In my current campain during a pitched night battle one of CL's (Birkenhead) was hit by a 28 cm shell suffering a critical magazine hit, 2 minutes later she was hit by a G7 torpedoe, sustaining another critical magazine hit, both times "Birkinhead has exploded due to a magazine detonation".
It took another 6 minutes for her to go under, I should think a CL would have gone under after the first magazine blast, and how many magazines did these CL's have ?.
CLs are not subject to the cordite ACH because they don't have turrets (the ACH explosions only happen on turret penetrations). Any magazine explosions they have are the regular kind that can always happen to any ship. In the ACH kind, POOF and the ship is gone pretty much instantly, like the BCs at Jutland. In the regular kind, there's a certain amount of flotation damage done and then the normal sinking process happens, however long that takes.
At Jutland, there were a couple of Brit DDs that had multiple magazine explosions during the course of their sinking during the night action. These obviously didn't involve enough cordite to sink the ships at once. CLs were laid out rather like DDs in this regard, so we figure they'd have played by the same rules (see below).
In the same night encounter, Princess Royal was being hit by the 3 German BC's however dispite the fact that they were only 3000 yards away I was unable to target them for some minutes.
Why were my ships unable to see them ?
In any battle, the enemy ships you see as a player are ALL the enemy ships seen by all of your ships. However, an enemy might be visible to 1 of your ships but not others, and thus that 1 of your ships can shoot at it but others can't, even if they are within range. LOS is not reciprocal nor is it uniform over the battle area. Besides obvious things like the position of the sun and the proximity of coastlines making visibility vary in different directions, there are also wandering patches of more or less thick fog, smoke, and rain.
Even if your ship is the closest to a given enemy, it might still not be able to see it. And sometimes, the enemy ship appears when you ship knows SOMETHING is over there, but can't see it well enough to shoot at it. In such cases, it would perhaps be better to have some generic unidentified ship graphic there instead of the exact model and name of the enemy ship, so you'd know that was the problem. Maybe in a future version.
I am not very certain about the layout of British CL magazines but I should think a ship has several, one for each gun, or pair of guns (port and starboard) down the ship. There is never a single central magazine on any warship, it would be impossible to get ammunition to the guns efficiently.
CLs and DDs in general had 2 magazines, 1 forward (usually under the bridge or nearly so) and one aft (usually under the aft end of the superstructure, just before where the hull started to pinch up to make space for the screws. They didn't have magazines amidships because all the hull volume there was taken up by boilers, engines, and fuel bunkers. Thus, the midships guns were supplied by ammo passed up to 1/2way along the length of the ship. In DDs, this was usually on the weather deck. In CLs, that could happend also but some of the larger CLs had narrow "ammunition passages" in their wings below decks. This need to pass ammunition long distances is why CL and DD guns don't have as high a rate of fire as the weapons were theoretically capable of.
This also applies to mosts RN 2ndary guns on capital ships. Remember, RN BBs and BCs of this period were usually rather narrower than their German counterparts. The beamier German ships not only had room for more torpedo protection, but also had 2ndary magazines for each individual (sometimes) or pair of adjacent (usually) 2ndary guns. This is why most German capital ship 2ndary batteries usually have rather higher rates of fire than the same or equivalent guns mounted in CLs, DDs, and RN capital ships. On the downside, these German 2ndary magazines were more vulnerable to damage.
Pommern apparently blew up from a torp getting into 1 of them, and
Konig nearly did from one of
Iron Duke's shells.
