So much excitement about the old "Bismarck is the best ship ever" chestnut
.
@Paul.Ketcham covers off the most important stuff. I don't have anything more to add, beyond a tongue-in-cheek look at the way the pro-Bismarck crowd write off its loss due to a lucky hit, and to mention it's speed was reduced due to the hit from PoW in the initial engagement as well - not as much as the rudder hit, but it didn't escape the Battle of the Denmark Straight fully functional, even if we ignore the reduced fuel on board from the post-hit leakage.
Against two battleships Bismarck would have lost anyway, but Bismarck was effectively defeated by a battleship that was 15 years older and 10 000 tons lighter. Hard to sink, but a floating wreck has zero combat value.
This is also another biggy. What matters with ships isn't whether they're still afloat - it's whether they can still do their job. The afloat bit, if they've been disabled, is only useful if they can be brought back to port and repaired. In combat, rendering a ship combat ineffective is the goal.
Danish Coastal Defence Ship HMS Niels Juel:
Add: Seconday 1
Replace: CA2->BCA1, LCB1->Torpedo 1
Given Niels Iuel had a broadside of one fixed submerged 45cm (most surface ship TTs in WW2 were 53.3 cm or 61 cm) TT, and a total torpedo storage of four (and there were only ever eight torpedoes made for the ship), I'd suggest leaving this out. This is another case of trying to "tick a box", when the effective capability of Niels Iuel as a torpedo vessel is far, far below that of a ship with one torpedo module.
The Coastal Defence Ship should have a penalty at Deep Oceans the same as Light Cruisers as that was about their size.
Light cruisers generally had deeper draught and a hull shape better designed for the open ocean (and were often longer as well). There's a lot more to seaworthiness than displacement. I'd be strongly opposed to suggesting light cruisers had a penalty in deep oceans, and am not particularly well-disposed towards the penalty for destroyers. I agree coastal defence ships (generally shallow draught and designed for coastal areas) should have a penalty in everything other than fjords/archipeligos and shallow seas.
Just because it was laid down in 1936 does not change the fact it was head and shoulders over other battleships at that time. I realize its performace was disastrous but that was predicated on a one ina thousand shot on its steering mechanism. There needs to be a tech that reflects this. Really, there need to be ship techs unique to each nation.
If you actually break the ship's systems down individually, I'm afraid your claim doesn't hold water. It was competitive - I'm not saying it was outright worse on balance (although it did have some areas where it was noticeably weaker than its contemporaries) - but "head and shoulders above" is something that is unsupported by any serious book on warships I've read. I'd be very interested in your source for these views.
the 3.7cm gun had a fire rate of like 30 rounds per minute and was probably inferior to the 40mm in pretty much every important area
The Germans did develop some fairly advanced (for the time) triaxially-stabilised mounts* for the 3.7cm SK C/30, but the gun itself had a far too low rate of fire to be a strong AA weapon for the late 1930s. They produced a modified version of the Army's Flak 36 for naval use later in the war that was more capable, but that was too late for Bismarck (I'm 99% sure, but going from memory, so could be wrong).
* Although these had some limits to training effectively during heavy rolls.
in particular USA did alot better in as can be seen at their rather low loss of capital ships due to air attack even consider how much air attacks they faced.
While the USN has a very good reputation based on its late-war AA, the RN was the navy that went into WW2 with the strongest AA batteries, and with some of the most effort put into AA fire control (but it had made some sub-optimal choices in terms of its fire control development, and the outbreak of war was at a time before they could be remedied, so when they mobilised they were stuck with HACS rather than a system designed to be tachymetric from the ground-up). The British 4.5in gun was also very similar in capability ballistically to the US 5in/38, but the US had a better system of mounts/ammunition supply, and by focussing on a smaller number of guns, could do a better job with them (the British had a veritable zoo of medium AA weapons, as well as less budget, so had less capacity to focus on optimisation and mass production).
Just out of curiosity, what's the name of the smallest ship that made it into the game by real-life tonnage, excluding submarines?
