two more rifles onboard without the cost, weight, and expense of having another magazine. While it didn't work out in practice, they didn't know that until they tried.
Fun fact: The German fuzes did not advance one tiny bit, they were functionally unchanged from WW1, which is probably why they ended up failing.
Graf Spee also had some fuzes failing, though they somehow solved it because their shells worled pretty well after the first few duds.
Read again: A 38 cm shell punching into a room full of RN cordite could very well blow up the ship without exploding.
Same if it ends up slamming into a turbine housing or taking away the foundation of a turbine instead of harmlessly parking in the ship's double bottom.
Yeah, the crew was happy no question.
But I bet the RN's designers were not happy that their newest ship was penetrated that easily, and saved only by shitty enemy fuzes.
They probably thoguht 'lucky us'.
>Fun fact: The German fuzes did not advance one tiny bit, they were functionally unchanged from WW1, which is probably why they ended up failing.
How ironic, given in WW1 it was the British fuzes that were terrible and the German ones considered reliable.
Success tends to breed complacency, which then ends up with that party being left in the dust when the next war rolls around.
>Success tends to breed complacency
It was more than that. In a few general's back, an user explained how Germany's pre-WW1 naval design system, bureaus, bureau staffs, and methods of training said staffs was all dismantled after Versailles. The treaty meant the navy could only have so many personnel on the payroll so officers were preferentially kept on and expert civilians let go.
When they began ramping up rearmament in the late Weimer period, they couldn't recreate that the central direction and technical excellence of the pre-WW1 system and instead had to go with a myriad of smaller design bureaus staffed by lesser engineers and sea-going naval officers. They either copied previous designs almost unchanged like Bismarck using Bayern's 20+ year old armor or saddled ships with various poorly researched/develvoped systems like Bismarck using 2 separate fire control systems for it's AA guns.
>RN's designers were not happy that their newest ship was penetrated that easily,
They were penned way below the belt, the shell should have detonated when it hit the water, it would not have penned had it detonated properly. No one armoured their ships that far below the waterline, you could fire non-exploding shells and pen all day on every battleship ever made, but you wouldn'[t be doing much damage vs everyone else who had shells penning belts and exploding inside the vessel.
Here is the link to the article navweaps.com
Unless you are the RN or IJN and use unstable propellant that could literally blow up from splinters (actually, sparks created by splinters hitting other things)
Or you're the IJN and spend 15 years designing special shells to dive into enemy ships, but completely forget about normal penetrations and also fuck up your explosive fillers while you're at it.
Unrelated question: Did any warship outright detonate after being hit by a torpedo?
The port AA guns are aiming right at the superstructure, could they even do that in reality?
>But I bet the RN's designers were not happy that their newest ship was penetrated that easily, and saved only by shitty enemy fuzes.
The shot in question penetrated PoW below her belt. If the fuse had worked correctly, the shell would have detonated in the water before reaching the hull. The fact that the shell was even able to end up where it did meant KM fuses were shit.
>>They probably thoguht 'lucky us'.
No. If PoW had been lucky the fuse would have worked and the shell woiuldn't have penetrated at all.
Do you understand now?
>Unrelated question: Did any warship outright detonate after being hit by a torpedo?
BBs? No. Plenty of smaller ships though.
>The port AA guns are aiming right at the superstructure, could they even do that in reality?
There are different kinds of interlocks best thought of as "physical" and "operational". The physical ones prevent a gun from being trained (or "pointed") in certain directions & elevations while the operational ones prevent a gun from being loaded and/or fired while trained in certain directions & elevations.
The difference exists because sometimes you want to train a gun in a certain direction & elevation for maintenance which would be dangerous if the gun actually fired in that position.
Not a dreadnought, but one of the German pre-dreads at Jutland blew up after a torpedo hit set off the 17cm magazine.
You stopped making sense two or so posts ago in your quest to defend the honor of the RN.
Calm down, man.
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HMS Royal Sovereign at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in 1941 if I remember correctly.
niiiice colorization in that one
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Sorry, your monitor don't got dem hips.
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Not the same user anon.
If you don't understand that those penetrations were caused by shells not being fused properly, I don't think you'll understand at all.
PoW took shells to her belt as well, they failed to penetrate, since the KGV was the best armoured western battleship ever.
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>the KGV was the best armoured western battleship
It lacked inclined armor, straight vertical armor was a very wasteful approach.
I do understand that the fuzes failed. That is the reason those shells could travel 50 or more meters underwater.
