Editor Formulas

[GaryChildress]

Anyone know what the formulas are for the following or how these values can be arrived at? I've lost my notes. [:(]

Ship Classes: Durability
Ship Classes: Manuever
Ship Classes: Fuel

[el cid again]

Fuel should be the fuel - not a formula. When fuel was not known, it appears that the value of the copied ship was used:

WITP editor instructions say "take a similar unit, modify it" - and thus - you can see they did that - and fuel stays the same if they have no data. But it should be fuel in tons for the vessel.

Durability probably should use a different formula than it does. For example, the same ship with a merchant crew should NOT have the same durability as the same hull used as an auxilary. A naval crew has much more manpower, and it has several damage control teams (instead of one poor one in a merchant ship), and it has a lot more firefighting equipment, foam, DC timbers, etc on board, and the ability of the ship to sustain/recover from damage is nothing like the same. [I rate it twice as high as a first pass approximation - and it seems to work OK - but that is conservative - and three times might be more realistic.] Similarly, a tanker should not have the same rating as a AK or AP of the same tonnage - it has many compartments and pumps which permit control of flooding/counterflooding on a scale other ships can only envy.
[I tried four times, but while it does not make them "too hard to sink" I am not entirely happy with the relative effect on victory points/reports.] In all cases, the scale should be sliding: an AK (or warship) twice as large (displacement wise) is not twice as hard to sink. Things like being built to warship standards or not should count (thus a DE or CVE built to MERCHANT standards should not be rated the same as a DD or CVL built to WARSHIP standards even if they are exactly the same displacement). And of course protection - but that one is very tricky: does a Kitori with 1 inch of deck armor (and, oddly, 2 inches of turret facing) count as "armored"??? In the same sense as IJN Yamato? Does a Yamato - with massive armor rafting - count the same as - say - an Iowa? If not, how do they differ? Just "any armor doubles" is not a good solution - and any good solution probably should be complex.

Maneuverability should depend on things like size in tonnage, waterline length, number of screws, number of rudders - or better still the actual measured turn rate. Thus some ships are notoriously horrible turners, others fantastic - and a fixed formula won't show it. I see no evidence in stock or CHS that any principle was used - it is whatever the copied ship had - sometimes modified by "seat of the pants" - and I confess I did not look up the turn rate for every class (which is not even available) and enter it. It remains a collection of inconsistent data - slightly modified in cases it was obviously wrong. Any official formula - even if it was applied to all classes - would be inconsistent compared to actual turn data ratings. This would take a lot of work to fix - but the big problem is figuring out a formula or rule set to apply to all the cases we have no actual data - combined with the labor of looking up all the actual turn data where it exists - combined with data entry time.

[GaryChildress]

Thanks Cid, "seat of the pants" has been my method for a lot of the fuzzier concepts in the editor. With things like durability I've been using fractional equivalences. Thus if Nagato is 39,250 tons and has a durability of 120, I would take the tonnage of a hypothetical BB and find the fractional equivalent based upon that. However, I've noticed that durability between many ships in the game doesn't seem to work out quite that way. Close, but not quite. So I've been taking the equivalent from the ship closest to the one I'm adding. I guess I'll stick to that method.

[el cid again]

I don't remember it - but there is a published RHS standard - something like 1 point per 400 tons for an AK (and probably 100 tons for a warship) - up to a certain limit. Above that limit the scale "slides" in some way. If the AK is naval crewed, we double it. If it is an AO we quadruple it. If a ship has armor, we multiply by something - and the multiple depends on the armor: 1.25 for very light, 1.50 for 4 inch or so, 1.75 for very heavy kind of thing.

[JWE]

Be careful with durability. The value affects much more than just durability. Besides the simple VP stuff, durability affects repair time (bigger the number, the longer the wait), availability acceleration rates, construction cost (in time & resource points), etc .. all of them hard coded, and (of course) pulling in opposite directions.

Matrix’ durability figures are on (yet another) sliding scale. In the DD à CA region, it’s approximately 250 std tons per point; and note, it’s std displ, not full load, or MC (lt). Navy Light comes close for vessels other than warships, that aren’t commonly described in terms of standard displacements. Above the CA displacement range, it slides from 250 to 350 std tons per point at a generally rectilinear rate.

[el cid again]

Thanks.

It appears it also affects victory poiints.

