Re:Springsharp Misc Weight

[Kaiser Kirk]

Some tweeks and full Misc Weight layout for the Tullius Leofric. Since working the belt up to a proper capital thickness, I've bounced between Large Armored Cruiser, Battlecruiser, Fast Battleship, and now Heavy Armored Cruiser.

Tullius Leofric, Imperial Roman Republic Heavy Armored Cruiser laid down 1916

Misc Weight Distribution
-Below Water (1700t)
--1565t Electric Drives
--100t Additional Pumps
--20t Additional Damage Control Equipment
--15t Construction Reserve
-Above Water (150t)
--40t Improved Officer Accommodations
--40t Improved Crew Accommodations
--20t Additional Damage Control Equipment
--20t Enhanced Ventilation and Crew Comfort
--20t Short-Range Wireless (x2)
--10t Construction Reserve
-On Deck (615t)
--290t 1912 Fire Control
--90t Flag Facilities
--40t Admiralty Accommodations
--50t Long Range Wireless (x2)
--20t Enhanced Ventilation and Crew Comfort
--40t Night Fighting Equipment
--50t Additional Damage Control Equipment
--25t Huelsmeyre Equipment
--10t Construction Reserve
-Above Deck (50t)
--20t Additional Optical Spotting Equipment
--15t Night Fighting Equipment
--15t Improved Signaling Equipment

Turrets arranged A(B)[SS]Q[ss] with B superfiring A. Secondaries are grouped between B and Q (Side Fore Deck), or aft of Q (Side Aft Deck)

Cruise Speeds/SpringSharp Range/True Range (Electric Drive bonus)
10knts/17000nm/21250nm
14knts/8000nm/10000nm
20knts/3436nm/4295nm
25knts/1201mn/1501nm
30knts/663nm/828nm

Time at Top Speed: 27.6 Hours
Fastest Speed From Brest to Havana (3943nm):18.9knts for 208.6h transit

Love the speed/range  breakdowns, saves me creating a SS hull to find out if it comes up.

So lets talk "Expectations" vs. "Flavor"

IF I wind up moderating another battle, and it involves these ships,
things like pumps/damage control, I can include in the damage control checks to see how long a damaged system stays off line, reduce the flooding(floatation damage),
and I'll be looking at both the 25t metric and % of Light Disp.  A single 5gal/min pump would not have saved Titanic....

But the rest...how are you envisioning these miscellaneous weights being evaluated and accounted for in battles,
or are they flavor?


There's night fighting gear of 55 tons spread over 2 stations.... um...
So searchlight towers x 2?
No, split
1 tower at 25tons...and a 15 ton spare + 15 tons.... really big binoculars?   The IJN had some of those, I doubt they came out to 15t.
Ultimately it's tied to the night fighting tech, which starting in 1912(?) is mostly Starshell.

There's 'Additional Optical Spotting Equipment'
So- really big binoculars, ...like the ones the you just paid for in night fighting?
or is that a backup rangefinder, in which case how am I to decide how big it is..or how many?

and 'Improved Signaling Equipment'
...so the last is a ....reserve medium range radio?  A better way to run out signal flags? An automated system to coordinate signal lamps and flags?
I mean you already have duplicated short range wireless, x2...giving the ship 3 sets? Plus the 2 LR ?

We do want to avoid the "Gotcha" scenario of 'I know more about naval systems, so I included this widget to give me an advantage', so most is governed by the tech you have, or do not have.
BUT, I think there should be room for miscellaneous weight to be taken into account in combat , and I try to do so. 
Problem is flooding and you have bonus equipment - ok, let's up the Damage control rolls or reduce the flotation damage a little or modify a critical, etc. 

But there's a bunch of stuff here, and I'm curious as to what your expectations are for it?

[snip]

With how big the Large Armored Cruiser Fast Battleship designs are trending, I figured it was time to take a look at something slightly more manageable more geared to counter-raider rather than having counter-raider capabilities while still being a line of battle ship. Its a few years out as its missing basically every tech piece about it, but I wanted to fiddle with the concept.

