destroyer crew loss

[tthomas7]

First off I want to mention that I've been thrilled with this game. I've had a lot of fun with it, so I don't mean to sound unappreciative. But this forum does seem to be the natural place to get questions answered. To be fair I should also take a ton of screen shots and post a rousing after action report. Maybe I will one of these days. In the mean time...

I'm playing a campaign as the Germans and have noticed that my destroyers are routinely wrecked by their English counterparts. I need cruisers to take their destroyers and I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong.

I ran a brief test with the scenario editor (thanks for this SES!) and found something strange that I suspect has been mentioned before, but I couldn't find it.

On the German side I put the destroys S-59, S-58, and S-57 and on the English; the fame, the falcon, and the ostrich.

The German boats weigh 919 tons, have a combat value of 471 and are armed with three 8.8-cm guns and six 50-cm torpedoes. These are clearly designed for capitol ship engagements with their many torpedoes, but the guns have a 15 kilogram warhead, and reload in 15 seconds.

The English boats weigh 350 tons, have a combat value of 116 and are armed with one 12-pdr, five 6-pdr guns, and two 18" torpedoes. These are much smaller vessels but with more guns and fewer torpedoes. Their guns fire 5.9 and 2.7 kilogram warheads at 15 and 10 second reload times respectively.

I have them battle it out in single file with each ship targeting it's opposite number and watch what happens.

At very short ranges, say 2000 yards the many guns on the English boats quickly annihilate the crew on the German boats to the point that they can't fix even the trivial damage they cause. I had one boat sink at 5% flooding and no fire. Whereas the English boats are badly damaged but the crew remain in good shape and can fix it.

At longer ranges, say 5000 yards the English do get the worst of it, the lighter guns lose their accuracy more quickly, but both sides run out of ammo before fatal damage is inflicted.

How is it that you can kill a destroyer's entire crew, from 85 to 5 without actually causing much damage to the boat? They aren't all on the deck. I would think that if there is enough shrapnel and fire to kill the crew, it would gut the machinery and hole the ship as well, and 6-pdrs just can't do that to 900 tons of steel, not quickly anyway.

So, am I doing something wrong, or do I just have to avoid British destroyers? Also, am I crazy for thinking this is weird?

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Tanyrhiew]

This happens to RN small ships too. I had one RN FL destroyer with 2 crew members...

 

[Von der Tann]

Part of the answer surely lies in the intended use of the destroyers or torpedoboats. Since the Royal Navy had a great superiority in capital ships, the Germans built their light craft for offensive purposes in order to kill enemy battleships with torpedo runs. For the same reasons, the British wanted to prevent this and specialized their light craft for a defensive role.

Not for nothing, German destroyers are almost all designated as "Torpedoboote", since they were intended for torpedo attacks. The primary weapon was the torpedo, guns were second in line, and only the "Torpedobootzerstörer" boats based on a Russian model were proper destroyers. The British did it the other way round: guns were the primary weapon to kill enemy light craft, torpedoes were second.

For similar reasons, most of the British light cruisers that came out later in the war have a large amount of small guns, 4" and the like, since they were likely to be backed up by capital ships and had to have enough rapid fire capability to kill enemy torpedo craft.

 

[tthomas7]

Strategically the designs make a lot of sense. And I could believe that against unarmored targets more, lighter hits is somewhat more effective than fewer, heavier hits. (At least you'll get hits before they launch their torps) But there are still things left unanswered,

In this example the German destroyer is three times the size of the English counterpart, so the difference in guns probably still comes out in the German favor. Here the Germans are firing 3 guns at 15 kilograms while the English can fire 3 guns at 2.7 kilograms and 1 at 5.9. (I think two of the 6 pounders face the wrong way) So the English really aren't even putting that many more shots into the air, and they are much lighter rounds.

The other question is why do they kill the crew so fast when causing so little damage to the structure of the vessel? I would think the overpressure from high explosives, even in small quantities would cause leaks and start fires and tear up the machinery as well as killing crew members.

Lastly, as the crew are killed the remaining individuals would be spread more thinly around the ship, and remain in better protected areas, I would think that each incoming shell would then cause just as much physical damage as the previous, but kill or wound fewer sailors. Obviously fire and flooding would cause their own casualties.