If Matrix uses the scales described, these are wrong in the sense of damage control theory. Navies universally rate ships - all ships including AKs in navy service - in displacement tons - because that is what really matters. When displacement = 0 a ship sinks. You can estimate the buoyancy left if you know the draft - in your head - for any given hull. You cannot figure out displacement from standard tons. Standard tonnage is a legal term, invented for the Washington Naval Treaty, and relates only to construction (so you get more ships than you would if displacement were used). It is more or less "tons of actual ship, not stuff the shp carrier, like fuel, ammunition, etc). And it is meaningless in terms of durability. We should not use this value - even if Matrix does. Nor should a merchant be rated differently from a warship - except becauwe of structure or damage control features. thus - a warship built to merchant standards - eg a frigate built in a merchant yard is NOT a destroyer escort built to military standards - is rated like a merchant with an auxiliary naval crew - same structure - same DC levels - per unit of displacement.

[JWE]

Sorry it’s taken so long for a full answer Gary, but I been a bit busy with AE stuff.

Fuel isn’t too difficult. Many, many vessels give you bunker capacity; so that’s a no brainer. Since standard tonnage is defined as the displacement of a vessel, ready for sea, but without bunker and reserve feed, the difference will include bunkerage. If you have standard displacement, full load displacement and bunker capacity, just take the difference between std and fl, find what % of that is bunker, do it for several different ship types, and get a good mean-sigma. That should work very well when applied to ships where you can’t get the bunkerage – good enuf for game purposes.

Danger, Will Robinson !! This works for like-to-like. Don’t work when comparing apples (turbines) to oranges (diesels) or pears (reciprocating). So, you gotta do it twice. Technically, you gotta do it across several horsepower bands, but what the hey.

Maneuver is another sliding scale (actually a set of piecewise linear functions). A reasonable facsimile is (Speed-2)/SQRT(2 x LWL), but with an additional SQRT(2) multiplier for “true” waterplane hull forms. Technically, it should be a polynomial function of Sp-1 and Sp-2, and LWL should be functionally related to prismatic and waterplane coefficients, but the formula is in “reasonable agreement” and will work well enough for incorporating modded designs.

Can’t say what’s under the hood in AE, but I did run over 60 different designs on Dr. Rybaltowski’s latest VPP at MIT, and have a very nice set of curves. In the limit, they reduce to a simple set of linear equations, as described above – good enuf for govt work.

[GaryChildress]

Thanks JWE! [:)]

[JWE]

No worries.

I wouldn't worry too much about damage control and I definitely would not take damage control into account for durability stats.. Damage control has nothing to do with durability stats (in code terms). In AE, damage control is predecated on ship type (in turn predecated on whether it is a commissioned vesel, or not) and cares not a whit about durability figures. 4 other aspects of the game code care very much about durability, however, but not in any terms that relate to damage control. This is as it should be.

The majority of algorithms in the code rely on absolute value minimum, random value multiplicative functions. To simply multiply a durability factor by 2, or 3, or 4, will skew the parameters to such an egregious extent that you will eventually get the opposite of what you think. Please don't waste your time.

Anyway. Ciao.

[jwilkerson]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

Anyone know what the formulas are for the following or how these values can be arrived at? I've lost my notes. [:(]

Ship Classes: Durability
Ship Classes: Manuever
Ship Classes: Fuel

Durability is four things as near as I can figure:

(1) VP Base
(2) Resistance to damage ( but this is also highly correlated to displacement )
(3) Production Cost (for IJN)
(4) Safe diving depth (for subs)

Ideally, these would be four factors, not one. But they are one.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: JWE

No worries.

I wouldn't worry too much about damage control and I definitely would not take damage control into account for durability stats.. Damage control has nothing to do with durability stats (in code terms). In AE, damage control is predecated on ship type (in turn predecated on whether it is a commissioned vesel, or not) and cares not a whit about durability figures. 4 other aspects of the game code care very much about durability, however, but not in any terms that relate to damage control. This is as it should be.

The majority of algorithms in the code rely on absolute value minimum, random value multiplicative functions. To simply multiply a durability factor by 2, or 3, or 4, will skew the parameters to such an egregious extent that you will eventually get the opposite of what you think. Please don't waste your time.

Anyway. Ciao.

If durability is not used by code in figuring damage, it is not well concieved - and the factor named "durability" is misnamed (a common problem in WITP - where things may not mean what the name implies or should imply). But the description of how this game system code works must be dead on accurate: it is amazing to me that so few factors are used with such fair approximations - far less than has ever been done by naval game designers in the pre computer age. Nevertheless, since things like cost, repair time, and victory points DO use durability, damage control SHOULD STILL be part of it. I once was given the general instruction "get the data right and we will get the code right." Even if it isn't right yet - it is more likely than not to change - as time passes - so long as there is genuine interest and money to be made in getting things right. Durability IS critically related to things like the number and capacity of pumps - and this is NOT the same for a merchant standard or a naval standard on the very same hull. Neither is the cost nor time to replace/repair what got burned out/damaged. I grant that real sailors live in a wierd world (we don't even use the same language for things like door, bathroom, post or stairway) - but from a nautical perspective it makes no sense to consider apples and oranges "the same." They are indeed different, never mind the hull is essentially identical.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

Anyone know what the formulas are for the following or how these values can be arrived at? I've lost my notes. [:(]

Ship Classes: Durability
Ship Classes: Manuever
Ship Classes: Fuel

Durability is four things as near as I can figure:

(1) VP Base
(2) Resistance to damage ( but this is also highly correlated to displacement )
(3) Production Cost (for IJN)
(4) Safe diving depth (for subs)

Ideally, these would be four factors, not one. But they are one.

