"E" for Excellence!

[m10bob]

I do not believe the USN ships which rated the "E" awards are represented fairly/historically in the data base and feel their day/night ratings might be tweaked up a bit to compensate.?
Is there a way to make individual ships have better gunnery ratings?
(I don't know what the Brit equivalent was?)

[el cid again]

I don't think E ratings are helpful. [My second ship, a destroyer, had every possible E in the same year she was rammed and also ran aground.] Ships that get E ratings are good at passing tests. Ships that are good in combat may or may not be any good at tests. Our ship had a captain who was willing to take risks - and these both paid off and had downside risks. Such is life. What matters is a ship's record in battle. Show me she did this well - and we will rate her accordingly. USS England surly rates this for example (she sank - what 5 subs in 5 days?). And FYI has it in RHS.

[m10bob]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

I don't think E ratings are helpful. [My second ship, a destroyer, had every possible E in the same year she was rammed and also ran aground.] Ships that get E ratings are good at passing tests. Ships that are good in combat may or may not be any good at tests. Our ship had a captain who was willing to take risks - and these both paid off and had downside risks. Such is life. What matters is a ship's record in battle. Show me she did this well - and we will rate her accordingly. USS England surly rates this for example (she sank - what 5 subs in 5 days?). And FYI has it in RHS.

No, aside from a couple of obvious examples, (Indianapolis, Lexington), I was really wanting to know how laymen such as I might tweak the day/night ratings OR somehow give a bonus to accuracy on individual ships??
No need to create work for you, Sid..

[spence]

I have the impression that experience ratings for individual ships are generated randomly from a range specified somewhere in the code for each nationality and shp type. Is this so?

In my own personal experience an "E" is more of a "test score" than an actual rating of how a ship will function in its mission area. At GTMO quite some years back my ship got an "E" in Engineering even though the whole plant was held together with chewing gum and baling wire and we spent an extra week there because on many days we were unable to get underway to take the tests (a 40 yr old ship with 50 yr old boilers is just a CASREP waiting to be written most of the time). On another venerable CG matron of the seas we shot the $hit out of our air target on the one and only day in my 2 years aboard that our Mk 56 GFS was operational (it was so old that there were no spare parts stocks anywhere in the US and when it broke spare parts had to be fabricated in a machine shop by the FTs - the system was later removed and gunnery was thereafter a job for the Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball which proved much more reliable).

[el cid again]

My principle is the record of the ship: unless it did something outstanding, it isn't rated as outstanding. Further - in Japan - if it is later in the war - the worse it is rated. Further - if it is a lesser type - the worse it is rated. I have a table of these ratings by type and year somewhere.

[spence]

Generalizations are necessary in a game such as this I suppose.

Just so's ya know though.

Two of the earliest US U-boat kills in WWII were by 165 ft USCG cutters which WitP would have us believe were crewed by 5 yr olds and captained by the only guy on board who could tell a line from a rope.

In one case the CO was a 52 year old Mustang Lt with 20 odd years service (CGC Icarus). The first attack damaged the Uboat enough that it surfaced wherein the cutter thereafter pumped a dozen 3" into it out of about 15 rounds total expended.
CGC Icarus made the first capture of Germans by US forces in WW2 (30 odd from the crew of U-352).

In the other (CGC Thetis) the CO was a Ltjg who did so badly at the USCG Academy (1935) that they didn't even make his commission permanent until 1940. Although he probably wasn't so red hot at Calculus and Physics he apparently could take data from his sonar and accurately predict where to put his depth charges to make the kill on his first attack. The Uboat (U-157) was sunk with all hands.

[el cid again]

We are stuck with code that says a sub chaser is junk - I think everything but a DD or DE is = to a sub chaser too ASW wise. I interpret it as meaning "fitted with hydrophones instead of sonar" - and a DD is "having a non ASW specialist crew" while the DE is "having a ASW specialist crew" - all this being hard code we cannot deal with. There are apparently three kinds of ASW in code

DE is best
DD
PC (and probably everything else)

and it isn't bad as a generalization either.