Timere, Imperial Roman Armored Cruiser laid down 1919

Actually +4 year ships start entering that hard to evaluate realm.
An entire generation of cruisers can enter service in that time period.
but it illustrates the difficulties with this 'mid' role.
The 235mm gun is a reasonable size, able to punch holes in most protected cruisers at current battle ranges and a bit beyond.
It's fast enough to catch all but the most recent cruisers, but at 20,000 tons a bit expensive.

I would say the 20mm torpedo bulkhead is probably not fully adequate against a same-era full torpedo.

I'm a little surprised it's not all - guns forward as a hunter.
Also, if she's chasing something in bad weather, you likely don't want her taking green over the bow, so a little height there might help.

Ya, Timere was mostly done as a conceptual test since the slot I have to develop the 235L50 used is in 1916-17. Im sure by 1919 the dynamic of what she is ment to hunt will have firmed up and then things like armament and armor layout can be fiddled.

So lets talk "Expectations" vs. "Flavor"
...
But the rest...how are you envisioning these miscellaneous weights being evaluated and accounted for in battles,
or are they flavor?

Some of these are flavor elements, such as the improved crew comfort items. I'll omit night fighting for now as it seems we may need a broader discussion about some Yes/No checks on that front. I'll note that my plan has me with Starshell by the time this design would complete, so my allocation did take that into account.

Additional Optical Spotting Equipment: Yes, this is basically intended to be more binoculars and stations for seeing things. My expectation would be that it helps in the initial acquisition of an object, resulting in a reduction in failiors that an object remains unspotted, not for Fire Control.

Improved Signaling Equipment: Signal flags and such. My expectation would be that it reduces the likelyhood of misunderstood or incorrect orders when ship-to-ship communication is necessary.

[Kaiser Kirk]

First and foremost - this is meant for opportune and short-frame discussion of these matters,
and establishing what folks want.
If it goes more than a handful of posts, I will split it off separate so we don't derail Roman Ships.

I certainly have some flavor elements on my vessels.
The 'raiders' have Brigs...not because the effect combat values, but as a clear intent the Parthians are expecting to provide secure accommodations for prisoners taken in commerce raiding.

As a matter of 'fairness', my operation presumption is that both the designers and commanders cover all reasonable bases.

In combat  : This unfortunately removes some of the element of "luck" or "fortune" from warfare, as many victories depended on the poor choices of the defeated.   I've had some thoughts on working around this, and you and I discussed and dropped one. 

In ship design : This assumes "Hull, fittings & equipment: 1,019 tons, 28.3 %"  covers the fittings needed for the vessel to do her job. The larger the vessel the more likely she automatically has redundancies.  Some can be signaled in the SS with things like an Aux Con tower... if there's armor, you apparently have one, even if its a small cruiser.

Things like admiral bridges probably need to be specified .
Additional signalling is probably the existence of an Aux con.

The place I've made visibility rolls so far is when nighttime (I think in weather too), to see at what point the observer notices  the object. }

For night fighting, I've generally figured it's built into the ship.
I presume the night fighting tech progression  to mean that night fighting originally is formations, and tactics tied to red illumination, coded running lights, signal rockets, semaphore lanterns and large diameter binoculars which gather light- as standard fittings, as you gain tech levels, it adds searchlights (but not searchlight towers), and starshell lockers, etc.  Beyond that it's weather and moon - once eyes adjust a full moon is fairly bright.

Where I think I've erred the most is not considering the roar of 30-odd aviation engines strapped to the back of MTB flotillas vs. ship engines and noises.....but I really don't know where to start evaluating that.

While the Brits mounted 75mm HA guns specifically to fire starshell, that falls under the "I know the ship systems so I have a special widget" bit I do not demand, and so long as you have a gun that fires UP (Deck/AA),
then I'll presume you can get the star shell out to 12000m.

For daytime optics, the limiting factor tends....distance to horizon.
Which works out to be YOUR mast height vs. THEIR hull size.  And since YOUR mast height tends to tied to your ship size and how long a weighted lever arm waving above your hull you want.  This translates to a very rough chart in SK5, or sometimes I'll work the math.  In the long run, I'd like to make my own math-based chart because our long ships with high freeboards make bigger (visual) targets than I think presumed in SK5.

