ORIGINAL: herwin
ORIGINAL: el cid again
ORIGINAL: herwin
Date of construction was very important, affecting compartmentation, torpedo resistance, and simple care in detailed design. WWI warships were about twice as vulnerable to torpedo damage as WWII designs.
This could be a factor. In more complex models I consider the quality of compartmentation - but here I only considered the extreme cases (German being a plus, Japanese being a minus). We could make WWI era ships a minus factor too. But the chance of sinking is not proportional to durability - the smaller the durability the chance of sinking rises far greater than linear proportion. A smaller value is more likely to be overwhelmed - a larger one may reach port and stay afloat long enough to repair.
This was a biggy, at least in the statistics. There was a lot of development between WWI and WWII. The three major categories I identified were ships designed before they really understood the danger of torpedoes (i.e., designed to about 1916 or so), ships designed to be resistant to torpedo damage (post war), and carriers (for some reason, probably involving large open spaces in the design). If a WWI ship could absorb 2 torpedoes before sinking, a WWII ship could absorb 4 and a carrier could absorb 3.
This suggests that warships should have two values based on class design date. But note that most of our game ships - even "WWI cruisers" - date from the 1920s in fact - with designs in the 1916-1918 era. Only a very few battleships and armored cruisers would be affected. We also need to study how changing durability changes survivability to game torpedoes, for example.
But it does appear that there is a difference between merchant ships and warships. And in RHS - we differentiate between auxiliaries that are civil manned and those that are naval manned - having served on the latter I know the differences are mainly in damage control -
and then tankers. We can make WWI era warships something like the naval manned auxiliaries, and WWII era warships between them an tankers - which are almost ideal damage control platforms due to compartmentation combined with pumps. The pumps of the nuclear USS Enterprise cannot cope with a 12 inch hole 10 feet below the waterline - but a WWII era tanker could.