And those headline differences aren't necessarily that important either. If a ship displaces 10,000 tons it can only be so good: whether it has 8in or 6in guns is not necessarily that important as more 6in guns are just as powerful as fewer 8in (give or take); it can have 4in armour rather than 3in but that means less area is armoured - unless you want to reduce speed, which is a huge drawback in real life but not a drawback at all in the HOI2 combat model...
The challenge from a game design perspective is to sort out a way that the player can make meaningful choices without giving them a huge advantage over the AI or without creating a whole set of unrealistic designs...
Indeed. While one could argue that something like Brooklyn was inferior to a limited degree to panzerschiffes at long range it certainly would not be in situations similar to those at Battle of Barents Sea.
The RoF from Lützow class was around 15 per minutes (with that kind of RoF, ammo would be avilable for 48 mins) with total shell weight of 4500kg which includes 99kg of explosive charge.
Brooklyn could get 135 shells out in the same minute (for 22 mins) for 7965kg of shellage with 121,5kg charge.
So not only had this American "light" cruiser much better firepower than the German pocket "battleship" it managed to do it with 30% less diplacement, and much better protection, speed and endurance.
One could argue that making an overgunned cruiser should yield, in HoI2 terms, a ship with lesser stats. British certainly found out that it wasn't that good idea with the trio aptly nicknamed Spurious, Curious and Outrageous (some official sourses give Furious, Glorious and Courageous as their "real" names).
TheLand said exactly what I was thinking about posting here, calibers have different pros and cons; in the end the ship's size matters the most.
And like I have said before, there wasn't that much compromising things like armour for speed and firepower in WW2 era. Majority of WW2 ship designs aimed to create balanced ships with good armour, firepower and speed; things like Washington "Tin-clads" and light scout cruisers (early Condottiere and Agano/Oyodo) were exceptions.
Again this was certainly significant in some areas - British battleships were given geared turbines to improve their fuel efficiency (for instance).
Geared turbines are about as old as steam turbines themself. Even Dreadnought was geared. In fact, I don't think you can have steam turbine ship at all without reduction gears, as the turbines themself are rotating in thousands of RPM range, while the propeller shafts were in hundreds.
In Myokos case (which might be of interest as the same setup was used on Amagi/Akagi BC/CV) it was like this in short;
There were four trubine rooms, each with 4 turbines (first 2 HP, then 2 LP). The 4 turbines in each room were connected all to one shaft (of the four) by four-pinion reduction gear. Further, there were 2 cruising turbines in the 2 foward turbine rooms, which had their own reduction gear (the RPM was further lowered with the main gear).
I'd be very interested in detalied info on the turbine arrangements on KGV, for example, if you have.
Thats actually my worry as well. It seems like the Devs have suggested that AI nations will have units that reflect their historical choices (USSR will embrace sloped armor earlier, for example), but if thats the case then the player will have an advantage because he is not handicapped.
I think the dev statement you are thinking about was about different brigade composition for divisions? Like soviets using artillery divisions, or Japan using it's marines as single brigades.
across europe.