 

[Bullethead]

Tthomas-

How many times did you run this? I made a scenario with the exact same ships at 2000m and ran it several times. Each time, the Germans sunk all the Brits with no losses, although the damage they took varied. Hit location, shell performance, etc., vary every time, so you can't take 1 run as representative of all possible outcomes.

In all cases, those Germans that had been damaged more than light had repaired back to light by the time the last Brit went under.

 

[Von der Tann]

In fact, the ship designers favoured rapid firing weaponry for some time - but this was before the accuracy of the heavier artillery at longer ranges began to rise considerably. The reason for this was the battle of the Japanese and Chinese fleets near the mouths of river Yalu in 1894, where Japanese cruisers armed primarily with light rapid firing guns sank or drove off most of the older Chinese ships with no such weaponry. The losses in crew were immense for the losers, since the hail of light grenades shredded the superstructures and killed the sailors in unprotected places. However, this tactic found its master in the form of the two battleships of the Ting Yuen class. They were slow and only had a couple of heavy guns left to fight with, but they were also heavily armoured and the light grenades could not hurt them. As a side note: both ships of this class had been ordered and built at the Stettin AG Vulcan shipyard.

 

[tthomas7]

Cool info Von Der Tann, I didn't know that.

And thanks for the help both of you.

The first time I ran the test I was mostly trying to confirm my subjective impression from the campaign. It ended up so lopsided that I didn't think it could have been a fluke. That's when I posted the first message. Of two other runs, once the Germans did punish the English and didn't suffer a sinking, though it was close, and the other time a German destroyer burned to the water line from what started as a small fire while one of the British sailed into the sunset strangely unharmed.

So there is a lot of variability; which makes sense, combat is never predictable. I guess it just strikes me as weird that the crew can be so vulnerable, while the ships themselves aren't as much so. On a torpedo boat a large percentage of the crew might be on deck, and in serious danger from splinters and shrapnel. But intuitively on a larger destroyer I feel like the internal compartments would offer some shelter. I could be wrong though, most of my knowledge is about world war 2.

 

[Bullethead]

I guess it just strikes me as weird that the crew can be so vulnerable, while the ships themselves aren't as much so. On a torpedo boat a large percentage of the crew might be on deck, and in serious danger from splinters and shrapnel. But intuitively on a larger destroyer I feel like the internal compartments would offer some shelter. I could be wrong though, most of my knowledge is about world war 2.

The German DDs you used here average 1 man for every 3 feet of length. If you lined the whole crew up on deck from bow to stern and had them face to port, there'd only be about 1 foot of space between their shoulders. They would look rather like the front rank of a Napoleanic infantry unit. And it appears that 12pdr and 6pdr field guns did such units terrible damage.

I say this just to put things in perspective. It's hard to hit a DD even with a small gun without making several mothers cry. And nothing on a DD provided any real protection. Even if you were standing on the far side of the turbine (about the only solid thing big enough to hide behind), any shells and fragments stopped by the machinery would release a lethal cloud of steam on you. Most of the DDs sunk at Jutland went down with most of their crews.

 

[bpmcgee]

The German DDs you used here average 1 man for every 3 feet of length. If you lined the whole crew up on deck from bow to stern and had them face to port, there'd only be about 1 foot of space between their shoulders. They would look rather like the front rank of a Napoleanic infantry unit. And it appears that 12pdr and 6pdr field guns did such units terrible damage.

I say this just to put things in perspective. It's hard to hit a DD even with a small gun without making several mothers cry. And nothing on a DD provided any real protection. Even if you were standing on the far side of the turbine (about the only solid thing big enough to hide behind), any shells and fragments stopped by the machinery would release a lethal cloud of steam on you. Most of the DDs sunk at Jutland went down with most of their crews.

What I want to know is who gave the order for them to line up on deck in the middle of combat!

B

 

[FuurinKazan]

I was just looking at this in a torpedo training scenario I made. One thing: alot of crew seem to be 'tied' to the torpedo tubes. If you lose a torp mount, destroyed or damaged, you seem to lose half the crew. I had ML Pelikan reduce the DD Manly crew to 6 by two 8.8cm hits that hit a torpedo tube and the other exploded on the deck, I think-it did searchlight damage and all that.