What you fail to grasp is that even a dud means 800 kg or so of steel slamming into teh ship. If those 800 kg hit a turbine, that turbine is knocked out. maybe only for a while, but it will not just keep happily spinning at a couple thousand RPM.
If those 800 kg of steel happen to enter a magazine, there are bound to be splinters and sparks.
Read up on what happens to Royal Navy cordite when sparks are around, there is a nice article on navweaps about that.
I get it, you think it was perfectly fine to get penned, and that everyone back then thought 'heh their fuzes will never work, no need to rethink our armor protection'.
You are wrong, but if it makes you happy to go on thinkning that, go right ahead.
I have this, does anyone know where those come from?
Are there more of them available online or are they once again from some out-of-print book from the 80s?
KGV's armor was inclined.
>I get it, you think it was perfectly fine to get penned, and that everyone back then thought 'heh their fuzes will never work, no need to rethink our armor protection'.
>You are wrong, but if it makes you happy to go on thinkning that, go right ahead.
Name a battleship that would not have been penetrated by that shot?
Hint: You can't.
>I get it, you think it was perfectly fine to get penned...
No, you don't get it you brain dead fuck. The penetration in question was a FLUKE and, by definition, a FLUKE is something which you can't plan against.
If the fuse had worked properly, the shell wouldn't have traveled ~50 meters or so underwater and slipped under the belt. No one plans the armor scheme of a ship thinking "Gee, what if their fuses don't work, their shells hit the water, and those shells then submarine for dozens of meters to penetrate the hull?" You might as plan and design against the likelihood of pixies abducting the crew.
Recognizing that no one could or did plan or armor against these extremely low odd "diving" hits, the IJN, in it's search to lower the odds versus the USN, tried to design a shell with slightly better odds of doing this and ended up with a shell which couldn't do it's primary job at all.
You can only plan and design up to a point and fluke hits are well past that point, fuckwit.
>No one plans the armor scheme
I don't know how to break this to you, but both the USN and the IJN planned against underwater hits.
The RN was no longer at the top of the game by WW2, plain and simple.
>I don't know how to break this to you, but both the USN and the IJN planned against underwater hits.
Not in a fashion which would have stopped the penetration suffered by PoW.
You're right, the RN was no longer at the top of the game in WW2. However this isn't some case of some teeaboo mumbling "RN stronk" like you seem to think. This is a case of you being unable to comprehend that the hit on PoW was a fluke hit which would have penetrated ANY battleship then afloat.
So very little as to not really be for functional purposes.
It's not about a fluke hit. Yes, the fuze malfunctioned, and it waws a 1 in a 100 chance to havea shell dive into teh double bottom that way.
That shell might've come in a few centimeters higher and opened a hole into a turbine room.
Or it might've gone a few centimeters lower and sunk without ever hitting anything.
It's about some people sperging about how 'happy' the RN must've been about the fact that their ship got hit in that way. Nobody is ever happy about that, because even such a fluke hit can cripple a ship.
There is not a lot you can do to protect against hits against exposed things like rudders, screws or shafts.
But you CAN protect machinery spaces and magazines against underwater hits, even fluke ones.
RN and KM didn't do it, but that only shows that they (for different reasons, of course) did not use the interwar years for R&D.
>It's not about a fluke hit.
>it waws a 1 in a 100 chance
Herpity derpity doo
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>1 in 100 chance
>hundreds of rounds of ammunition being fired
Sounds more like an inevitability when you put it that way.
>Sounds more like an inevitability when you put it that way.
No, it doesn't. You're ignoring, most likely deliberately, the fact that not all of those "hundreds of rounds" are "eligible" for "diving" hits.
A successful diving hit needs to:
- Land within a certain distance of the hull
- Have a "flight path" which intersects the hull
- Not hit the ship
When you're honest enough to examine all the aspects of "diving" hits, you realize it's not a case of 1 in 100. It's not even a case of 1 in 1000. Such hits are called flukes for a reason.
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The fact that the IJN decided to invest a ton of ressources into designing shells that did this and defenses against this makes me question your outright dismissal of diving hits.
The irony is that a KM ship hit a RN ship with a diving hit, while both of these organizations treated the whole issue like you.
The double irony is that this only happened becasue the shell in question had a shitty fuze (though one could make a reasonable argument that the fuze was fine and only failed because the shell hit water and probably tumbled for a few revolutions)
One really has to wonder why they didn't add a gun shield of ome sort.