Ryan Thunder wrote:Thanas wrote:Lascaris wrote:Ok. First has anyone heard the term concentrated fire? Fire won't be willy nilly distributed against every battleship in sight. It will be directed at 1-2 targets till these are crippled or forced out of the line, then move to the next target till that one is crippled and so on.
Second even if the fire was idiotically distributed across every battleship in sight 14 hits per ship average isn't exactly something to be shrugged of. Particularly in the older ships and battlecruisers they could well be causing crippling damage.
To wit: Derfflinger took 17 hits at Jutland (from much smaller calibers) and Seydlitz 21. Both ships were out of battle and Seydlitz only managed to reach home with sheer determination. And considering these are 18" hits and most of Wilkens ships assigned to the job do not have that much of a protection - yeah, there should be more damage.
There we are. 210 hits, assuming a very generous 20 hits per ship to sink it, would result in at least ten sunk battleships and one heavily damaged one. Not ten damaged ships; ten *dead ones*. On the bottom of the ocean. Gone.
Fuck you and re-read my math. You would have AT BEST 90 hits from your large caliber guns, I am rotating units in and out of the battle (I've got three lines of ships moving from tacking at 25,000 to repairing minor breaks at 35,000). I did the math for you 10 pages ago but I will repeat it again:
Aside from reduction in accuracy against MPI over barrel life the US 16"/50 had a barrel life of 290 rounds. Meanwhile the Japanese 18.1/45 had a life in the 150-200 range and both of the comparative guns were produced two decades after Ryan would have made these so lets go with 250 rounds as barrel life.
2x3 17.7" Guns at 250 rounds each = 1,500 rounds, at 6% hit rate, 90 hits
Now for the 350mm guns, based on the US 14"/50 Mk11 (200-250), the US 14"/45 Mk12 (250), the British 14"/50 Mk VI (150), the British 13.5"/45 (300), and onwards you can see that extending to the L50 barrel seems to indicate lower barrel life but lets go midpoint and stick with 250 round
2x2x2 13.7" Guns at 250 rounds each = 2,000 rounds, at a 6% hit rate 120 hits
Now barrel life doesn't mean the thing is useless after that number of rounds but it serves as a decent aim point for roughly when he would no longer be able to accurately target my ships as his True Mean Error would continue to increase (and he would run out of rounds). The thing is during the run up to these points the guns would start to see degradation in accuracy and range that would be noticeable from call it 2/3rds of the way through barrel life.
What this really means is that he should be able to reasonably land 180 total hits before suffering increasingly severe loss of range and accurracy. Since I can rotate my units in and out of the engagement I'd be in fine shape. 210 hits distributed amongst 14 front line battleships equates to about 15 hits each...or 210 hits amongst 18 Battleships (if I brought the Mexicana or Virtuoso class in to play) works out to 11 2/3 (call it 12) hits per ship .... or I could bring both my BCs and 12" ships in to play so 210 hits amongst 22 ships for 9/54 hits per ship.
Now that assumes you fire until your ammo storage is almost exhausted and while Thanas made the point about Jutland those two particular ships were also older than average wheras I only used my 18 newest ships laid down from 1918 onwards. The proof is in the armor protection scheme which I ALSO laid out:
A 14"/50 based on the US Mk 11 will penetrate 13.75" of vertical armor at 20,000 yards and 5.3" of deck armor at 30,000 yards. My least protected ship has 13.5" of side armor and 5" of deck armor, given that Ryan is actually using 13.7" I should be effectively immune from fire between 20,000 and about 28,000 yards for his secondary battery. My 2nd class has 13" of side armor (but inclined at 12 deg) and 6" of deck armor so effectively immune from about 22,000 to 31,000 yards, My most modern class includes 15" of side armor at 15 degrees and 7" of deck armor so it would be effectively immune from 15,000 to 35,000 yards.
Cruising at a rough average range of 25,000 yards would make my ships effectively immune to his secondary battery and subject to penetrating hits only by his 17.7" guns of which he would have 90 strikes across 18 targets or 5 per ships.
Again cruising at 25,000 yards my ships are essentially immune to fire from the 13.7" battery with only the 90 odd shots from the 17.7" battery able to tell decisively. Now why might this be an issue is based on the
sinking of the Bismarck which was protected in a similar degree to my ship classes (12.6" side belt, 4" main deck plus 2" on the top deck (call it 5.5" effectively) I ran out there.
Actually lets take a quick comparison:
Bismarck:
Protection - Main Side Belt 12.60" (320mm)
Armor Deck - over Magazines 3.74" (95mm)
Armor Deck - over Machinery 3.25" (80mm)
(Note there was an extra deck of 50mm protection not listed here)
Veracruz:
Main: 13.5" / 343 mm
Armoured deck - single deck:
For and Aft decks: 5.00" / 127 mm
Forecastle: 1.00" / 25 mm Quarter deck: 1.00" / 25 mm
Virtuoso:
Main: 13.0" / 330 mm
Armoured deck - single deck
For and Aft decks: 6.00" / 152 mm
Forecastle: 1.00" / 25 mm Quarter deck: 1.00" / 25 mm
Santa Ana:
Main: 15.0" / 381 mm
Armoured deck - multiple decks:
For and Aft decks: 7.00" / 178 mm
Forecastle: 2.00" / 51 mm Quarter deck: 2.00" / 51 mm
Simply but 2 of the 3 classes weigh in at a similar displacement while the one is undersized but all three have greater armor protection as just a raw consideration than the Bismarck. So lets look at what happened:
Firing from ranges starting at 23,000 yards and dropping steadily to less than 4,000 yards she was hit by somewhere in the neighborhood of 300-400 shells of all calibers (out of 2,876 fired) of which by percentage 75-100 would have been large caliber 16" and 14" shells. If we took this by percentage for only the 16" shells that would be 40-50 rounds...one ship. Now she was struck repeatedly in ways that damaged her, blew out turrets shot away parts of the conning tower, etc, but she was still floating while being engaged at <10,000 yards by those shells (which would have greater side armor penetration than your 17.7" at 25,000). In other words with 210 large caliber hits you might (MIGHT) baring a lucky penetration completely disarm 2 of my BBs but that assume you could concentrate that much but you would need to land all of it on no more than 3 ships to succeed in sinking them.