What about "time to repair?"

Are you saying that Allied ships have no cost - that no HI points are required to build them - and that naval shipyards and merchant shipyards have no function? Do they expend HI points anyway? We know that repair shipyards work for the Allies. We know that naval and merchant shipyards - and feeding them- matters to Japan. Is there no point in having US shipyard capacity grow - or even exist?

[JWE]

I believe Joe stated that durability directly correlates to damage.

I think we also expressly stated that damage control is a separate algorithm that works on several new factors, as well as some old ones. There are many, many new things in AE.

The caution to Gary about fiddling with durability in order to fiddle with damage control, is valid. In AE it would be not only unavailing, but also misdirective to other portions of the code.

[el cid again]

If durability for two ships, one an auxiliary, the other a merchant, is identical - the caution is wrong - and "tampering" is correct simulation. IF durability is one of the factors involved in damage control, then a ship with inherantly more ability to sustain damage is not identical in durability. There are mainly four ways this differs. [I served on the former Prarie Mariner, renamed USS Francis Marion, when a naval auxiliary; I also was forced to take the Damage Control School after a horrible fire killed 130 pilots on a carrier - we had to watch that fire on film.] The differences are:

more damage control parties

more pumps

more firefighting stations including hoses, foam and related materials

more timbers for rigging repairs

The same ship in the same battle taking the same hits would appear to have more "durability" in most cases. NOT saying so is a technical misunderstanding of what durability should represent in game terms. Now it could be coded in a different way: you might say "an AR on the same hull is twice as likely to put out fires or sustain flooding" - but no one seems to be saying that. The factor is at least 100% more durability - conservatively speaking. Typically a merchant ship can improvise one DC party - an auxiliary of 10,000 tons four - for example. The ratio of DC gear is similar - but 4 times the damage control might only double the durability (hard to say).

[witpqs]

As a third party reading the back and forth it appears that they mean that in the game damage control is handled separately from durability by the code. In other words, durability does not influence damage control. Also that increased durability will allow a vessel to absorb more damage, but will not allow that vessel to repair said damage faster - most importantly this includes flooding and fire damage, not just longer term repairs of system damage.

Maybe it would be better or best to have each vessel have it's own damage control rating, but I'm sure that's out of scope for AE. It sounds like if you want something to control damage better then it needs to be a certain type of vessel (eg CV's better than AK's), and it needs to have good leader and crew ratings.

I think they are also saying that (with respect to damage) durability is understood by the code to be along the lines of 'how much damage will this vessel sustain from this attack', obviously things like armor, penetration, etc. also being factors.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: JWE

I believe Joe stated that durability directly correlates to damage.

I think we also expressly stated that damage control is a separate algorithm that works on several new factors, as well as some old ones. There are many, many new things in AE.

The caution to Gary about fiddling with durability in order to fiddle with damage control, is valid. In AE it would be not only unavailing, but also misdirective to other portions of the code.

This is confusing because what is meant by "damage control" is not defined. IF durability correlates directly to damage, THEN the nature of damage control facilities of a hull DO count - and it has nothing whatever to do with a damage control routine in code. It is a part of the capacity of the ship to be damaged as such. The fact the same words are being used should not confuse you. I am saying that a strait up AK is not able to take the damage the same hull takes when we see it as an APA (the ship I served on for example). Nor can you measure the difference in tonnage, armor, speed or things of that sort - THEY ARE identical. But the DURABILITY is different.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: witpqs

As a third party reading the back and forth it appears that they mean that in the game damage control is handled separately from durability by the code. In other words, durability does not influence damage control. Also that increased durability will allow a vessel to absorb more damage, but will not allow that vessel to repair said damage faster - most importantly this includes flooding and fire damage, not just longer term repairs of system damage.

REPLY: You are on the right track. Yes - that is exactly the point - the ship SHOULD BE able to absorb more damage - and it is NOT related to its ability to control fires or flooding. Code may handle that well or poorly - but it is a different subject. The question was about durability itself - and it should not be identical for a ship of the same tonnage alone. This is a simulation gimmick - it is apparent damage absorbtion that I want - but in fact the same amount of flooding sinks the ship. Since the ship can control this better - it is the same as if it were a bigger ship. This is the same reason tankers are notoriously difficult to sink - they are not just big (usually) - but awfully able to control listing (ships usually are lost when they capsize).

