RE: dreadnought thrust was Re: Fighters and Hangers

I encountered similar problems when doing the conversion of FT I to WW2
Naval - for instance an Iowa class battleship had 9 Class A (Beam 3)
guns mounted in three turrets, twenty Class C (Beam 1) mounted on the
sides, 10 PDS and 4 ADS.  Belt armor was represented by shields, but
ignored if fire came from the front/rear arc or from long range
(plunging fire). Hull boxes was based on displacement, roughly 1 box per
1,000 tons with some fudge factor based on anecdotal evidence of
strength of design.

Interesting enough, large American carriers (Essex Class) were serious
ship killers with 10 stands of planes (representing 120 planes)  With
limited launch and recover facilities (one stand per turn, flight deck
only allowed to launch or land, not both in the same turn) it would take
5-6 turns for a strike to form then a large cloud of planes would
descend on some poor hapless target and pretty much annihilate it. (18
torpedo shots can ruin a battleship's day) then take another 10-12 turns
to land, re-arm and launch again.  The main concern was the opposing
fleet's aircraft attacking while your own planes were down for
re-arming.

There was a problem with Battleships and heavy cruisers annilhating
destroyers at long ranges, which historically didn't happen much. 
Another issue is that in real life, salvoes are very much hit or miss,
with rarely anything like a "grazing" shot.  Getting slammed with 1,600
lbs of armor-piercing steel is going to hurt, but a near miss is only
going to get you wet, so in reality there should be a "to hit" roll then
a damage roll.

Submarines were ok with a referee but oddly unsatisfactorily slow and
unpredictable, a good salvo of 6 torpedoes into a key ship could change
a battle in an instant, but getting the submarine into the correct
position was a very difficult job.

--Binhan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: agoodall@att.net [mailto:agoodall@att.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 7:36 AM
> To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
> Subject: Re: dreadnought thrust was Re: Fighters and Hangers
> 
> 
> Jared wrote:
> 
> > I assume that 5" is a typo and you mean the 15".
> 
> Yes, that was a typo.
> 
> > All of the Jane's that I have list shell weight and muzzle velocity
> > only, not max range.
> 
> Warships International had an issue where they discussed gun 
> trials between the Russo-Japanese War and the First World 
> War. I can't remember if they discussed maximum range, but 
> they did talk about the accuracy (in terms of hit 
> probability) at several ranges, giving a very good idea of 
> the maximum effective range.
> 
> I have several source books for the Russo-Japanese War, and 
> so I know the maximum range used for engaging, which is more 
> realistic to model than theoretical maximum range anyway.
> 
> > As for how the ranges convert to FT, I figure that the engagement
> > ranges were "effective range", while the list values were "maximum
> > range".  I feel that this translates into FT as effective 
> range being
> > the 3rd range  band for K-guns, as this is where you get 
> 50% hits (4+
> > on d6),and one FT "shot" can represent the firing of several shells,
> > rather than playing out each round.  It's all up to your individual
> > tastes
> 
> I took a different tack. I found information on the number of 
> minutes of sustained fire that was required to sink a ship, 
> based on trials done before the Russo-Japanese War. The war 
> came out with similar statistics. The average time was 50 
> minutes, but that was from the fire of one battleship. Using 
> this as a gauge, I came up with a method of calculating hull 
> boxes based on average chance to hit. Surprisingly, the 
> result was fairly accurate. 
> 
> One problem I have is that beams are linear in the number of 
> dice added, while real life guns are non-linear in accuracy. 
> I tried to fix this, but eventually just abandoned the whole 
> _Full Steam_ idea. I've since gone back to it and feel that 
> while it's not 100% accurate, it's fun and simple. This is 
> why I'm looking at it again.
>  
> Each shot does, indeed, represent more than one actual shot. 
> In fact, each shot represents firing from one turret. This is 
> another problem. I've had to double up the guns on the ships. 
> It works for 12" guns, which were mounted two to a turret, 
> but it means that smaller guns are rounded up. I'd prefer to 
> have one gun on the actual ship represent one gun on the ship 
> sheet, but that means that a 12" turret (two guns) would 
> require 12 dice to roll at close range, and 24 dice at long 
> range. Add in, say, the five 6" guns on the Fuji at close 
> range and you're rolling 39 dice! That was way too excessive. 
> Chopping them down by half that makes the game faster to 
> play, though some realism is stripped out.
> 
> I'm still working on this as it's the one area of the rules 
> I'm really not crazy about.
> 
> > I used PDS for small rapid fire like 20mm Oerlikon and 40mm Bofors.
> 
> That's sort of what I did with the anti-torpedo boat guns.
> 
> > This was after FB2 was out, and I was disappointed with the 
> absence of
> > KV integral armor, as I had been looking forward to it.
> 
> I looked up my copy of MT (I never did play KV before FB2). 
> Integral armour is just screens that can't be taken out by a 
> threshold check. Funny enough, this is _exactly_ what I came 
> up with to represent armour in _Full Steam_.
>  
> > The way we treat it is that each level of IA uses 5% of the 
> ship's MASS
> > per level, with a minimum of 4 MASS per level, and costs 4 pts per
> > MASS.  If you feel this is too cheap, you can always raise 
> the minimum
> > to 5 MASS per level and the cost to 5 pts per MASS. 
> 
> I didn't bother coming up with a point or mass system. 
> Instead I worked out a way of creating a ship based on 
> historical data. Since it's a historical game, I don't have 
> to worry about coming up with a ship design system.
> 
> > So unlike MT armor, it can be lost.
> 
> That's an interesting idea, though not realistic for the 
> Russo-Japanese War period. McCulley's report shows the 
> location where shots hit several of the Russian ships. At no 
> time did a shot hit the same location twice, so the idea of 
> degrading armour just doesn't fit this era.
> 
> > PS The K-gun & IA conversion was never ment to represent 
> real world wet
> > navies, just "inspired by" -type spaceships. 
> 
> Those are some interesting ideas, though.
> 
> --
> Allan Goodall 	     agoodall@att.net
> http://www.hyperbear.com   agoodall@hyperbear.com
>