My 1st Tease

[Bullethead]

I've gotten the go-ahead to bring up and go into some detail about a Jutland feature, but am under instructions to drag it out for a while. I've never done this before, so I ask you all to bear with me.

I figure the best approach will be for me just to name the subject and then answer at least some of the questions you all ask about it, assuming anybody's interested . So here goes:

The subject is gun ammunition in the Jutland game. What do you all want to know about it?

 

[Firestorm]

A couple of questions.

1. An option for unlimited ammo?

2. Is there a warning popup notifing of a ship(s) low on ammo?

That's all I can think of right now.

 

[rgreat]

Any user control on ammo types you can fire?

 

[Bullethead]

1. An option for unlimited ammo?

Nope, and no God Mode and no No Clipping Mode, either

2. Is there a warning popup notifing of a ship(s) low on ammo?

There's nothing that jumps up and screams this at you, but as in the RJW game, the telescope pop-up view will show "low ammo", if such is the case, when you pass the mouse over a ship.

 

[Bullethead]

Any user control on ammo types you can fire?

Strange to say, there is no historical basis to provide such a feature for a game set in 1916. At that point in time, either a gun only had 1 type of ammo, or there was no effective difference between the multiple types of ammo it had. So no, the player can't select different types of ammo.

HOWEVER, this is NOT to say that all ammo is treated equally in Jutland. That's a major change from the RJW game, where a shell was a shell was a shell. In Jutland, different types of gun shoot different types of shell with different effects on the target.

 

[Lützow]

I

n Jutland, different types of gun shoot different types of shell with different effects on the target.

Including the better armor piercing characteristics of geman shells? I hope so, anything else won´t be real realistic, I think.

BTW, some other question about fire directing. Would there be different fire directors for main and second guns? Just like the case your BB or BC engages equal enemy ships and suddenly being under attack from DDs/TBs? To handle this you must be able to engage BBs/BCs whith main guns and DDs/TBs with second guns. We must be able to do so, just see Derfflingers Gunnery Officer´s account on Jutland, engaging BCs with main (30,5 cm) guns and Light Cruisers with second (15 cm) guns. Anything else also won´t be realistic.:hmmm:

Am I right or wrong with this?:shy::shy:

 

[Bullethead]

Including the better armor piercing characteristics of geman shells?

Yup, now you're on the right track. But not all German guns had superior penetration, even in 1916. There's a fair amount of detail involved here if you're curious .

BTW, some other question about fire directing.

Much as I'd like to, I can't get into that right now. So let's keep it on gun ammo for the time being, please.

 

[jdkbph]

Yup, now you're on the right track.

Would this cool feature, whatever it is, have any specific impact (pun intended) on the Brit 13.5", for instance?

JD

 

[Firestorm]

As I recall alot of British shells had bad fuses and would trigger prematurely on the intial impact with armor.

 

[KGB]

AFAIK Brit shells didn't explode on impact like 80-90% of all hits.

 

[Rhetor]

I only wonder where the fine line between historical accuracy and gameplay would go, when it comes to shell quality

 

[jdkbph]

I only wonder where the fine line between historical accuracy and gameplay would go, when it comes to shell quality

Good question. That's an area where DG is somewhat lacking. The historical situation at Tsushima, for instance, was that the Russian crews were is such bad state relative to the Japanese crews that the action was pretty much one sided. The game seems to ignore this for the most part... one can only assume for the purpose of play balancing. Fair enough - and truth be told, I'd prolly rather play it that way - but this kind of thing should be user selectable. In fact, the traditional computer wargame paradigm holds that this should probably be one of many user selectable "difficulty factors". DG has, essentially, none at all.

JD

 

[Bullethead]

Would this cool feature, whatever it is, have any specific impact (pun intended) on the Brit 13.5", for instance?

Which type of 13.5" did you have in mind? There were 3 distinct types in service afloat: the Mk V with both 1250# shells and 1400# shells, and the Mk VI in Erin, which didn't have quite the same stats as the Mk V. There was also an old Mk III in the Penlee Battery at Plymouth. Jutland's got all of that .

 

[oz_boater]

The subject is gun ammunition in the Jutland game. What do you all want to know about it?

OK.

Give you have not restricted it to just the shell I have a few.