I had to add that the above example was a pretty rare occurence, but I have seen a few 'neutron bomb' hits on DD's here and there

 

[rgreat]

I find it rather amusing... in Jutland DD's lose crew quite easily (maybe too easy), while CL's on other hand are very safe for its crew...

I have come to conclusion, thats because of alghorithm in gunnery used for damage computing dependand solely (or severely) on weapon armour penetration capacity.

DD's have no armor so it lose crew if hit by a gun with virtually no armor penetration capacity.
On other hand CL's belts have some armor to protect itself from HE ammo up to 150mm.
Thats the weird thing - they do not lose much even if hit on supposedly unarmoured places.
Can it be that if all armor values of a ship are set at mere 1 inch it means that HE shells can be more or less ignored in their hitting power against the crew no matter where shells hit? Like if all ship surface is thoughly armoured? And there is no chance of HE shell (or splinters) to hit unarmored part of the ship?

 

[tthomas7]

Interesting idea. Does the same happen with auxiliary cruisers that don't have any armor? I should experiment with the scenario editor, but has anyone seen this effect on larger but unarmored boats?

 

[cj95]

It's hard to hit a DD even with a small gun without making several mothers cry. QUOTE]



Awwwww......Thats the most depressing thing I've read today. :upset:

 

[FuurinKazan]

hmm..does seem to be a bug here. I've seen now plenty of instances where a8.8cm will score one or two hits, damage a torpedo mount and crew remaining will be 1 or 0..I sent a bug report in, we'll see what comes of it.

 

[FuurinKazan]

Looks like the newer versions have made some improvement here?

In my test scenario, I'm not seeing the crews reduced to zero by a couple of 8cm hits anymore, or at the least, haven't yet seen it-and I saw it alot with ver .1048

 

[tthomas7]

sweet. Hurray for SES support!

 

[rgreat]

Tested, well, seems like DD's are more likely to sink from severe damage now instead of small leak and no crew onboard.

Thanks SES.

 

[Blutarski]

A British 30-knotter could bring 1 x 12lbr and 3 x 6lbr to bear on a broadside. Assuming that the weather conditions and range were such as not to interfere with achievement of the maximum rates of fire specified by the game, it could deliver a weight of fire of approximately 72 kg per minute. A German torpedoboat armed with 3 x 8.8cm firing 10kg HE could deliver 120 kg per minute, a superiority of 5:3 in broadside weight of fire, coupled with better ballistic characteristics, a more stable firing platform and a theoretically better standard of fire control.

 

[kristof]

I agree with Von der Tan, German Destroyers Designed for attack against Capital ships. more torpedoes and greater speed. British DD Designed for Defence against German Destroyers. The British really feared Torpedoes, that is why Jellicoe did the Battle turn away at jutland when threatened by mass Torpedo attack and lost chance to Destroy the High Sea's Fleet. He has been critizised for to much caution. But if he did not turn away, then what? "The only Man who could lose the War in one Day" what a responsability!

 

[Bullethead]

The British really feared Torpedoes, that is why Jellicoe did the Battle turn away at jutland when threatened by mass Torpedo attack and lost chance to Destroy the High Sea's Fleet. He has been critizised for to much caution. But if he did not turn away, then what? "The only Man who could lose the War in one Day" what a responsability!

Just in terms of practicality, IMHO Jellicoe had exactly zero chance of inflicting much more damage on the HSF when he turned away from the torp attack. The visibility was already too bad effective shooting and it was almost sundown anyway so that wasn't going to change. Besides, due to the crappy visibility, he had no real situational awareness. Today, we can look at track charts, see the relative positions of the fleets, and think "woulda coulda shoulda" with hindsight, but at the time nobody on either side really knew what was going on.

So, IMHO Jellicoe did the right thing. After all, he didn't call it quits. He used the best knowledge he had (which was merely that the Germans were generally "thataway" somewhere out in the murk) to try to put himself in position to catch them at sunrise. Certainly this was the wisest strategy available to him at the time. But as we know, mostly due to unimaginable failures by RN junior commanders to communicate, the HSF managed to escape during the night.