Werent the Kongo Class battleships completely refitted with new armor? I cant find how long it took to refit them tho.
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I feel like refitting ships takes far too long
- Thread starter thedarkendstar
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For the first refit that involved engine and armor upgrades, it took 4 year 4 months for Haruna and 2 year 11 months for Kirishima and Kongo. Hiei's refit was aborted because of the (First) London Naval Treaty.
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See the above post. Also, for reference, Kongo was laid down in January 1911 and commissioned in August 1913. So it being more effective to just build a new ship seems an accurate representation. The Haruna refit also took longer than Yamato's construction (4 years 1 month)
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The refit to the Kongo-class did improve the belt somewhat, but generally-speaking that didn't actually increase the belt thickness (except for the bow and stern); this was done with internal armored bulkheads. The main increase in armor was to the deck, which was significantly-reinforced (this also isn't as hard as the belt, which has a cap on how much internal protection can be added without cramping the ship). The turrets were also uparmored somewhat.
Deck armor refits were actually pretty common in the interwar period, since most WWI capital ships had terrible deck armor. Torpedo bulge refits were also somewhat common on both battleships and occasionally carriers. I personally wish this was represented differently than the main armor, since the "secondary" armor isn't as important for repelling gunfire (at long range deck armor is critical, but even then far less is required than the belt since the angle is never steep enough to justify equal armoring) but did increase the reliability of the ship (protection for surface components, resistance against bombs or torpedoes, better stability offered by torpedo bulges). At the same time, this was easier to refit, although still being an expensive undertaking.
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Yeah, the belt armor still had a maximum thickness of 8 inches, the change was moving from incremental armor to uniform 8 inch all-or-nothing armor.
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True but in game this would be represented as well upgrading the armor no?As for the time I find it quite interesting that one took almost double the time of the other
The problem is that the in-game descriptions and such don't really match up, and the tech years are extremely inaccurate. All-or-nothing armor was formally adopted by the United States with the Nevada class, a 1912 design. I haven't played HOI4 in a while but isn't all-or-nothing a 1940 tech?
The result of that is we really don't know what the in-game refits represent outside the obvious ones.
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They were undertaken during times of complete peace, so a lot of stuff might have affected the schedule. In addition, Haruna was the first to undergo refit, so they might have been experimenting with it to figure out how to refit the Kongo class which make it longer than the other two.
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Technically that is the in-game way of representing it, but these rebuilds took a stupidly-long time to do in some cases (up to the full construction time for a new capital ship). The in-game approach literally treats you as building new ships for the Kongo and Conte di Cavour refits as well, which is an indicator of its somewhat ad-hoc nature when it comes to rebuild mechanics.
This is why I pointed out the distinction between upgrading belt armor versus deck armor; the latter was less significant, but far easier to refit and far more common to do. More importantly, outside of a slight improvement to internal protection the tech disparity between different belt armor techs is massive; a 1936 BB armor module represents, on average, ~13.5 inches of belt armor and 5 inches of deck armor. The 1940 belt goes as high as 15 inch belt and 8 inch deck. The 1922 module, however, covers everything between 8 and 14 inches of belt armor, and anything from 1.5 to 5 inches of deck armor. Battlecruisers tended mostly towards the lighter end, but even the refitted Kongo-class ended up with similar armor to the Renown class (more deck but less belt), yet in-game is represented as having significantly-better armor.
To make this a bit simpler, consider the difference between a refit of 1 level of armor to swapping between BB and BC armor, by showing the New York class (tier 1 engine and BB armor, historically 12-inch belt and 2-inch deck):
- BB-36: Internal bulkheads and particularly citadel armor reinforced, torpedo bulges modernized, turret armor increased, deck armor reinforced to at least 3.5 inches (typical of later US standard battleships). Extensive, but not impossible (not a +2 inch increase to belt armor, however).
- BC-36: Hull lengthened by ~150 feet (on a 570 foot length); bow and stern extended by cutting both ends off and building new sections between the ship section there, in order to increase the ship's speed. This represents a partial reconstruction of the ship; it might actually be more practical in this case to cut the ship entirely in half.
- BC + Engine 36: Extend previous refit by cutting into the engine compartments and enlarging them; more boilers will be needed, so the engine room needs to be considerably-expanded (you're going from ~25,000 horsepower to ~130,000 horsepower). At this point, you're definitely cutting the ship in half in order to even try to accomplish what is being done to overhaul it, meaning you're basically building a third of a battlecruiser in the middle of your old battleship, and that's only after cutting through hundreds of square feet of hull and armor plating.
Refitting armor more than 1 tech also represents effectively rebuilding the ships, since something like King George V's 14.7 inches of belt and 6 inches of deck armor is going to be very difficult to match with a considerably-smaller ship, and if you overload a ship with extra armor and engine power when its already relatively small, you're at risk of making an unstable ship (causing problems ranging from serious accuracy deficiencies to an increased risk of sinking from flooding damage).
