Nebakenezzer posted:

Are you sticking to the Second World war, or are you going modern? There's a *large* break in technology between those two eras. Especially as Armor becomes obsolete, replaced with active defense systems and reengineering so ships could take a missile hit and not be impeded.

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Just throwing out random ideas:

if these ships involce battleships, there's an extremely good and nerdy old article out there that tries to answer "what WW2 battleship would win in a fight with another WW2 battleship." Might be a good source as it tries to assign numeric values to attributes like fire control and damage control.

http://www.combinedfleet.com/baddest.htm

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Another *major* change post world war 2 is that ship types get completely revised. The world war 2 era had a lot of bespoke classes for functions, (IE light vs. heavy cruisers, battlecrusiers vs. battleships, destroyer escorts vs. destroyers vs. corvettes) and this collapses into a few broad classes.

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One thing from the era that article mentions specificlly is that all battleships save American ones had an armored 'citidel' in their design; the best quality armor surrounding the most important systems. Only America was rich enough to build the entire ship out of this high quality but very expensive armor.

Something in modern ships to consider is if their superstructures (as opposed to their hulls) are made out of steel vs. aluminum.

Submarines similarly go through a complete revolution post war as nuclear power and nuclear weapons (not to mention submarines designed to stay underwater all the time) completely revise the type.

Oh, and I did a series of posts on the Soviet Kirov class battlecruisers a few years ago, might give you some ideas.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

That said, how the tech behaves in-game and how it was actually used historically are going to be drastically different. Like, armor will never go obsolete because the combat assumes you're going to get hit repeatedly during missions.

TK-42-1 posted:

modern peer warfare seems boring as hell. like there’s not a lot of room between ok and completely hosed.

FrangibleCover posted:

The reason armour went obsolete is not the assumption that one will never be hit, but that one will be hit so hard that no feasible amount of armour will make the blindest bit of difference.

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- There's lots of stuff to be done with the armour scheme and different places you can put armour, the two most important schemes for your purposes being Turtleback (German heavy ships and pre-Jutland ships of all nations) and All-or-Nothing (post-Jutland ships). There's plenty more nuance to it than that and I'm not really the guy to talk about it.

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- You're going to really struggle to get useful stats for main battery guns above about 20" size, but I'd fill out the odd-numbered calibres between 6" and 16" size since all saw some description of service in WW2 (7.5" on Hawkins, 9.2" in land batteries, 11" on the Twins and the Deutschlands, 13" on the Dunkerques and 15" on most British battleships, Bismarck and Tirpitz and the Richelieus).
- Quad turrets were fitted with 13", 14" and 15" guns historically and frankly I don't see any reason not to allow them across the board. They let you get a lot of gun on not a lot of hull but they were all desperately finicky.

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- Most ships with torpedo tubes didn't carry any reloads at all, so you'll have to purchase and find space for reloads before you buy an upgrade to make the reloading faster. Mind you, in an arcadey game reloading torps is about the first gameplay concession I'd make. It's no fun blowing your load and going home if you miss.

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- Remember that the most important sort of missile you're going to have is the anti-ship missile, it's what necessitates the CIWS and pushes naval combat ranges out beyond visual range even without aircraft carriers. It also makes the carrier more deadly, yet more vulnerable, as each aircraft now has a significantly better chance of sinking a ship and is almost guaranteed to get home okay. These missiles can take many forms, between Penguin-style low end ones:

Which are small and can be fitted to aircraft, helicopters or tiny missile boats, and huge carrier killers like the P-700 Granit:

Which can only be fired from a few large vessels and carry either an explosive charge that weighs twice as much as an entire Penguin or a nuclear weapon that can annihilate a ship and anything stupid enough to be near it.

Missile combat is honestly a whole other ballgame and I would advise you to put a cutoff in your game before you get to it, because it just won't work with WW2 style systems.

TK-42-1 posted:

modern peer warfare seems boring as hell. like there’s not a lot of room between ok and completely hosed.

TK-42-1 posted:

modern peer warfare seems boring as hell. like there’s not a lot of room between ok and completely hosed.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

None of the guns in-game will be "desperately finicky"; they'll all work exactly as advertised. I suppose I could ding the multi-gun turrets on their accuracy or firing rate a bit, but I'm not sure they need a downside beyond being heavier. That's a question for playtesting.

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I think you could make a fun game about modern naval warfare, but it'd be a very different kind of game from the one I'm making. You'd almost certainly have to do it at the strategic layer, controlling entire fleets plus aircraft, satellites, and ground-based radar systems. At the single-ship scale, it'd be a long cat-and-mouse game followed by one or both ships dying in a single shot.

Nenonen posted:

Such is the history of naval warfare: it used to be fun and games, but then some dick came up with some novel ideas

like when someone invented the ram

fast forward, the Greek fire

or put a gun onboard

or fit a loving deck, nay, several decks with guns

and then they come up with more powerful guns and shells

But hey, someone comes up with an idea of making a ship of steel! Hooray! Except that steel ships sink like rock when pierced...

