It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about anything you want, even if it's not naval/military-related.
Rule the Waves II was released on Saturday, much to my delight and Lord Nelson's chagrin. Much like the first game, it makes you Grand Admiral, in charge of building an entire fleet and leading it in war. Unlike the first game, which ran through about 1925 and pretty much ignored air power, this one goes through the dawn of the missile age. Early on, it's very similar to the first game, although a lot of the systems have been subtly tweaked. Overall, it's an improvement in terms of realism. The air operations system isn't documented all that well, so I'm still trying to figure that out, and my one game so far didn't make it past 1940 before I got tired of it and restarted.
My one serious criticism would be that the fiscal end of the game seems seriously out of wack. In my first game as the Americans I found myself unable to afford more than about one capital ship at a time. In my second game, playing as the British, I found myself blockaded by the Germans in 1910. Their budget was almost as big as mine, and their fleet might have been larger. This was seriously wrong for obvious reasons. Also, the tendency of the AI to design ships that can't be built is annoying, particularly when it then builds them for itself anyway. I can't tell you how many enemy ships I've encountered in ~1910 toting dual-purpose guns. Despite all that, it's a very enjoyable game, and I'd recommend at least downloading the demo.
We've reached the first anniversary of the Falklands War series, and the first part has been overhauled. I think we're past the halfway point, but I've been wrong on such things before. Other updates are to So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Strategy Part 2, the Super-Dreadnoughts, There Seems To Be Something Wrong With Our Bloody Ships Today, Millennium Challenge 2002 and Auxiliaries Part 1.
Comments
On the subject of RTW2, I've been kicking around the idea of doing some sort of community game. The idea is that the group would set priorities and approve ship design and procurement, and I'd handle the implementation and fight the battles. We could even look at things like modeling politics in terms of who gets to vote and make decisions. Unfortunately, there's no multiplayer support, so we could only run one side. The good thing is that the save file is pretty easy to edit (or at least in was in RTW1) so if their model and ours starts to diverge, I can bring them back into line. Anyone interested?
Bean: I would probably be interested. I ran a similar game in a sci-fi setting, which I think I linked here some time last year - that one had no technical support besides a few spreadsheets, which helps with multiplayer but hurts the automatic resolution of battles. I will warn you that keeping on top of turns and writing battles the way I did it got to be a huge task. I wasn't up for it, which is why it ended early, but perhaps you're better organized than I am. (Most people are, tbh.) And if you can do it in RTW, then you're probably fine for a lot of that.
Is RTW2 moddable? Any hope that mods might eventually help with the issues?
We’ll have to see how it works. Because of the scale (1 turn/month) I won’t necessarily run turn-by-turn here, and I have no idea what level of detail I’ll go into on the battles. Probably a couple paragraphs each. But I’ll take a look at that and see if it will be any help.
@Protagoras
I don’t believe there’s any mod support. I do expect updates to help with some of it, and the rest, I may just have to live with. And if I want a better financial model, I can just edit the save.
The most realistic setting for "fleet size" is "very large", and do remember to mothball/reserve fleet most of your ships during peacetime.
(Maintaining a fleet at battle readiness is ridiculously expensive. Mothballing/reserve fleet cuts the expense at the cost of ruining crew quality until you take some time to work it back up.)
The game naval budgets are more level than they should be to provide more challenge, the "historical" check box on game start is supposed to make them more realistic, but right now that's bugged. It should be fixed in the patch that was promised for today.
I think that game was on medium, which should be playable at least for the US. (Someone like Italy might be a different matter.) I do need to get more aggressive about mothballing, but I'll point to the second game as an example of something still being seriously wrong, because I got blockaded at certain points. (Some of this was because of how many ships I had scattered around, but it was still rather annoying.)
And I'm certainly looking forward to the patch.
Anyone here have recommendations on what to see in Dunkirk?
I should have several hours to spend there.
I'd be interested in a SYWTBA early 20th century navy series too.
On a different topic, suppose some sort of emissions limiting agreement made sailing ships competitive again. What would a sail powered tanker or container ship look like? I expect there would be a big increase in cost from a switch towards sail, but then there would also be large costs attached to other (less cool?) green initiatives. Is there any way we could have fleets of 'DynaRig' equipped clippers without wrecking global trade?