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But my overall point is the game doesn’t make distinction between upgrading the primary or secondary armor of a ships so if you wanted to upgrade just the secondary armor you would have to upgrade the whole thing no?
As I mentioned at the start, technically yes. However, BC conversion has no historic comparison I can think of, and in-game BB/BC armor doesn't have enough variety to really represent small changes; there are huge differences between ships with the *same* armor in-game, and some ships actually had considerably-more armor than ships represented with better-armor (mostly just cruisers).
Sorry if I'm blabbering too much about the details and missing the main point, because the core of my initial response was:
1.) The IC cost for a 1922 battleship reconstruction shouldn't exceed the cost for a new 1936 battleship.
2.) Battlecruiser conversion, on the other hand, is sufficiently impractical that it quite possibly should. Battlecruisers tended to be a lot longer than early dreadnoughts, and even some prewar fast battleships.
3.) Refitting both the armor and engines for a capital ship still takes potentially the same length to do in reality as in-game, aka the same time as a new battleship. One or the other is a better idea, and I would generally never recommend refitting the armor. An engine refit gives you a far-more significant change than an armor refit does.
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The problem with just using the time it took to refit a ship vs building a ship is that a refit would have significantly fewer people working on it then a new ship. This is simply because for a new ship so will several things be built at the same time, having people working all over the ship. While for a refit so will the work force be limited to how many can work on the specific thing being upgraded.
So in the game so should there be a harsher limit to how many dockyards that be used for a refit then a new construction, but the IC cost should be lower then it is right now.
So in the game so should there be a harsher limit to how many dockyards that be used for a refit then a new construction, but the IC cost should be lower then it is right now.
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That could work - lowering the maximum number of shipyard that can be assigned to a refit to reduce the total IC cost while keeping the long refit time
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In my point of view:
I would keep the dockyard-space as it is. It doesn't matter for what reason a ship lies in the dock; occupied is occupied.
For the minor refits ( aaw-guns, torpedo tubes, radar etc. ) the time-balance is quiet good.
And for the major refits, like changing the whole steam engine-plant; the balance is satisfying.
So I wouldn't suggest any great "modification".
For sure, one can always "hone down" some niceties
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Interestingly, I actually find this somewhat backwards - several ships actually underwent the former refits (most notably the Kongo class), while so far as I know, outside of the treaty-skirting of the Mogami-class, no warships had their main battery altered after the ship was completed, even though it should theoretically be simpler than changing the armor or engines. Even where plans existed, such as with the Scharnhorst class (and I've heard proposals existed to replace the old 16" Mark 1 guns on the Colorado class with the newer, superheavy shell capable Mark 6 guns), they were never carried out, and you'd think there would be more obstacles to doing conversions that just didn't really happen than ones that actually did.
A better move would be to take your existing battleships and convert them into carriers, which will buy speed and take less time than ripping out the engines (also, if the designer is to be believed, you can get some crazy savings on conversion time when you change from battleship to carrier engines or vice versa because it doesn't seem to think they incur the same penalty as changing engines within the same type, but I'm still not sure if that's the interface lying) and instead just build new battleships and use the old ones for what utility they can provide as carriers because a 1936 battleship is always better than an early battleship with the same modules, but an early battleship and a 1944 battleship make for the exact same grade of carrier.
I guess it depends. Boilers and turbines? Absolutely. You have to dismantle the entire superstructure, all the decks to the boilers, remove the boilers, install new ones, and then rebuild the ship from that deck onwards. It was messy. Read about the Conte di Cavour and Andrea Doria-class battleships if you want to see what a complete reconstruction entailed - four years for the Conte di Cavour-class, and three for the Andrea Doria-class.
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It costs the difference between the current template and the new template, provides the new template costs more resources. So if you regun a light cruiser from three 1936 batteries to three 1940 batteries, it will cost 3 steel for that time.
Fully correct; not to mention the belonging auxiliary-mashines, pumps and the kilometers(!) of pipes.
I wouldn't say better, because the convertion to carrier, the refit of new engines and a new BB costs the same time. You start with 11 dockyards and after the focus Mare Nostro, you expand to 15. With 15, you need to finish your BBs in production (normally i finish all ships), refit your old CLs (they don't have armor) and DDs. To get it worse, Italy é the major with less factories in the game, and your entire air force is garbage. I'm having a hard time trying to discover how you're gonna convert 2 BBs to carriers and make +4 Littorios, being 2 in early construction. If you invest in dockyards early on, maybe, but you will probably be lackying with your army, or worse, your airforce.
If Mussolini was right in something, was when he said that, Italy is a big Carrier and doesn't need it (at least not like the japanese).