Big guns or not big guns ?

[Jefgte]

As we can see in the last topics on French & Spain Navy , The big guns like 340-370-420 or similar have realy a poor ROF - 8mm-12mn-15mn-

This is not seriously ROF- nearly enable to hit a target in a battle or just by a lucky hit.

I 'm not sure that I instal that "Big Slow Gun" on French BBs...?


Jef

[Carthaginian]

Acadia will use some big guns in the 13.4" range initially- but they will likely be on ships that are detailed for more 'static defense' jobs... more floating forts than ships of the line.

Most ships at sea will concentrate on the 10.8" guns as primary weapons.

[snip]

I have different plans, which results from the way I imvision the New Russian Navy being structured. Biggest guns at the start will be no larger then 12", and that would only be on one class of coastal monitor (admittedly a very large one). Biggest guns on my Armored Frigates will be no greater then 9".

[Logi]

The big gun low rates of fire were attributed to the muzzle-loading aspect of the guns, in addition to the requirement of zero elevation to reload. It is easy to see why muzzle-loading guns drop dramatically in rate of fire under battle conditions. The breech-loading guns had similar RoFs - excluding the under 8" large secondaries.

For example:

NavWeaps lists the following RoFs for the following Breechloader guns, all created from 1880-1886.

16.25/30 Mark I ---- 0.29-0.33 rpm
10"/32 Mark I-IV --- 0.5 rpm
9.2"/26 Mark I-II --- 1 rpm

Nothing of the 8 minute per round RoF sort. That was reserved only for muzzle-loading guns.

[Tanthalas]

Logi for our startup ships we are almost all stuck with Muzzle loading guns for the Main guns atleast.

the Guns of Deseret will be however

11/13.5 ML
11/35 BL
10/14.5 ML
10/35 BL

that should get me up to the dreadnaught era (or close to it atleast)

[Logi]

Ofc you are right Tan. However, by 1880 the British navy had started to switch muzzle-loading guns with breech-loading guns (although not all guns BL). For that matter, in my case, the only design that used "large" guns before breech-loaders was the Gloria 1877 design with a 12"/20 gun. - Admittedly I did not bother to change the gun's classification from the default Breech-Loader since it was not official and it didn't contribute anything solid to the design weight/strength.

The Aragon used a historic 13.5"/30 gun that the British created as their first successful breech-loader gun. The Lisbon was based on a downgrade from the historic 16.25/30 gun. Ofc, the question is- do you need the large guns?

For Iberia - IMO there is really nowhere to go but build a navy. Since Iberia as a location has only one land neighbor in a defensive location - there is no heavy need for offensive ships like those of cruisers. Therefore, Iberia would build a small battle-fleet and a few cruisers as it's navy. Enough for defensive operations, yet not overwhelming costly (at one predread per year after I shave weight - 7~8% of a starting economy's military budget). Ofc things might get a bit tight with other things - but we can't say until we get a complete set of the rules - if it's too difficult, plans can change ;)

[Nobody]

Someone posted a link to an old article which described how technology evolved and lead to the Dreadnoughts not that long ago.

My summery from that for our period would be, that big guns were almost useless(low rof, no fire control), but absolutely necessary to penetrate the armor these ships carried. A ship with no big guns would have nothing to harm or fend off an equally sized opponent, too many would take up space better used for other things.