1) Do you take into account the different vulnerabilities of British and German cordite (at the time of Jutland) to flash? and if so, how? As far as I recall at the end of the war when the British inspected the High Seas fleet they do not consider their gunhouses 'flash tight' - but it was not the German ships that were blowing up at Jutland

2) Do you take into account the effects of armour (or the lack of it) on different types of ammunition? Including but not limit to:

a) the impact on HE (where thin armour would protect against it) vs AP (where thin armour would just activate the fuse, but hull plating by itself may not)

b) the different ballistic characteristics of different sorts of ammunition for the same gun (which together with 'a' above led to the adoption of 'all or nothing armour' as one of the British lessons learned from Jutland as HE was ineffective at battle ranges and thus thin armour became a net menace)

c) the propensity of different types of ammunition to loose their filler or fuse or break up at various impact angles - in particular the problems the British had.

3) Gun life (which was quite short for some of the big guns - and a gun may been able to be 'shot out' in an afternoon)

4) The impact on spotting of mixed calibers firing on the same target (which problem after all was 1 of the two factors that lead to the development of HMS Dreadnought)

5) The differences in rate of fire that flow from using man handled vs mechanically loaded ammo and the impact on this of fatigue and sea state

6) Whether data about ammo performance will be available for post battle analysis (useful to assist with learning what works and what does not - but also for debugging that issues that will inevitably remain if the gunnery systems is a black box)

Thats all I can think of immediately

Regards

Boater

 

[Bullethead]

As I recall alot of British shells had bad fuses and would trigger prematurely on the intial impact with armor.

The Brit APC of 1916 had several problems. Its lyddite filler was shock-sensitive, the metal was brittle, and, as you say, the fuzes weren't good. It therefore had a strong tendency to break up or prematurely explode on even thin armor, although it did still sometimes penetrate and explode inside as intended. This is why Brit capital ships don't have a choice of ammo types in the game. The APC and HE or CPC (which the Brits fired a lot of anyway) usually had pretty much the same effect--an explosion on the surface.

So yeah, we've got that in the game. And this is different from how the German big shells work, and also different from the smaller guns on both sides.

 

[Bullethead]

I only wonder where the fine line between historical accuracy and gameplay would go, when it comes to shell quality

Our goal, of course, is to make the game as historically accurate as possible while still being fun to play. Relative shell quality is just one historical factor that we use to achieve this. 1916 has a bunch of other historical factors, all of which taken together tend to balance the game. This is the best of both worlds, because it allows us to include a bunch of noticeable historical detail for the grogs while making the balance tweaking a bit easier and less obvious.

 

[Bullethead]

1) Do you take into account the different vulnerabilities of British and German cordite (at the time of Jutland) to flash?

Yes, we take this into account. Can't tell you how yet, though.

2) Do you take into account the effects of armour (or the lack of it) on different types of ammunition? Including but not limit to:

a) the impact on HE (where thin armour would protect against it) vs AP (where thin armour would just activate the fuse, but hull plating by itself may not)

Yup. There are many guns in Jutland that match their historical prototypes by having only HE ammo without any AP at all. HE is handled differently from AP that often broke up but sometimes penetrated, and of course both are different from AP that penetrated fairly reliably.

b) the different ballistic characteristics of different sorts of ammunition for the same gun (which together with 'a' above led to the adoption of 'all or nothing armour' as one of the British lessons learned from Jutland as HE was ineffective at battle ranges and thus thin armour became a net menace)

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're asking here.

c) the propensity of different types of ammunition to loose their filler or fuse or break up at various impact angles - in particular the problems the British had.

Yup. See above.

3) Gun life (which was quite short for some of the big guns - and a gun may been able to be 'shot out' in an afternoon)

Nope, we don't have that. But I can't think of anybody else who does, either, probably because most players would find it a total pain.

4) The impact on spotting of mixed calibers firing on the same target (which problem after all was 1 of the two factors that lead to the development of HMS Dreadnought)

Fire control's another subject for a later day.

5) The differences in rate of fire that flow from using man handled vs mechanically loaded ammo and the impact on this of fatigue and sea state

Rate of fire is a fairly complicated subject. Suffice to say that Jutland takes the above factors and a few others into account. The net result is that most guns have effective ROFs rather less than max their breech mechanisms were capable of. This is a fairly noticeable change from the RJW game.

6) Whether data about ammo performance will be available for post battle analysis

We're considering various types of post-battle stat reports but haven't come to any decisions yet.

 

[Rhetor]

Since this is only the first tease, how many teases should we expect before the our appetites are finally appeased?

 

[Lützow]

To Rhetor:

Read between the lines:hmmm:... Just like this:

Fire control's another subject for a later day.

Or this:

We're considering various types of post-battle stat reports but haven't come to any decisions yet

We should expect many more, I think:nofear::drink:

But after all It´s a very interesting thread, isn´t it?

 

[HMSWarspite]

As an aside for the 'choose my own shell type' enthusiasts, several ships on both sides did their own thing completely without any regard to any admirals (you..), or what anyone else was doing, so shell control would be very ahistorical