[TacCovert4]

IF I wind up moderating another battle, and it involves these ships,
things like pumps/damage control, I can include in the damage control checks to see how long a damaged system stays off line, reduce the flooding(floatation damage),
and I'll be looking at both the 25t metric and % of Light Disp.  A single 5gal/min pump would not have saved Titanic....

My rough metric for the 'additional pumps' or 'additional firefighting' or 'additional DC' is roughly thus:

5t - 1 x High flow pump (ship's power) - 1 x additional firefighting hose and pump and breathers (eventually) and storage locker - 1 x portable petrol pump and a locker for it and a small DC crew's worth of hole-patching equipment.

So 25t of additional pumps would roughly equal out to 5 additional pumps above the ship's 'normal', spread out in the hull. Something that might take a ship that could usually eat a pair of torpedoes on the TDS and let her eat the pair plus a few below-waterline shell hits before flooding starts seriously becoming an issue.

[Kaiser Kirk]

Interesting,

I would exclude the torpedo hit concept.  Having a 10x 20 hole in the side of your ship, means a wall of water is entering every second, and pumps are not moving it out.
Those sections are contained by your bulkheads and the list corrected by counter flooding.

Shell hits can cause smaller, but still fairly large holes, may or may not fall in that category. Leaks past a torpedo bulkhead, shell splinters, fall under that category for sure.
Ships have their belts dislodged, seams sprung, splinter holes made, "battering damage" - and are equipped to pump those out until the Damage Control parties can stop them.

The issue I am observing is :
Take the default South Dakota with Springsharp.
We know they had pumps.
Max draft 36feet.  Which is a long lift with a pump.
Cited as:   Hull, fittings & equipment: 15,036 tons, 34.8 %

They've invested 15,000 tons on various things which would include their pumps.
Presumably the naval designers felt they had included "enough".
and that adding 25t, or 0.16%  - a trivial investment - but more in pumps was not needed.

Even the smaller default Algereie : Hull, fittings & equipment: 4,394 tons, 39.6 %
so 25t of pumps are 0.57 % more ...still a trivial investment.

If it was a trivial amount of weight, and had a real beneficial effect, I would expect them to "spend" that trivial weight.

So with pumps, I rather think the naval architects would provide enough.
I think it would take a whole lot more pumps, likely enough tonnage to ensure some in each subdivision
to make much additional difference, and then it would depend on the size of the hole and level of flooding,
which is hard to evaluate.

Which gets back to the core issue - right now, I'm doing a mixture of judgement and Damage control roll modification.
That's the fairest approach I have
But what do the player(s) expect / want and is this the right way to get there.

[The Rock Doctor]

Realistically, I'd want to see a list of "___% of displacement dedicated to ___ function has ___ mechanical effect in gaming."

If my "25 t:  Night-fighting doodads" has no mechanical effect in wargame resolution, I'll re-allocate those tonnes to something else or just not have as much miscellaneous weight.

But yes, it's fine to have some weight for flavor or to address a couple of specific issues, but allocate a few tens of tonnes for eight or twelve different reasons each just gets to be overkill.

[snip]

Please forgive any incoherence, its early and I'm under caffeinated.

My expectation with adding tonnage for things like additional pumps or damage control equipment is basically what has been happening; a modification to roles regarding the use of the equipment in question.

I agree that there is already a baseline for having a "default" amount of pumps under Hull, fittings & equipment and from our standpoint its a very reasonable assumption that this represents the "minimum viable" amount of pumps/DC equipment.

I also agree that having to get into how many gal/min of pump capacity that a given ship has is far to in the weeds for our purposes.

In general, when I'm assigning Misc Weight to something that is reasonably assumed to be counted for under the Hull, fittings & equipment header is that all other things equal, the ship with the assigned weight will preform better on average than a ship without it.

