Just some Naval ideas

[zgrssd]

I had some ideas regarding Navies:

Bouyancy:
Unless I seriously forgot my Physics lessons, gravity maters for how big a ship you can place - as much as air density maters for how big a plane you can make.
So there needs to be a "Naval Viability Score" as much as there needs to be a "Airforce Viability Score".

The AA problem:
From Age of Wonders Planetfall, I can already tell you that Ships will need serious AA abilities. You do not want the Airforce to pearl-harbour the navy.
In the real world, air forces spelt the doom for large surface ships (going more and more for the Carrier/Destroyer spam). Wich is really a rather boring state.

The Major River Problem:
Usually rivers in strategy games are little more then terrain modifiers. However lately there is a tendency to treat major rivers as part of the Naval Warfare System.
Total War 3 Kingdoms treats the two big rivers of China as sea zones.
Before that, the "Old World Blues" mod for Hearts of Iron IV made all US rivers de-facto sea zones (however they might have actually overdone it a bit there).

So it is really worth considering if really big rivers could actually be part of the Naval System.

The Geography Problem:
Normally people do not consider that the Geographic region for naval activity maters - but it does very much so.
We can roughly seperate earths connected watermasses into the "sheltered" and "deep sea" regions, wich need almost opposing Naval doctrines:

"Sheltered" sea regions would be the Mediteranean Sea, Red Sea, Black Sea, Baltic Sea - somewhat even around norways North Sea cost. You rarely had to deal with heavy weather there. But you needed a seriously shallow draft.
Submarines or minefields had serious issues hiding there and enemy airfroce tended to be very close.

"Deep Sea" are stuff like the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean - to some degree even the English Channel.

Every time a Empire that primarily dealt with sheltered seas (Rome, Ottomans) tried to venture into Deep seas, it quickly turned into disaster. They were quite literally "out of their depth".
Meanwhile a "Deep Sea" Empire that went into the Sheltered sea realized just how outnumbered their big, deep draft ocean going ships were. How much more AA they needed, as the enemy Airforce was closer. How little submarines mater.

Tug of War
In a modern Navy, we almost exclusively use Destroyers and Airctaft carriers. The odd navy might still have some cruisers, but overall it is destroyers and carriers everywhere. No more battleships, no more cruisers. We might see battleships again with railguns (simply need a big hull to carry the power generators).
However the current doctrine is mostly a reaction to increasing ranges of ships.

In the glory days of naval warfare (WW1+WW2), range was the decider at what you could bring to bear and the decidere of naval or even exterior policy doctrine:
A fleet far away from a friendly port could rarely bring anything smaler then a cruiser as escort. While operating close to the enemy coast would expose you to all the destroyers, corvettes, torpedo boats, minefields and even shore batteries of the enemy.
The less spamable something was, the more range it had and vice versa. This resulted in a quickly diminishing combat ability of all navies as distances increased.
Destroyers actually had issues getting enough range for escort duty (leaving it to the Flower class Corvette and Cruisers most of the war). While forcing Battleships to do Escort duty was a major success of the two Bismark class "battleships"*

Say we only had 4 rough ship classes - with one range for ship classes:
Boats: 5
Destoryers: 10
Cruisers: 15
Battleships and Carriers: 20

Given those numbers, the distance of two ports maters massively:
- If the ports are only 5 hexes appart, both sides could drive their Torpedo boats into the other parties port.
- If the ports are 15 hexes appart, both navies would be their strongest at the halfway point (7-8 hexes), where both sides could bring destroyers. But actually driving to the enemy port would mean you can only bring cruisers and bigger - while the enemy has all their destroyers and torpedo boats to counter you.

Actually large scale combat is the exception, not the rule. Skirmishes are the rule.

Both sides get to decide:
1. How far they want to push it from their port
2. How willing they are to comit to a fight, if the enemy pushes back.

A "Fleet in being" could be set to "push however far you can" and "but do not fighting for it, if you have to". Effectively binding a lot of enemy ships just by being there.
But if you want a naval invasion, you are better going "all the way to the enemy port" and "willing to fight for every inch".


*Personally I consider the Bismark class more of a "oversized cruiser", then a battleship. It had the usual cruiser hallmarks: Commerce Rading mission (historically a cruiser job), long range, good speed, weak deck armor, the Cruiser Motto: "Outrun anything you can not outgun, outgun anything you can not outrun" (could beat any lone cruiser or destroyer group and run from every battleship of the UK navy). The Tirpitz even ended up having Torpedoes, something that was even rare among cruisers.

[springel]

You should re-read Archimedes' Law, and remember that liquids are practically incompressible, so mass density is not dependent on gravity. So the mass of the displaced water and the mass of ship are both invariable, while the forces are just mass multiplied by gravity, so the ship will be in equilibrium independent of gravity.

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: springel

You should re-read Archimedes' Law, and remember that liquids are practically incompressible, so mass density is not dependent on gravity. So the mass of the displaced water and the mass of ship are both invariable, while the forces are just mass multiplied by gravity, so the ship will be in equilibrium independent of gravity.

I might have been thinking to much that it works like a Atmosphere here.

However there should still be some planet specific differences:
- the water density could change based on how much salt is disolved in it. In someones lets play, I saw red (brown after atmosphere) oceans, wich makes me beleive Iron was disolved in them
- the liquid may not be water in the first place, resulting in totally different density
- the airpressure might still have a positive or negative effect

[beyondwudge]

I just want to note that in the game universe, GR technology may allow a Battleship to deal with the problem of air-attack much better than modern technology does. After all, when your mature laser is moving at three hundred million metres per second, there is no dodging a beam that is on target. Also, with a battleship's bulk there may be no bombing through a GR shield mounted inside a battleship's hull or on a dedicated ship shield.

Just saying, the dynamic might be _a lot_ different when you apply advanced technology to something as big as a capital ship. So far we've seen small aircraft, man-scale vehicles like tanks and humans like infantry. A blue-water capital ship with a nuclear power plant, lasers and shields might be completely immune to anything short of a atmospheric space ship.

[Hazard151]

We've also seen very large vehicles, substantially larger than a human and more like the largest man made vehicles on Earth.

They can mount ICBMs and large shields. The idea that even a modestly sized ship can mount a shield and a useful weapon isn't crazy, but at the same time shields are end game tech anyway. Different active defenses or just thick layers of armour would be necessary. At the same time polymer armour is both lightweight and very effective for its thickness, so... it gets into an interesting number of trade off concerns.