Lascaris wrote: Ok. First has anyone heard the term concentrated fire? Fire won't be willy nilly distributed against every battleship in sight. It will be directed at 1-2 targets till these are crippled or forced out of the line, then move to the next target till that one is crippled and so on.
Second even if the fire was idiotically distributed across every battleship in sight 14 hits per ship average isn't exactly something to be shrugged of. Particularly in the older ships and battlecruisers they could well be causing crippling damage.
Third Gran Colombia has 50 odd cruiser submarines in the Atlantic. One would be expecting at least a significant of them in the vicinity of the battle. No less than a dozen, probably more. Which coupled with the non existence of anything approaching a serious screen would mean oh say half a dozen battleships sunk from submarines.
1) Even if you took it down to 1/3 of my ships (and there were 6 of 18 with major damage) see the math above for why that doesn't equate to sinking them. Moreover I'm not just tacking the same line back and forth endlessly, I am rotating units in and out of range in mixed formations that would make identifying one particular unit at 20mi distant a tough distinction.
2) See above
3) Ryan had 10 based out of Colon by his own designation, 1 of which was sunk by my own submarine screen in the early morning hours setting off a wild melee where they pursued my subs. Moreover once they did have my battle line in sight the nature of torpedoes in this era (since most folks seem to be using the rough dimensions of the US Mk 15) require transiting to within 5,000 yards to be effective. Trying to do that in the midst of a battle zone where your own fire is plunging all about and you are already scattered. Short of incidents like the Broad Fourteens subs in this era were not BB killers
As for the Darien landings. I won't go on whether the Colombians have lookouts over their whole coast. But the Mexicans after, yet one more successful multi-division landing with no specialist craft (allied militaries must really have been incompetent in WW2 to fail to manage even a fraction of that) in one of the most hostile terrains on Earth advance several dozen miles though a navigable river without being detected till they reach the rail line. Navigable river without any custom stations and patrols to at the very least keep an eye on contraband, in a country that is less than a democracy.?
That navigable river runs through one of the most unpopulated regions of the country since it is a rain forest wilderness devoid of almost any human habitation. It was only Ryan's Inf 5 score that allows him to have a rail line in the region but the river itself runs through essentially wilderness until it reaches Yaviza.
Oh and the attack WAS SPOTTED you incompetent. I know you are trying to cherry pick the log but you might have missed where a local garrison patrol spotted the assault 2/3rds of the way in, alerted the local commander, and got abotu a BN of reserves assembled in a region where there is nobody to assemble from while all of the Colombian firepower is headed to Ciudad.
Lascaris wrote:Anyway lets assume that the two Mexican brigades somehow reach undetected the rail line. With no artillery to speak of, of course, I might be willing to forget where sufficient river boats for 10,000 men were found in the middle of Darien or gathered together along with the remaining invading armadas in Mexico but adding to that enough capacity to bring a divisions worth of artillery along... The point is at the moment the line isn't just in use. The Colombians ar moving division after division accros the line to Panama. So can someone explain to me why exactly the divisions en route don't hit immediately the poor Mexican units that have reached the rail line?
Because their trains plummet in to the river. On a serious note these are two Ranger Bdes who have nothing but local forces in front of them until a sustained response is mounted ... at which point they will have to dismount from the train in the midst of swamp and jungle, they most certainly won't be able to do more than jury-rig the arty to fire from the train beds, then attempt to attack the troops stationed there. Now they can wait for a whole division to come on line so they have numerical superiority but that would take a couple trains and the terrain isn't really that conducive to flanking attacks anyway. Those divisions rolling along are piled up in stock cars not deployed in a battle front 1,000 yards wide advancing to contact, changing from one state to the other takes time and lacking anything resembling offloading facilities in the middle of the jungle the loss of equipment (not to mention backing and delays on down the line) would be severe and even then success isn't assured (since each division only carries 2 combat brigades the actual troop strength would be even).
Lascaris wrote:I can't recall whether there was an upper limit in how much of your tonnage could be capital ships (though I tend to believe there was? ) But weren't capital ships laid post 1915 supposed not to be more that half to 2/3 your total capital ship tonnage?
You were supposed to (last I checked) have half of your hull's laid prior to 1918. My Mexicana class (8 hulls) Presteza class (4 hulls) and most Veracruz class (6 hulls) qualify. Only the Virtuoso, Santa Ana and 2 of the Veracruz class were laid down after 1918. I also have the 2 old Austrian Dreadnoughts and 6 pre-dreadnoughts so if the dividing line changed to 1916 then I would have 20 capital ships on the old side and 18 on the new side.
