Ill let you answer this one yourself:
There were mistakes made on both sides, not just by Kurita. I just listed some of the things I think he did wrong. Allowing a force of that size & power through to your soft targets should never have happened in the first place.
You can't get lucky unless your hitting the enemy ( radar, effective shells ).
Indeed, and with a armor/piercing mechanic for naval ( and air attacks on naval ) ASW aircraft or dive bombers probably will have their damage significantly reduced versus armored targets. With armor piercing only torpedo bombers would be effective which they had none at Samar ( or at least no heavy torpedoes ).
The air attack effectiveness would be a balancing issue. Some very well armoured ships (North Carolinas etc) would not suffer greatly from most bombs with their 5” main deck, de-capping and splinter decks. Alternatively, dropping converted naval shells from great height/dive bombers or other specialist weapons like strat’ bombers using tallboys could be devastating against a stationary target.
If Yamato and 3 other Battleships fail to effectively hit cruiser ( or bigger ) sized CVEs until they can fire back with 5" guns, how can you be so sure that a lone Battleship always will "easily" obliterate a group of several cruisers?
Firstly, it took an hour for the
cruisers to close the gap on the T-3 CVEs to 10 miles. That’s 17,000 yards. Still quite a way for an 8” and still taking over half a minute to “land”. In the meantime, most of Kurita’s heavy units had been delayed (Yamato had been chased away and took no significant part in the battle) by torpedoes.
You say “effectively hit”. One of Kurita’s battleships
did score hits on a CVE but, just like with the unarmoured screens, the heavy AP shells did little damage. Even the 8” guns firing AP did mostly superficial damage. None of the battleships got within range of the CVEs 5” guns. The CVEs that were sunk by gunfire were sunk by cruisers & destroyers.
So again, the importance of not being armoured when fighting battleships is demonstrated. One of the DDs was hit more than 40 times (all calibres) before a lucky 8” shell took out her last engine.
You’ve got to remember that there’s a
huge difference between a shell passing through a ship to burst outside of it, while traveling
away from it, and a shell bursting
inside an armoured box that contains the blast (and all the remaining kinetic energy possessed by the fragmenting shell) where it will do the most damage.
The other reason I’m so sure battleships obliterate cruisers is that their heavy shells don’t just do their damage inside their target. They do a
lot MORE damage.
Look at what Graf Spee (little more than a heavy cruiser herself) did to Exeter. Two hits & a near miss from 11” shells.
A 300kg 11" shell might have a bursting charge of 6-7kg of explosives and impacts with significant kinetic energy. 15” shells weighing 880kg would have a bursting charge three times that of an 11” and vastly more kinetic energy. An 11” might knock-out a heavy cruiser’s turret but 15” shells
remove them! (see Cape Matapan, Fiume to see what heavy guns do to cruisers.)
Also, heavy cruisers can’t seriously hurt a battleship. Battleship protection schemes are typically designed to protect against their own calibre. So 8” shells are no serious threat. Even Graf Spee was in absolutely no danger of sinking. Yes, they can do lots of superficial damage with their higher rate of fire (typically two or three times that of a BB’s gun) and can get lucky & knock-out radar & directors & put holes in the funnels yada yada yada, but every big gun hit on a cruiser is going to do very serious damage. While the 8” shells are bouncing off anything important, the 15” shells are detonating inside. I can’t stress enough what a HUGE difference this makes. Seriously, a single 15” hit could cripple a heavy cruiser and three would probably sink one. If Exeter had taken those same two hits & near miss from Bismarck, there would only have been survivors to pick out of the water.
The only real weapon a cruiser has that can seriously threaten a battleship is the torpedo and by the time they get within torpedo range, they’re dead. There are very few engagements where cruisers (heavy or light) actually engaged battleships. This is because their captains knew just how vulnerable they were.
This effect should be modeled by doctrine, experience and perhaps intel advantage. Not overly complex piercing mechanics IMHO.
Imo it's easier to assume most secondary or small caliber guns will be DP AA guns and combine this into their AA value. No more stats just for the sake of adding more stats please.
Extra bonus if the Japanese heavy ships can't fire at charging incoming destroyers at Samar because these are to busy with shooting at the CAGs buzzing around them.
This is about anti-destroyer batteries. Well, yes, I suppose that could work but it’s an important fact that short guns were not as good against surface ships as longer barrelled guns and longer barrelled guns were not as good against aircraft as shorter guns. DPs were not bad in the AA roll but generally poor in the surface protection roll. Don’t mistake the huge technological advantage of the Allied VT proximity fuses with the 5"/38 being a good AA gun. These shells more than made-up for the inferiority of the 5” DP as an AA weapon but, thankfully, these guns were seldom (if ever) called upon for surface action by the capital ships carrying them. (Anybody know of an instance?)
Ironically, where the 5” DP would have excelled would have been radar controlled, close-in against destroyers making the Alan M Sumners just about the best screens of the war.
Do we need that much detail? To split out primaries, secondaries & AA batteries? I’ll agree with you, probably not. But an armour-penetration model that reflects the destructive power of big guns and the relative immunity to big guns of unarmoured ships would, IMHO, be a big step forward.
