1922 Rules Change Discussion

[Kaiser Kirk]

WWI seemed to have caught several combatants off guard.

After the 1866 Austro-Prussian and 1870-71 Franco-Prussian wars, movement and relatively short wars were still somewhat expected.  The Russo-Japanese experience seems to have been somewhat dismissed.

As a result, the armies tended to lack in the medium and heavy guns felt needed for trench busting. You wind up with naval guns turned into medium artillery by the Germans (15cmL40), and the UK/French/Germans placing coast defense and naval guns on railroads.

As for old- the Italians pulled an 1877 piece out- the 149mm siege gun, while the Russians took the 15cm M1877 out of their forts to make field guns.

[miketr]

Black Powder artillery were still the norm at that point.  Smokeless powder was introduced in the 1880's.  Breach loaders had been pushing muzzle loaders out for some time.  The big program was the Prussian's had STEEL canon so they could have higher muzzle pressures.  

An example of a French gun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reffye_cannon

Also alot of the French artillery park were muzzle leaders vs. Prussian breach loaders.

Michael

[Laertes]

In the Hearts of Iron 2 forums a long while ago, there was a discussion about the benefits / drawbacks of a war economy; specifically, about how one can make war economy not be the obvious "right" choice in a wargame. (For reference, HoI2 economics was so very slanted in favour of war economies over peacetime ones that many players would declare war on landlocked, non-neighbouring countries like Tibet, Afghanistan or Paraguay, and then ignore said war, purely to reap the economic benefits of being "at war".)

It was suggested that running your country on a war footing for extended periods would do permanent economic damage to it, so that wars would be followed by a period of reconstruction, and that "war exhaustion" becomes a real and tangible thing, rather than an abstraction.

[miketr]

A tight centralized WAR economy is good at one thing, making things need to kill your neighbors with.  It does this by stripping resources from the civilian economy.  Only in the US where the civilian economy wasn't working at anything like full capacity did it come across as being great.  People either were drafted or were in work work so un-employment ended very quickly and people felt rich; even if the government ran up huge debts.  The Germans in late 30's were in effect running a limited war economy.  It used up their foreign exchange, stifled their civilian economy and all the government spending was inflationary. 

What I have suggested for war economies is the following.

1 MOD approval, so no having a player declare war on NPC nation X, that isn't a threat and then doing nothing about to get the war bonus.
2 In current BP / IC system the cost of BP / IC go up at a greater rate than you get in additional cash, this to slow down economic growth.
3 An exhaustion system where by the more and harder you push your economy the more likely bad things are to happen.  Things being discussed where IC being lost as small and medium businesses fold or close for war production, workers strike demanding higher wages to keep pace with inflation (penalties to cash and BP production), etc.  Do it long enough and hard enough very bad things (TM) happen, revolution, civil war, economic collapse, etc.

Michael

[P3D]

The mount-and-hoist type armament on cruisers make light cruiser weapons too light. Could a change be made requiring twin 5.4"+ mounts to be turreted?

[Jefgte]

I add in complement of P3D that French max hand loading was the 138mm gun.


Jef

[TexanCowboy]

That sorta screws those over who use 5.5'' guns....

[miketr]

It would screw a lot of my ship designs and require that they be redone.  I don't know if they were built with enough weight reserve.

I would want it to be for ships of date X forward.

Michael

[Sachmle]

I've always operated under the reasoning that, right, wrong, or indifferent, SS is our physics. If SS says a twin 5.5" gun mount & hoist weights 20t less then historical then it just does. If we start screwing with it now, it just leads to other things. Next thing we'll need to add misc weight so our SHP/t values are the same as RL engine plants, etc... Slippery slope to me.

[Kaiser Kirk]

I've always operated under the reasoning that, right, wrong, or indifferent, SS is our physics.

I fall in that category as well. It's not if the parts are balanced right, it's if I can sim the end result and get fairly close to historical. Generally, I can for larger vessels. So if a mount is too light, oh well.

