Ship Design for Expanded Battles

[martinworsey]

I have been looking at the Ship Designer in anticipation of creating some historical ships for use with the Expanded Battles Scenario Generator.

There are some interesting options and I was wondering how these are best applied to create historical ships. My main area of interest is the earlier part of the period up to 1920's.

As a slight preamble, illustrating references in the Ship Designer and some RN examples for reference relating to side armour:

- Belt armour some 7-9 feet deep (Admiral - Trafalgar): Narrow Belt
- Belt armour some 14-16 feet deep (Majestic - Lord Nelson): Belt
- Casemate/Turret: Secondary Guns
- Armoured area protecting secondary guns and the upper side of the ship (King Edward, Super Dreadnoughts): Upper Belt
- However some ships (Royal Sovereign, early US Battleships, early Dreadnoughts) have a shallow stake (Narrow Belt) with a lighter upper belt above. This could ideally be represented as Narrow Belt and Upper Belt but this depends upon the damage model. Alternatively, the armour could be averaged.
- Other ships (invincible/Indefatigable) fall somewhere between Narrow Belt and Belt (around 11 feet) which provided waterline protection but also gave a large area unprotected.

Queries that I would like some answers to please:

- Does "Narrow Belt" give a higher degree of vulnerability to floatation damage?
- Does the modelling of deck slope assume the same thickness as the flat deck?
- Does armour thickness assume Krupp Cemented, allowing "order of merit" to be used to establish equivalent thickness for older types (e.g. Harvey, Nickel Steel, Compound, Iron etc.)
- For a full length "narrow belt" is it necessary to use belt extended for the area outside the citadel?

Thank you in anticipation.

[f11supertiger]

- Does the modelling of deck slope assume the same thickness as the flat deck?
- Does armour thickness assume Krupp Cemented, allowing "order of merit" to be used to establish equivalent thickness for older types (e.g. Harvey, Nickel Steel, Compound, Iron etc.)

I think I can answer these two questions.
- Does the modelling of deck slope assume the same thickness as the flat deck?

I believe it does. There's no way to set other possible values for the deck slop in the standard campaign ship designer. This, from the game manual, is useful for understanding things here:

armour.png (175.54 KiB) Viewed 271 times

- Does armour thickness assume Krupp Cemented, allowing "order of merit" to be used to establish equivalent thickness for older types (e.g. Harvey, Nickel Steel, Compound, Iron etc.)

The way that it works in campaign mode is that armor quality is based on year of construction.

[Dasein]

Regarding historical ship designs, I’m not sure the ship design in the new Expanded Battles will be that different from what we have now. in RTW3 for instance we cannot replicate predreadnoughts with intermediate battery (nor the French Charles Martel and her 4 half-sisters). Because in all those cases, what we call tertiary guns in RTW3 are meant to be protected by armour. But in the game we cannot do that.

Charles Martel class: 2x12”, 2x11”, 8x5.5” all protected by armour
King Edward VII class: 4x12”, 4x9”, 10x6” the same
Katori class: 4x12”, 4x10”, 12x6”
Satsuma class: 4x12, 12x10, 8x6”

The USN in particular was very keen on that arrangement:
Indiana class: 3x13”, 8x8”, 4x6”
Kearsarge class: 4x13”, 4x8”, 14x5”
Virginia class: 4x12”, 8x8”, 12x6”
Connecticut class: 4x12, 8x8”, 12x7”

All those ships had their 5" to 7" guns protected by armour.

Belt and sloping deck armour scheme: I also would like to know what’s the thickness of the sloped side of the deck. Historically is supposed to be two to three times the thickness of the flat deck. My guess, and hope, is that this is somehow already taken into account when setting penetration resistance when using the deck armour scheme.

[Metesky]

In sloped deck designs, the slope and the flat center portion of the deck have the same thickness. In protected cruiser designs, the 'belt' thickness represents the deck slope, 'deck' is the flat center portion. Hope this helps!

There is no way I know of to armor tertiary guns, but in game designs like the Connecticut or King Edward VII work fairly well b/c tertiary guns don't get hit anywhere near as much as secondaries. On the other hand, they don't hit anywhere near as much, either. This is historical: it was difficult enough to get a semi-dreadnought's 12 inch and 9 inch guns to work together ... three calibers only really worked well at 2,000 yds or so - close enough for the gunners to spot their own shots through their gun-mounted telescopes.

[Dasein]

Thanks, yes I know the game does not distinguish thickness between the flat top and the sloping sides of the deck in ships with belt and sloping deck armour.
What I wanted to say is that real warships usually had two to three times greater thickness in their slopes than in the flat deck. As in RTW we cannot make that distinction, my comment was only that I hoped the team had had that into account when designing the resistance of ships with sloping deck armour, as it's supposed to be better than ships with flat deck and belt.I'm sure they did. The same way armour weight of any ship changes depending of its armour scheme.

[martinworsey]

Thanks for the interesting comments.

With respect to "Semi Dreadnoughts", this was discussed in the early days of Steam and Iron. Additional to the points raised (which are good ones) you are forced to chose between omitting the medium guns that would be expected to be the decisive armament at close range and the anti torpedo armament.

Looking at the scenario editor, there are a few further issues thrown up with the "tech" aspect, which appears to set a fixed date for armour advancements and prevents the building of ships with a mixture, such as the Royal Sovereign which had a mix of compound and Harvey as an example.

Also, you don't seem to be able to replicate German rapid fire heavy guns.

Considering deck slopes, I used to make allowance for this when playing Steam and Iron and felt empirically, that this gave a more satisfactory result. Real world analysis from Jutland and the other battles of the period indicate very few (none?) hits at battle range penetrated belt, coal and deck slope and burst behind. Turrets on the other hand were frequently burned out (with often spectacular consequence). I felt the game reflected this better with making allowance for it.