Nebakenezzer posted:

Torpedoes are the great equalizer: potentially giant-killers (hence when destroyers were first invented, they were called torpedo boat destroyers) but also potentially deadly to the ship using them if your damage control isn't so good. (The Japanese had the best torpedoes in World War 2, nicknamed in the west the Long Lance. They had so much explosive they sometimes ripped away whole sections of warships below the waterline, or caused a ship to sink so fast it was like it had been vaporized. On the extreme other hand, they used pure oxygen as propellant, so if the torpedo magazine took a hit, it could destroy the entire ship in one big explosion.

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I think if you keep asking people ITT about stuff we will subtly (or not remotely subtly) try and steer you down the route of "expressing historical truths via game mechanics.*" Me, I think exploring the armor/guided munition divide would be interesting, since it explains quite well why battleships vanished. Also keeping older ships around might produce some oddballs, like the 1980s Iowa class battleships. Bismark 1983 would be wild, as would the HMS Prince of Wales in Falklands kit

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*Ask us how partially thanks to pen and paper/computer games, specifically their simulation of some aspects (like armor depth and gun power) and the neglect of others (breakdowns and servicing requirements) lead to a weirdly distorted pop culture view as to who's tanks were better.

Cythereal posted:

The Coast Guard also aren't part of the Department of Defense anymore.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

OK. How did pen & paper / computer games lead to a distorted view of whose tanks were better?

Nebakenezzer posted:

I read that for a second as 'F-4 Phantom II' and then got irrationally angry at USN aircraft nomenclature

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

This game is...not really going to be historically accurate. At bare minimum, the player is tooling around the world with a combination floating dry dock / manufactory in tow, which lets them completely replace their ship between missions. And they'll be fighting dozens of enemy ships singlehandedly each mission. But where I really want to send things off the rails is with the boss fights -- I have all kinds of plans for ridiculous gigantic superweapons like flying battleships, submersible aircraft carriers, a colossal artillery piece that uses a volcano as its gun bore, etc.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

But where I really want to send things off the rails is with the boss fights -- I have all kinds of plans for ridiculous gigantic superweapons like flying battleships, submersible aircraft carriers, a colossal artillery piece that uses a volcano as its gun bore, etc.

Hobo on Fire posted:

...So basically, you're remaking Warship Gunner 2, but minus the goofy endgame energy weapons.

That would actually be pretty awesome.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Oh. Oh!

I'm now picturing some sort of giant robot anime but with battleships

In that case I also wrote a thing on the Ratte

Also, realtalk, in the 1950s the Iowa class got atomic shells

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Torpedoes are something I'm a bit torn on. It's great to have destroyers have weapons that can let them sink bigger ships; it means I can throw those bigger ships at the player when they're still in a destroyer. I don't think I want to do "your munitions got hit so your ship exploded" as a game mechanic though, mostly because it's not really something the player can make meaningful decisions on. "If you install this weapon there's a small chance your ship will explode" doesn't strike me as a fun game mechanic. However, if I don't have that kind of counterbalance to them, then why wouldn't a player make a battleship that's all torpedoes, all the time? Especially once long-range guided torpedoes become available. Maybe it's not a problem though.

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Fun concepts in ship design: The Torpedo Battleship

The US laid down a whole bunch of dreadnoughts that were on the whole pretty similar in concept. Big armor, big guns, and a low speed. This is not about them. This is about an idea that got seriously considered and wargamed as a supplement to them.

The US had a bit of a love-hate relationship with torpedoes on large ships, putting them on and then taking the above water tubes off their early battleships following the Spanish-American War. However torpedoes kept getting better and by late 1903 the General board was recommending them on every armored vessel of the Navy under construction, one or preferably two as they started proving decisive in war games at ranges of 3,000 yards or even more.

But if one was good, why not more? In 1903, that was answered by advances in fire control taking gunnery out to considerably longer ranges. In 1907 a Lieutenant Commander Schofield proposed a 23 knot ship that used weight that would otherwise go to guns to become essentially proof to shellfire, above a 16 21-inch torpedo tubes, with only 12 5 inch guns to cover from torpedo ships. A torpedo hit was reasoned to probably sink and certainly cripple its target, and such a ship would be able to launch an entire school of fish at once. While battleships would be firing at longer ranges and unlikely to be able to fire their torpedoes and lighter torpedo ships could be held at bay, such a ship could fire torpedoes into an 18-knot fleet with ease, with armor to deal with the shellfire that represented the only major threat. Gaming showed that a fleet with two such ships could always attack an enemy line with torpedoes.