Maybe it would be better or best to have each vessel have it's own damage control rating, but I'm sure that's out of scope for AE. It sounds like if you want something to control damage better then it needs to be a certain type of vessel (eg CV's better than AK's), and it needs to have good leader and crew ratings.

REPLY: Again you are right. I am using the EXISTING concepts rather than introducing new ones. IF we could change code, THEN we would want more factors under soft control.

I think they are also saying that (with respect to damage) durability is understood by the code to be along the lines of 'how much damage will this vessel sustain from this attack', obviously things like armor, penetration, etc. also being factors.

Again right. Armor should matter with respect to shells and bombs anyway. It is very tricky to get armor right - and no one really knows what "right" means either? There are theories - all of which are moot IRL - you get hit in a real place by a real weapon - and only then do you learn if you had "enough" armor properly configured?

[JWE]

Golly … let me see if I can make this clear.

I am talking about a computer game; specifically the AE version of WiTP.

I am addressing a question, regarding aspects of AE scenario design, posed by someone who wishes to enter data into a comma separated value data table so as to incorporate “what if” ships into the computer game in a manner consistent with the requirements of the computer game.

If the computer game executable code does not address a specific data field for calculating a specific functional effect, then fiddling with that data field, in order to affect that function is useless.

As stated, many times above, damage control is handled very differently in AE. If you wish it to be based on a specific comma separated data table value named “durability” on a database editor screen, and the code bases it on multiple other comma separated data table values, guess who wins.

If you just want to talk about your game system, this thread is not appropriate therefor.

If you want to talk about damage control in conceptual terms, this thread is not appropriate therefor; please address the subject in the AE Sub-forum, Naval Thread. Several people with experience in this area will be pleased to review and respond to your questions.

[el cid again]

Again - and as usual in an impass between sincere people - the problem is linguistic and not substantive.

I also am talking in specific game terms - although here I am using WITP I terms as a foundation since I don't play with AE as such. But I to suspect that "durability" means the same thing in AE - since it has not been split into 4 different fields as would be required for it to be different.

All I tried to say is that durability AS USED BY WITP/AE needs to have "damage control" in the hull in the durability value - and this is not really related to "damage control" as a code handles it after a battle requires fighting fires, flooding, etc.

What I mean in saying that is that a ship which otherwise is identical has DIFFERENT durability values

including cost to buy, cost to repair, and amount of damage it can absorb

according to its damage control features/fittings/outfit, etc.

Not technically so, or trivially so, but significantly so - on the order of 100% - and likely more than that so.

Cost actually varies much more than because of damage related things - and I don't think most people have any sense of how expensive a ship like an AR really is? The special machine tools, cranes, etc on the ship make it cost MANY times what the basic ship costs just fitted to carry cargo. My APA had gigantic radio facilities, a hospital, three different CICs (one for the ship, one for an embarked admiral, one for an aircraft control team bigger than either of the others), a countermeasures suite in addition to radars, the largest admiral's quarters ever built anywhere for anyone, plus a vast amount of extra damage control features, including plumbing, bulkheads, watertight doors, pumps, storage brackets for timbers, name it. It probably cost an order of magnitude than the original funding for Prarie Mariner did. So whatever increasing durability does to cost probably is not exaggerated. My concern is "how much does it add to making the ship able to absorb damage?" If you do NOT increase it for an auxiliary, you make auxiliaries far too easy to sink.

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

Again - and as usual in an impass between sincere people - the problem is linguistic and not substantive.

I also am talking in specific game terms - although here I am using WITP I terms as a foundation since I don't play with AE as such. But I to suspect that "durability" means the same thing in AE - since it has not been split into 4 different fields as would be required for it to be different.

I too, am speaking substantively, and I’m here to tell you that Durability does not mean the same thing in AE.

All I tried to say is that durability AS USED BY WITP/AE needs to have "damage control" in the hull in the durability value - and this is not really related to "damage control" as a code handles it after a battle requires fighting fires, flooding, etc.

You do not understand how durability, or damage control, is developed in AE.

What I mean in saying that is that a ship which otherwise is identical has DIFFERENT durability values

It does not in AE. If you are referring to damage control, it may well have substantially different velocities, but it will not have a different presentation value to a torp, for example.

including cost to buy, cost to repair, and amount of damage it can absorb

And that’s exactly why we chose to minimize the simplistic ‘durability’ number, and add several new data vectors to the code.