What makes for a good gun? I'm talking large caliber artillery here, but people are alway going on about how, e.g. the german 88mm, 5'38, or what have you were amazing, but I've never quite understood what made them so much better than their contemporaries of similar size, at least not when the problem wasn't blatant, like poor ammunition handling or build quality.
Alexander: Sailing ships have realistic size limits, because practical sail area isn't much better than linearly proportional to hull size, whereas mass/inertia is proportional roughly to the cube(for a given hull design). A pretty good write-up of sailing ship design theory, at least to this landlubber's eyes, is https://grantvillegazette.com/article/publish-281/ and https://grantvillegazette.com/article/publish-292/ - it's from an alt-hist series, but the bulk of the article is straightforward science and engineering. I don't think an oil-tanker-sized ship is practical with sails under any imaginable circumstances. Historically, pure sailing ships never seem to have gone much past 5-6000 tons. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GreatRepublic(1853_clipper), for example.
Another Rule the Waves quirk. Battles occur in locations that have very little respect for geography. What I'm pretty sure it does is have a couple of different locations for each power, and picks them at random. This is often slightly irritating, and occasionally really confusing. I'm currently fighting the Russians, and I was rather bemused to find their fleet in the Western Approaches.
cassander: That's a rather interesting question that I'd also love to hear an answer to. Weight and handling characteristics, perhaps?
cassander: One common feature of most of the notably good guns is versatile design - the German "88" was an antiaircraft cannon, it's right there in the official name, but it came with the sights and carriage and ammunition and whatnot to serve as a perfectly good antitank gun or field artillery piece. Compare British antiaircraft guns with better ballistic performance but the gunners facing backwards, or American ones that couldn't depress below horizontal. And the 5"/38 was of course explicitly designed to replace both a specialized antiaircraft and a specialized antiship gun. The British 25-pdr gun-howitzer and the later Soviet D-30 in 122mm built their reputation by being notionally indirect-fire howitzers that had everything set up for easy direct-fire e.g. antitank use.
The other is making things as easy as possible on the gun crews, because easy things become very difficult in combat. Sometimes this is revolutionary design features like the hydropneumatic recoil mechanism of the "French 75" that eliminated the entire step where you had to manhandle the gun back into firing position. Or automatic fuze-setters in anti-aircraft guns. Usually, though, it's just the engineers taking the time to get everything just right while the gun is still on the drawing board, rather than blaming the gunners for not flawlessly carrying out a needlessly complex procedure under fire.
Ballistic cleverness that gets you 10-20% more range or armor penetration or whatnot almost never qualifies, and it anti-qualifies if as is too often the case it costs you barrel life and accuracy.
@Alexander
That's not what I'm proposing. I'm proposing a game with strategic decisions made by the community and implemented by me. Sorry, but for some reason I have trouble sustaining motivation on SYWTBAMN, and I don't see any reason for that to change if we move the setting back 80+ years.
As for sail, there have been lots of proposals going back several decades to use clever aerodynamics and the wind to reduce fuel bills, most prominently Flettner rotors. None have seen much use. I'm pretty sure that the killer is maintenance costs. The nautical environment is a harsh one, and it takes a lot more work to keep a complicated machine going on deck than it does down in the hold. The extra salaries eat the fuel savings and then some.
@cassander
I'd broadly agree with what John has said on this. But I'd add that it's a gun which balances the various drivers on it well. For instance, the 5"/38 shell is just the right weight. It's at the very upper end of what can be loaded quickly by hand at high angles. Much heavier, and your rate of fire falls off fast. But lighter shells are less effective, and the USN struggled to deal with this when it came time to design a successor. Another big thing is reliability. The 5"/38 wasn't perfect when it was introduced, but it was debugged pretty thoroughly before WWII. The British couldn't really do that because they had to develop a new gun/mount for every single class. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.) Lastly, it made things easy on the crew. Automatic fuze-setters increased rate of fire about 25%, the ergonomics were vastly improved by power-elevation, which let the trunions be further back so the breach didn't move as much. Some British guns had a pit in the floor that was covered at low angles so the gun could be loaded at high ones. And power ramming was another big RoF increment.
Thinking over the three examples given so far, I also see that all of them were essentially the first example in their class to get everything right. The French 75 had hydropneumatic recoil and was thus much faster-firing. The 88 was the first AA gun with good dual-role capability. The 5"/38 had all the stuff already discussed, which was a big change from things like the 5"/25 used previously.
@John Schilling and Bean
It sounds like what you're saying is that soft factors can be huge, getting the buttons/handles/angles/balance all right. Also everything working as it was supposed to, which is what I suspected.
But let's take the 5"/25 vs. the 5"/38 as examples. Both are about the same size, and fire semi-fixed shells of about the same weight. the 38 is longer of course and has much higher velocity which is obviously beneficial and was mounted in a turret, but were those the only major differences?
They were pretty different guns. The 5"/25 was designed for manual operation and handiness in the barrage fire AA role. This meant the lightest gun possible, and a good rate of fire, but not much concern for muzzle velocity. The 5"/38 was meant for power operation in a turret, which meant it could be heavier and longer. And that also let them do a bunch of other stuff like the fuze-setting hoists. There wasn't anything wrong with the 5"/25, but the ~15 years between the two guns saw a lot of innovations.
Also, neither fired semi-fixed shells. The 5"/38 was separate, while the 5"/25 was fixed. (I know Campbell says differently, but NavWeaps thinks he was wrong.)
JS and Bean already touched on something I'd like to emphasize: there's an element of design trade-offs and needed roles. Just about any design element of a gun has costs and benefits, and the mix of choices you make produces a gun that's more or less useful for certain roles.
For example, the 88 is pretty large for a field gun, which makes it more expensive to build, harder to hide, and more difficult to keep in supply than a smaller gun. But it used that size well, to produce a useful combination of range, accuracy, penetration, and payload. And that combination filled two big roles that the Germans desperately needed.
In the anti-tank role, it covered a gap in other major German weapons systems. Several early-war British and French tanks (most notably the Matilda) had heavy enough armor that early-war German tanks had difficulty piercing them, but the 88 pierced them easily at a distance that out-ranged their own guns. Later-model German tanks, assault guns, and tank destroyers were generally equipped with heavier gun, but by that point the 88 had already gotten its reputation.
The anti-aircraft role was more straightforward: as the war went on, the British and Americans achieved air superiority in Europe and North Africa and used it to pursue a large-scale strategic bombing campaign. And the 88 was big enough to provide a degree of protection against heavy strategic bombers, while still being portable enough to provide protection to front-line units against tactical bombers (and the dual-role capability meant that you didn't have to bring a second gun along to fill this role).
It probably helped quite a bit that the 88 was used heavily and effectively against English-speaking (British and American) forces, in both roles. The anti-aircraft role came up quite a bit against the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign, and the anti-tank role was a big part of German tactical doctrine against the British in North Africa.
Back to trade-offs: a bigger gun would have been slower firing and would have been more expensive to build, harder to supply, and harder to tow around and set up in firing positions in a timely manner, reducing its tactical utility. And a smaller gun would have had a shorter effective range against the same targets. Basically, the 88 was a good gun because the 37mm guns were too small and the 105mm guns were too big, and those were Germany's other major choices for anti-tank and anti-aircraft roles the first few years of the war.
There were also some very good 75mm German guns, but those weren't put into production until later in the war and didn't make a big as impression because 1) everyone had better systems later in the war (I think the Allies relied mostly on ~40mm guns for both roles early in the war, like the British 2-pounder, and only developed and mass-produced larger guns after learning their usefulness the hard way), and 2) the differences in performance between the 75s and 88s wasn't anything like as dramatic as the difference between the 88 and a 37mm or 40mm gun.
@John Schilling
Re the Flak 18/36/37 being "a perfectly good [antitank gun or] field artillery piece", I know it was used for bunker busting (also as coastal artillery, both in planned emplacements and as a field expedient), but was it also used by the Germans in a general field artillery mode against soft skinned and/or area targets (presumably using the regular flak shell, or was there an HE shell for it as well)?
Le Wik's article (it's been decades since I either had or read a book about it) mentions the Nationalists using their 88s in both direct and indirect (! - I guess just by fire, observe, and correct methods - I tend to doubt the gun had ballistics tables for indirect fire) battlefield support roles, but other than that no mentions other than AA, AT, bunker busting, and a bit of anti-ship.
Can you elaborate a bit off the top of your head?
The Flak 36/37, and I believe the 18, came with indirect fire tables and sights - that was part of the dev team's philosophy of "anything this gun plausibly could do, we'll give it the tools to do", and a small up-front cost to add ultimately tens of thousands of emergency-capability artillery pieces to the German army. I don't think that capability was used very often, and it's not what made the gun famous, but it was there.
Direct fire against infantry targets was definitely on the agenda. Most everybody who had antitank guns capable of firing HE shell, found them to be useful for dealing with infantry who'd found something bulletproof to hide behind. Not just pillboxes but buildings, walls, foxholes, hedgerows, etc. Infantry that hadn't found something bulletproof to hide behind were probably too spread out and mobile to engaged with artillery of any sort and were what you had machine guns for.
And on the subject of versatility as a way to earn your gun a spot in the pantheon, if you're tasked with designing an antitank gun, make sure there's a decent HE shell for it. Not everybody figured that out.
Any advice for getting started with Rule the Waves? I tried the demo, and slammed headfirst into a giant wall of spreadsheets.
With the help of the manual, some trial and error, and the auto-designer, I managed to figure out enough to design and build some new ships, but I'm still feeling very... aimless. There's no obvious end goal, I'm just screwing around, buying new ships or scrapping old ones, and clicking "end turn" over and over while I wait for something to happen.
I started building up for a war with France, because they had some colonies near Japan that I figured would be easy to take, but the demo ran out before tensions even got halfway. I never got to see any of my ships fight.
@beleester
It may not be everyone's cup of tea. I love trying to figure out the best possible designs, although I also frequently provoke wars to see them fight.
Although I'm becoming increasingly suspicious of their financial models. I'm currently Britain, and it's about 1925. Germany, with a slightly larger budget, has like twice as many capital ships. Even with reserving everything immediately, they shouldn't be able to do that. I think some of this is that they didn't do a good job of balancing economics for the new, longer campaign, but I had the same issue when I was the US, so I suspect that the AI is just flat-out cheating. I'll try to open up the save files and find out.
Seriously, I've never had such sharply mixed feelings about a game. I love the shipbuilding, and fighting is fun (although an box for "auto-resolve minor battles" wouldn't go amiss) but I don't like fighting for my life against overwhelming odds, which is what the late game turns into.
@bean
You've often made the point that steel and air are cheap relative to everything else in a warship. However, it seems that if you build a bigger ship the designers inevitably find a way to fill it with more stuff (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, if it gives more capability.) So, do you have good examples of a navy building ships larger than needed primarily to allow for future expansion or easier internal layout/maintenance? Like, has anyone put a Perry or a Burke worth of equipment inside something 30% bigger just so that they have more space?
The Spruance are the only really good example of this, when they basically did exactly that. The Ticos use the same basic hull, and were able to because there was so much extra space. The problem is that people (usually Congress) tend to assume the relationship is linear and try to cap size.
@redRover
Some, but by no means all, of the earlier proposals for the LCS were an attempt to do this, build a relatively big hull (for the level of capability) with a lot of extra space that different modules could be plugged into. but then the design got stupid with insisting on a ludicrously high speed, and the ridiculous idea of hot-swapping the modules gained currency, and we got the disaster that we now have. the FREMM frigate might be considered a successful, if less ambitious, example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FREMMmultipurposefrigate
Modern ships tend to have more growth margin than old ones, because they're going to be around longer. They also tend to have more room for things like access, because labor costs are higher these days, so they'd rather, for instance, bring food aboard using a forklift instead of having a bunch of guys do it by hand. Some ships like FREMM have even more margin because they might need to be fitted with multiple different sets of weapons for different customers. Modules are even more of the same, adding weight to make it easier to switch equipment in and out. None of these are quite the same as the deliberate overbuilding that characterized the Spru-cans.
Alsadius and Bean: Thanks, that was a good read, and reminds me that I should try and get hold of the 1632 books. If the cost per ship would shoot up (because of the extra crew required for maintenance) and the number of ships required would also increase (due to their smaller size and capacity) then a second age of sail probably isn't something I can look forward to.
Re RTW2, Apologies, it wasn't wise of me to compare it to that series. Are the decisions involved things like trying to pick when to switch from 6"QF to all big gun, or trading off between patrolling cruisers and a bigger battle-fleet? It sounds like an fun game to try things out in.
You can find 1632 itself through the Baen library, and there was a CD in most Baen books through about 2010. You can find everything in the series through then if you look a bit.
Not a big deal. Just didn't want to raise false expectations.
Pretty much, although a lot of that is dictated by available tech. (It won't let you just build dreadnoughts in 1900, for instance.)
I've been trying to piece together the data on the recent Flight 1492 accident. The chain of events looks like this:
I don't have the qualification to judge which of those options would be the best one. Obviously, landing an overweight craft with full load of fuel is dangerous. But letting an essentially blind and direct law-controlled aircraft with only a limited channel of communication to the ATC circle around in the busy airspace of the major airport isn't very safe either. One way or another, the pilots decided to land.
— at 1100 ft windshear prediction system issues five warnings recommending to perform a go-around. The crew continues to attempt landing.
— at 180 ft glideslope warning is issued, as the aircraft is sinking too low. To compensate for this, pilots increased thrust, also increasing speed. When the aircraft appeared descends to the flare altitude (16 ft) it's speed is 170 kt. The speed is obviously too high to attempt a landing, moreover the aircraft overshoots the point of touchdown, by more than a km. Nevertheless the pilots attempt to land.
Interjection: it might seem very strange that crew attempted landing in such adverse conditions despite multiple factors stacked against them. One could only theoretize as to what caused them to do that, but one of the things in the mix might be that the Aeroflot discourages pilots from performing a go-around, claiming that it causes "reputation damage" to airline. Moreover, pilots are forbidden from piloting in the direct mode outside of the simulator. Also, since SSJ is a regional aircraft, the pilots probably weren't very experienced.
I think this sums it. From the outlook, this seems like a case of one too many piloting errors, possibly and probably as a result of a company politics resulting in people having little to no experience of manual piloting making decisions. Not a new problem by any means, but made worse as the lack of pilots becomes pressing.
Wow. That's a horrifying tale. A major pilot error, a serious technical problem, then a string of increasingly stupid decisions coming out of the cockpit. I wouldn't say that was one too many pilot errors, it was about three too many. I'm just surprised it survived the first 5G bounce. That seems like a lot more than I'd expect a typical airliner to stand. Then again, I don't remember limit numbers for Boeing/Airbus planes in similar circumstances.
@bean
Yeah, there was a lot of flak pointed at SSJ immediately after the accident, but all evidence points in the other direction. Not that the aircraft doesn't have it's share of technical problems, but they are of different origin. SSJ is a first aircraft produced in Russia in partnership with western companies. When Russia was sanctioned, SSJ was hit hard, since a lot of its components, especially engines, are a product of cooperation. As a result, spare parts have become scarce and/or unavailable. This essentially destroyed craft's export perspectives and made a lot of problems for those still using it. I think they have learned the lesson, and the next big civil aviation project in Russia, the MC-21, will be available with either P&W engine, or a completely locally-produced one, no exotic hybrids.
But the design itself is pretty sound, and the fact that the crashed plane didn't just fell apart right there on the landing strip is a testimony to that. I doubt that any other airframe would have fared much better in the circumstances.
The electrical failure after the lightning hit is very, very concerning, and seems like a potential fundamental problem instead of something we can blame on sanctions. But I agree that the failure on landing is not the sort of thing any airliner could be expected to survive. Prime fault is still clearly with the crew.
In SYTWBABB-related news, Italy has just launched its new aircraft carrier (officially an LHD) Trieste.
And I mean launched- the ship actually slid down the ways at the Fincantieri yard in Castellammare di Stabia near Naples. I don't know when a warship of this size was last launched in the traditional manner rather than by flooding a drydock.
Wow. It probably has been a long time, although I suppose it depends on how nationalist the procurement people are. Slipway construction and launch is pretty cheap from a capital point of view, even if it's more expensive per-unit. So it makes sense to do if you're only planning to buy one in a long while. That might explain Italy's choices here. The other alternative is to outsource construction, but that has political drawbacks.
Registering my own interest in a RTW2 community game.
Aye, I'd love to be a part of a community game as well.
I'd also be potentially interested in a community game