So the idea went on to the main games, where the ships were given a charitable rating of equivalence in underwater resistance to damage (charitable in that a university system of torpedo rooms like that would've meant the TDS would be a torpedo detonation syndrome rather than a torpedo defense system, but this wasn't realized until years later, when it led to the removal of submerged torpedo tubes). The ship was given a 50% greater life than a usual battleship, since it would still be vulnerable to conning tower and smoke pipe hits even if it wasn't actually sunk. In games with such ships replacing battleships 1-1, one such ship could never succeed but two nearly always resulted in victory. There were other unconventional ships being touted however, and the battlecruiser as represented by HMS Invincible and a more heavily armored example the Naval War College had devised in 1904 offered a serious problem, since the design depended on a surfeit of speed. The Invincible was already faster by two knots, and could carry a significant torpedo load as well as a battery superior to any battleship except the Dreadnought. By the time a reworked torpedo battleship was submitted, gunnery had gained ground yet again, and an enemy fleet with battlecruisers was able to wipe them out before they entered torpedo range. Further attempts to gain sufficient speed led towards unsustainable sacrifices. Late drafts could hit 31 knots, with four 14 inch guns and a very large number of 6 inch guns, with a protected cruiser armor scheme, and it took mounting all four guns in a single thin turret to get a belt. It just wasn't going to work.

However, the torpedo was still considered very strongly as a battleship weapon even in 1914, when the General Board wanted four tubes a side, and when C&R started screeching about how the torpedo bulkheads would be compromised and structural bulkheads near No. 1 turret would have to be cut, they accepted a cut of half a knot. Thankfully war experience showed soon that it turned out that firing the things at speeds over 16 knots was pretty much impossible, damage showed they were a weakness, and in the end they were omitted. In 1921 the above water tube was set to make a comeback with the South Dakota class (not that one, the one that got canceled by treaty), but by the end of the treaty era the battleship torpedo tube was not in the US' design ideas.

The Lone Badger posted:

I thought you could only fit a tiny payload into the 16" shells because of the thickness of the steel.

The Lone Badger posted:

I thought you could only fit a tiny payload into the 16" shells because of the thickness of the steel.

Cythereal posted:

Video games, as a rule, showcase tanks as being about two, sometimes three things: firepower, armor, and sometimes speed. This is a big part of the wehraboo worship of the Tiger and Panther families, and why tanks like the Sherman are often pooh-poohed.

Anyone who knows some actual military history about tanks, though, knows that there's a lot more to what makes a good tank than the size of their cannon and how thick their armor is. Things like reliability, fuel mileage, off-road mobility, optics, ergonomics for the crew, etc. These things just don't come up in video games, but they were extremely important in real life, and unsurprisingly they're things that, say, the Sherman and T-34 excelled at.

Video games tend to put nerds in a mentality of two tanks head to head in an open field shooting each other in a vacuum, when that scenario basically never happened in real life.

GotLag posted:

xthetenth posted:

So the US did actually consider this, but gunnery kept getting longer ranged, and it never was able to contend with battlecruisers.

Here's one of my ship design posts:


Link to more at the bottom if you have archives: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3731563&userid=194809&perpage=40&pagenumber=2#post464774341


Yes. AP shells have a very small payload, but if it's punched through the sort of armor that it takes a 16" shell to get to, it's in a small place with a lot of valuable things.

GotLag posted:

GotLag posted:

GotLag posted:

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

The Ratte would fit right in if it weren't for the fact that it doesn't float. A superweapon that's a gigantic tank with floaties would be pretty funny though.

Chamale posted:

For an example of a design flaw that doesn't translate into gameplay, look at the Panther tank. It was a 45-tonne tank with a drivetrain designed for a 30-tonne tank, which meant it was ridiculously vulnerable to breaking down. It broke if the tank made a sharp turn on rough terrain, it broke if the driver switched gears while going downhill, it broke if the tank went 100 kilometres without being checked by a mechanic. But in a video game that doesn't simulate that, the Panther's heavy armour and gun make it an objectively superior tank even though its weight was the thing making it unreliable .

bewbies posted:

crosspost from the baseball thread:

here is a cool video of dudes shooting arrows at armor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE

200 lbs bow, jesus christ

Squalid posted:

I watched this video and its pretty cool. I've followed the Todd's Workshop channel for a bit and it always posts good content.

Things that surprised me were how easily the arrow pierced both chain mail and a padded jack. Someone just wearing that equipment would clearly be at major risk to arrows.

Also noteworthy were how much force arrows retained after striking a chest piece and glancing off. Thinking about how bows were used in the medieval period I knew they were usually used in direct fire and shots into the face or other gaps in the armor were the primary way they killed or injured, however I always had a bit of a hard time believing it was possible to reliably hit such small targets in actual combat environments. However this video makes it clear you didn't have to be that precise. It's enough to aim at the center of mass. Even if you hit an impenetrable piece of armor there's a good possibility the arrow will deflect into something more vulnerable. It's also cool to see how the armor was obviously designed with this vulnerability in mind and incorporated clear countermeasures to deflect shots away from the body.

Squalid posted:

on the subject of historic guns how on earth do you bore the barrel on a big bronze or cast iron gun in the 18th or 17th or 16th century? On a big naval gun I assume you have to remove several kilograms of material, like what kind of tool do you even do that with? They must have used wind or water mills or maybe mules to drive the drills, I can't imagine they had some poor sap manually doing all the labor. . .

GotLag posted: