Rescue the crew!

[Mish]

It would be nice if destroyers and torpedo boats be able to rescue the crews of sinking ships and then transfere the rescued to the other battleships or cruisers which suffered from the big crew losses.

It will make destroyers and torpedo boats much more usefull in this game.

[HMSWarspite]

But why? You don't think you are going to get anything like effective work out of a crew that has just been rescued from a sinking ship do you?

[Bullethead]

But why? You don't think you are going to get anything like effective work out of a crew that has just been rescued from a sinking ship do you?

Quite true. And even assuming the survivors weren't wounded, burned, hypothermic, shark-bit, oil-choked, completely exhausted, or totally demoralized, there's still the problem of effecting the transfer to another ship.

Most times, ship casualties were like troop casualties on land. As in, beating up a ship usually took 1 or 2 other ships out of action to deal with the crippled or sinking ship. Once the survivors got picked up, the DDs involved usually had to go straight home. After all, the other big ships weren't likely to stop for a transfer while still in contact with the enemy. Plus a typical WW1 DD might have a normal crew of about 80 guys, and now there are several hundred more at least aboard, with no place to go except to stand on deck shoulder to shoulder and thus preventing the DD from using its own guns. IIRC, 2 German DDs came home with about 400 Lutzow survivors each. I have no idea where they all fit. RJW DDs, which were significantly smaller, would have had even more problems.

So IMHO, players should be glad crew rescue isn't taken into account. As is, they only lose the 1 ship. If crew rescue was done in the game, they'd lose a couple of DDs as well as the ship actually sunk.

And while I'd kinda like to see admirals be able to transfer their flags, in reality this doesn't seem to have worked well, either. At Jutland, Hipper bailed on Lutzow long before she sank, but then spent just about all the remaining daylight (several hours) in a DD because none of the other German BCs could hold still long enough to take him aboard. As such, after Lutzow got crippled just before the main fleets engaged, Hipper was unable to excercise any form of command until well into the night. And since the BCs had it pretty easy from then on, he was effectively out of the fight well before sunset. He did get a peerage for it, though :).

All that said, however, I'm more surprised at Mish's apparent assumption that DDs aren't very useful in the game. I find DDs absolutely essential myself. It's a big mistake to send them in against undamaged ships unless you've got a bunch of them or there's no other choice. But for finishing off cripples, DDs are ideal.

Guns in the RJW don't usually let much water into armored targets due to the shells' inability to penetrate the armor. Thus, sinking armored targets with guns usually means a protracted bombardment whose purpose is to kill crew, start fires, and build up damage to the propulsion system. This damage gradually reduces the ability of the ship to handle whatever flooding is happening as an incidental by-product of all this shelling, until eventually the flooding gets the upper hand and the ship begins to sink, although this may take half an hour more. All this takes a huge amount of ammo that's better used on more functional targets. Therefore, once I get a target fairly beaten up, I finish it off with DDs while shifting my big ships to other targets.

I wonder what Mish means by "effective" DDs anyway. The record for torp hits in both the RJW and at Jutland are not very impressive, so if DDs aren't killing machines in that game, it's no surprise. The PA attack was about the ideal condition for a torpedo attack, with an immobile, surprised enemy in bad visibility, but no Russian ships were sunk and relative few even damaged. Sure, the torps of the day sucked by later standards, but so did the underwater protection of the targets, so that's something of a wash. Torp successes at Tsushima were mostly against cripples.

WW1 torps were much better than RJW torps in all respects, with warheads, speed, and range approaching WW2 standards. Per Campbell's book, however, they didn't have much effect despite several massive torp attacks by both sides. The stats are as follows:

Daylight Action:
Brit:
DD torps fired: 33
DD torp hits: 3
Ph: 0.091

German:
DD torps fired: ~78
DD torp hits: 1
Ph: ~0.013

Night Action
Brit:
DD torps fired: 38
DD torp hits: 1 or 2 (depending on who got Rostock)
Ph: 0.026 or 0.053
The 1 certain hit, of course, blew up Pommern and killed 800+ Germans, so was important to the box score. But Pommern's loss had no real effect on the strength of the HSF, other than the loss of the trained men.

German:
DD torps fired: 19
DD torp hits: maybe 1 (on crippled Turbulent, which was immobile)
Ph: 0 or 0.053

So, I wouldn't expect miracles from DDs even in WW1. OTOH, none of these were attacks on enemy cripples. And some of the German hits (and at least 1 of the misses) were to scuttle their own cripples.

[Mish]

IIRC, 2 German DDs came home with about 400 Lutzow survivors each. I have no idea where they all fit. RJW DDs, which were significantly smaller, would have had even more problems.

Only one destroyer Buinyi managed to rescue 204 sailors from sunk Osliabia.
Later on Buinyi rescued Admiral Rozhestvenski and flag-officers from burning Suvorov. Next morning the people from Suvorov moved to destroyer Bedovyi, and Osliabia and Buinyi crews moved to cruiser Dmitri Donskoi as far as Buinyi due to damages in boilers and machines could not follow the cruiser anymore and had to be scuttled.

In the end of the day Donskoi was chased by japaneese cruisers and had to take fight 1 vs 5. Byinyi's crew did excelent job helping to fight with fire on board the ship. The other story was with Osliabia's crew. Some people started to panic and finally had to be locked in the compartments on the living deck. Nevertheless in the end of the fight some Osliabia artillerists volunteered to substitute wounded cannoneers from Donskoi. Previously Donskoi only received punishment and could not ever hit japaneese ships. The picture changed when Osliabia's people stood to guns. Donskoi managed to knock Naniva out of the line and placed some good shots on Otova. (Osliabia artillerists were known as a best trained on the 2-nd Pacific Squad). Donskoi managed to withstand the fight till the night and did well against attacks of the destroyers (but had to be scuttled later anyway as there was no chance to reach Vladivostock due to the damage).

[Bullethead]

Only one destroyer Buinyi managed to rescue 204 sailors from sunk Osliabia.
Later on Buinyi rescued Admiral Rozhestvenski and flag-officers from burning Suvorov. Next morning the people from Suvorov moved to destroyer Bedovyi, and Osliabia and Buinyi crews moved to cruiser Dmitri Donskoi as far as Buinyi due to damages in boilers and machines could not follow the cruiser anymore and had to be scuttled.

Tsushima, compared to most fleet actions, was a special case when it came to dealing with rescued crews. Most times, fleets meet in "no-man's-land" between their bases, remain fairly well organized throughout the action, and the fight moves along in a definite direction for a considerable time. As cripples fall out, the fight passes them by. Damage control help and survivor rescues all take a lot of time, so by the time the DDs have finished, they're many miles and a number of hours behind their fleet. Odds are, they won't be able to catch up before the battle is over, even if they can still fight effectively, so there's usually nothing for it but to go home alone. And as Hipper showed at Jutland, even if the just an admiral and his staff bail quickly, while still in proximity of the fleet, he won't have much chance to board another ship while the fighting continues.

At Tsushima, however, all this was different. The Russians were running a gauntlet with nowhere to go but forward, so the effectives and the survivor-laden DDs were all going the same way. The remaining Russians were also all scattered in small groups after the initial clash, many of which weren't in contact with the enemy for long periods of time. Thus, if a survivor-laden DD happened to catch up with another ship, transfers would often be possible.

It seems hard to justify making a whole rescue/transfer system just to cover this 1 special battle. The circumstances of Tsushima are unlikely to happen except in a campaign where the player is the Japanese and takes PA before 2PacRon appears. And in such a case, the system wouldn't do him much good--the only real beneficiary would be the AI Russians. For the IJN player, losing 1 ship would also result in the effective loss of any DDs left behind to collect survivors, fight fires, tow the cripple, etc. The same could be said for most WW1 battles.

[Hinchinbrooke]

Reading about Jutland, the last thing found survivors were capable of was continued fighting.................. and very often the ships that found survivors were miles from the centre of the action and were themselves in no state to continue fighting................ those involved were happy enough to attempt the voyage home.

[Daedalus]

It would be nice if destroyers and torpedo boats be able to rescue the crews of sinking ships and then transfere the rescued to the other battleships or cruisers which suffered from the big crew losses.

It will make destroyers and torpedo boats much more usefull in this game.

I'll have to think about this one. But as of now I do not think it would help the game. Also in the waters that they where in if the crew was not picked up quick then they would have not made it anyway.

[Mobeer]

Just please get rid of the stupid message where a captain runs his ships aground to save his crew and is guaranteed to die as a result.