The caveat is when dealing with things that weren't standard in the era. The Dutch Hazemeyer stabilized mounts added considerably to the weight vs. non-stabilized. Those should have tonnage added, either as armor, or misc weight. Likewise fielding a double-Twin style "Quad" turret should have some rule for adding to armor thickness to account for the wider turret & barbette.

[snip]

I've always operated under the reasoning that, right, wrong, or indifferent, SS is our physics.

Im on this bandwagon to. As long as we all play by the same rules, I don't see a problem if mounts are underweight or overweight for everyone. Same goes for "upgrades" (kirk's example of stabilization), as long as everyone is under the same constraints by the same rules, its fine in my book.

[P3D]

I do not want the rule to be valid retroactively, only for new builds.

[Kaiser Kirk]

The mount-and-hoist type armament on cruisers make light cruiser weapons too light. Could a change be made requiring twin 5.4"+ mounts to be turreted?

Re-thinking this, I've long taken the position that OTL you see a transition from single 6" mounts to twin 6" mounts (say the Omahas), then twin 6" turrets. The twin 6" mounts  on the Omahas took 51.8tons were lightly armored, narrow and still slow to train and unsatisfactory. The single 7.5" mount on the Hawkins took 46tons were likewise unweildy. Twin 15/48s on the Type 36(a) mods, ran 60t.

Much later the cramped, twin 5.25" seem to have been on semi-barbettes- 'short trunk' as Navweaps call them-  and came in near 80tons. While the US DP twin 5"/38s ran 33-77t depending on armor.

So it could be a game play thing- choose a mount & hoist for a twin 6" weapon and the mods penalize you in combat.
Or we could break it out. 
Say Single M& H up to 7.5inches/ 191mm
Say Twin M & H fine up to 6.1inches/155mm
But Twin DP M & H only good to 5.4inches/138mm
All M & H would be restricted to total mount weight <80t.
With the caveat that as you approach that boundary, you are likely loosing some effectiveness. Beyond those boundaries, turret & barbette is required.

[Nobody]

While thinking about my 2000 ton DD the following thought crossed my mind:
Most small and fast vessels (even WWI I think) had "flat" aka transom sterns, right? As did many DDs starting at least around 1930.
And since SS is bad at simming small fast ships why not improve them by allowing transom sterns for DD & TB tech ships?

My proposal:
Change the "Destroyer and TB architecture" rules to
1924: quintuple tubes, maximum light displacement 2500 t, Transom stern allowed for ship build under the DDs & TBs rules

I think we should also omit the 0.5 cross sectional strength requirement, or have we already done that?

[Guinness]

Most DDs and TBs had either ship sterns (mean rounded with some overhang) or cruiser sterns. The first British ship with a Transom stern was the minelayer HMS Adventure, l/d in 1922, and she had it not to improve hydrodynamic efficiency, but rather in an attempt to make her better at laying mines. Ironically, it turned out the transom stern made it more difficult to lay mines (they tended to be sucked back into the ship at speed), so she was rebuilt with a conventional cruiser stern. The idea wasn't tried again in the Royal Navy for quite some time.

Transom sterns came into use in the US Navy with the Brooklyn (1936) class, IIRC. There may have been an experimental vessel sometime before that I can't think of.

The Germans seemed to have first commissioned a ship with a transom stern with the Konigsberg class of 1929.

So 1920 might be a tad early. We certainly might consider adding a tech-tree item for it, with development starting in 1922.

As far as ships built under the DD/TB architecture: when the discussion took place that led to the DD speed calculator, one idea presented and rejected was the idea that we simply sim all DDs with transom sterns. We found that the transom didn't really help top speed all that much, among other problems. Since that discussion, I did a lot of work on DD freeboard heights, and found that we were all building DDS with hulls that are too big. Not doing that seems to help quite a bit at attaining closer to historical true top speeds for small fast ships.