I think Rocky has a good point as well in that for the sake of a better shared expectation, something that may be in order is a chart of what the effect would be. I can see ether a % based system as proposed, or having enough tonnage to clear a Yes/No check. I'd be more on the side of effectiveness over a Yes/No check in most cases, but understand that Yes/No is a lot easier to track.

[snip]

Since it came up again in the Wilno ship thread, a bump of our previous discussion on Misc weights.

[The Rock Doctor]

I respect the idea that we should come up with an idea together, but there is the challenge that I don't know the mechanics of the gaming system at all.

Maybe let's start by listing out how miscellaneous weight gets used, and what rolls it might influence:

1.  Improved Damage Control
-What is it:  Pumps, fire mains, and extra generators to decrease flooding/listing and put out fires.  Basically a really thorough plumbing system to deal with immediate threats to the ship's existence.
-What is it not:  Repair of broken hardware like guns or radar antenna.  The ship doesn't have a warehouse of spare parts so that's for ports to deal with.
-How much weight:  Walter seemed to use 1% of normal displacement as his benchmark.  This implies a fair bit of actual hardware throughout the ship.
-Mechanical effect:  A roll made to change the intensity/damage of a fire gains a bonus in the 10-20% range.  A roll made to change the amount of flooding/listing gains a similar bonus. 
-Is this useful:  Likely so.

2.  Night-Fighting Doodads
-What is it:  Searchlight towers, flare launchers, and other equipment intended to translate levels of the Night Fighting tech into actual equipment costs for a ship.
-What is it not:  Reflective of a crew's ability to follow orders or doctrine.
-How much weight:  I've often assigned flat figures like 25 or 50 t to reflect hardware installation.  This is a hefty investment on a destroyer, but negligible on a capital ship.  On the other hand, a percentile doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense in some cases - 1% of normal displacement might imply two big searchlights on your destroyer, but then your capital ship's just going to have thirty times more searchlights and resemble a Christmas tree?
-Mechanical effect:  All this stuff is about seeing and shooting enemies, so it depends on how the game system treats darkness.  If darkness reduces the number of hits landed in a turn, then night-fighting equipment can offset that penalty by a fraction in the 10-20% range.  It may also improve checks to detect or observe enemy vessels - and if the equipment being used is searchlights, also the ship with the searchlights after an initial period of surprise.

[Darman]

Misc weight assigned for a specific purpose could also (stretching a little here) be presumed to apply to extra berthing space for skilled personnel (and sometimes extra personnel), in addition space for extra equipment.  we could also just take it as sort of a given that if someone is spending an extra 1% of their ship's tonnage for damage control that part of that cost isn't actually physical equipment on the ship, but represents the extra cost of training, etc.  We only have ship cost as being the mechanism by which to represent that

[Desertfox]

We do know that in OTL different nations put different emphasis on damage control and it made a difference. So yes I believe we should account for it. That said i would like to keep it simple. I'm thinking a flat rate gets you a flat bonus to DC rolls, say 100t for capital ships, 25t for cruisers, and 5t for destroyers.

As for night fighting, since it is mostly doctrine, I'd rather not make it necessary to add misc weight (other than radar once that comes around) for stuff like searchlights and such. One thing I did back in Nverse 3.0 was have some specialized night-fighting destroyers. They had misc weight but it was for things like flash suppressors on the guns, spark screens on the funnels, low viz paint schemes, electric drive + batteries (not allowed here), and hydrophones (for use against ships, not subs).

[snip]

When its comes to Misc weight, my opinion is that items need to be broken up into two categories; Yes/No checks and modifiers. I think this is important because some items are about whether you have it or not (eg RADAR) where others are about how much of it you have (eg pumps).

Yes/No Check: These are items where the question is whether you have them or not. These are items such as sensors (eg hydrophones or RADAR) or weapons substitutes (eg Torpedoes or Aircraft). These are the sort of things I think are best done with a fixed weight (ether flat or calculated based on something specific to the ship). The benefit of these is easy to track, because they are well defined and a given ship ether has them or does not.

Modifiers: These are items where how much you have is more important than if you have them, but are more abstract in terms of what they actually represent. These are items that could be considered to be normal parts of the ships fittings, but due to the desires of the designer are being enhanced beyond that baseline. This could be things like pumps, general damage control equipment, spotting devices, or crew comfort improvements. Like Rocky, my understanding of the combat system limits how detailed I can get in its effects, but my goal would be to have these items serve as bonuses to rolls where they are required. The "best" way of going about this may be something like for every X tons assigned in Misc Weight, there is a bonus of Y applied to the roll. This would mean that on average, a ship with Misc Weight assigned to something would preform better than a ship without that weight.

[TacCovert4]

When its comes to Misc weight, my opinion is that items need to be broken up into two categories; Yes/No checks and modifiers. I think this is important because some items are about whether you have it or not (eg RADAR) where others are about how much of it you have (eg pumps).

Yes/No Check: These are items where the question is whether you have them or not. These are items such as sensors (eg hydrophones or RADAR) or weapons substitutes (eg Torpedoes or Aircraft). These are the sort of things I think are best done with a fixed weight (ether flat or calculated based on something specific to the ship). The benefit of these is easy to track, because they are well defined and a given ship ether has them or does not.

Modifiers: These are items where how much you have is more important than if you have them, but are more abstract in terms of what they actually represent. These are items that could be considered to be normal parts of the ships fittings, but due to the desires of the designer are being enhanced beyond that baseline. This could be things like pumps, general damage control equipment, spotting devices, or crew comfort improvements. Like Rocky, my understanding of the combat system limits how detailed I can get in its effects, but my goal would be to have these items serve as bonuses to rolls where they are required. The "best" way of going about this may be something like for every X tons assigned in Misc Weight, there is a bonus of Y applied to the roll. This would mean that on average, a ship with Misc Weight assigned to something would preform better than a ship without that weight.

This would be my general opinion as well. 

Also I'm a bit against doing it as a percentage across the board, as like Kirk said, a percentage system for spotting equipment would mean a single extra lookout position on a DD, but 50 extra lookouts on a BB.  A lot of it is going to be 'fixed' weights.  Plus, we need to keep in mind that 'additional DC' is not a replacement for proper armor and TDS, it's a supplement. 

My suggestion would be thus: 

1)  Add a fixed weight for Improved spotting equipment. Say 5 Tons.  That would equate to an additional searchlight and spotting scope, so day and night spotting improvement.  A DD might want just one more than it's normal complement, a BB might want 8.  It adds a small percentage per station to the ship's chances to spot something that wouldn't normally be spotted.  For specialized gear, it's the 25t.

2)  Crew Comfort Improvements at 1% of light Displacement.  This is unneccessary for general operations.  It would represent slightly expanded berthing per berth, and things like a wine store/ice cream freezer/etc.  In a 'normal' situation this would be irrelevant, but a ship that's been on an extended station or at long-term general quarters, things that would reduce crew performance due to fatigue,  would find a small improvement in how long the crew can operate at peak efficiency.

3)  Damage control at 1% of light displacement.  This accounts for piping, hoses, lockers, pumps, and improved hatch/scuttle seals and such.  What this would show is equipment for a better quality of DC team to operate, improved firefighting equipment, lockers of common DC parts like pipe patches and such, and improved pumps and non TDS compartmentalization.  This might manifest in a reduction to the chance of a critical hit, or the ability to maintain fighting trim after taking damage that would be a mission kill. 

[Kaiser Kirk]

Since it came up again in the Wilno ship thread, a bump of our previous discussion on Misc weights.

Actually I had decided not to do similar as I'm not up for yet another discussion right now.
It does need to be done, but I was hoping to kick it down the road for a week or two
until I get through the other unresolved stuff.

So have at, but I won't offer much in the way of comment just now.

[The Rock Doctor]

I agree that "Yes/No" certainly makes sense in some cases.

Modifiers could be trickier and I think from a moderation perspective it'd be easier to have a reduced range of possible modifiers.  Otherwise no two ships are necessarily the same.

So if we maybe land on "This weight for a (minor) modifier" and "This weight for a (major) modifier", it'd be logistically simpler for Kirk than a range of "X Tons = +Y".  It would not be far off a yes/no, really.