The Draugs, at 550t, are strong contenders (and are a bit inconsistent given their combat effectiveness in the 1930s). Prior to MtG it was (as
@xtfoster well says) about 1000 tons (although some of the Italian TBs were in the 600-ton range, and also of questionable combat effectiveness). Post-MtG, the inclusion of some ships as minelayers and sweepers has added more inconsistency into what is and isn't included. Not crazily much, but it's a bit difficult to judge what the design goals are at times.
The thing is it should probably not have been disabled by bi-planes in the first place, however there was quite a few battleship casulties due to air Power in the first half of the war including the allies so it was not a unique german problem. But the threat Aircrafts possesed to ships was known Before Bismarck was even laid down so it is not possible to defend the very lackluster AA the Bismarck class was equipped with.
It show more how flawed the AA was since they had not taken account for these Aircrafts, even though they was used at the time. Hitting them given their slow speed is not that difficult since speed make it exponentially difficult to hit Aircrafts.
Iirc, there were actually issues with Bismarck's fire control coping with aircraft moving as slowly as the Swordfish, which complicated matters. AA fire control at the time used mechanical (or electro-mechanical) computers, and from memory the way they made calculations wasn't optimised for slower aircraft.
The Italian 88mm guns, while a bit thin, had some pretty advanced mounts - so while I agree they had too little heavy AA (and I think too little close-in as well, but can't remember for sure), they were pretty innovative in how they were mounted. Sadly, the innovation was a bit too ahead of its time, and they were (again, iirc) a tad unreliable. But Italy could arguably said to have had the most advanced (but also least reliable) stabilisation of its large-calibre AA of any of the WW2 navies.
For starters, Bismarck proved to be unsinkable, and had to be scuttled. I will have to research this but methinks that while you are admittedly quite informed on the subject, yours is a contrarian view.
Unsinkable's a pretty big claim (particularly given what happened to its sister ship - which was clearly not unsinkable). German shipbuilding in the first half of the 20th century did an exceptional job with watertight subdivision, which makes a ship very difficult to sink. This is good if a ship can be disabled post-battle, but useless if it can't.
That's weak actually. Bismarck was defeated by a lottery jackpot hit of an airborne torpedo. Rodney had little to do with it.
Let's try a thought experiment. What if people started saying "Hood was a great ship - it just got ridiculously unlucky with one critical hit - otherwise it could have gone toe-to-toe with Bismarck and stood a decent chance of defeating it". That's stretching things a bit (particularly given Hood's lack of modernisation or even recent refit), but as
@egslim well suggests, bad luck was not the sole preserve of the Kriegsmarine during Bismarck's sortie!
It has 4 twin turrets, resulting in a heavier ship for less firepower than the 3 triples standard of most ships at this point (better-protected than the quad-turrets on the KGV, and somewhat-better than the split-compartment quads on the Richelieu, which could still have the turret ring jammed for both compartments by one hit). This is an obsolete gun layout by the measure of every other navy, having been abandoned in WWI as a poor argument in the face of the weight-savings and even larger batteries that could be fit onto a ship for cheaper with triple-turrets (or quad-turrets, which always seemed a step too-far to me).
Even at the time
Vanguard was designed, the Admiralty preferred an A-B-X-Y layout* (balanced firepower, and also better balance in terms of trim and stability), but clearly the benefits of triple turrets, combined with the extra weight and cost of four turrets, meant that the best compromise (or at least the compromise the Admiralty settled on with the Lions) was with three triple turrets rather than four twin turrets.
* Based on a comment in Raven and Roberts' British Battleships of World War Two.
If it were i am convinced that things would have gone different as they did when Bismarck met Hood.
The outcome of naval combat has a very wide probability distribution. It's perfectly plausible to say that
Prince of Wales and
Hood could have disabled or sunk Bismarck in that first encounter. I've never seen, even in the most biased sources, anyone claim other than that
Bismarck got lucky at the Denmark Strait.
A thing to consider is the relative importance of such ships for their country. Italy, France and Portugal had colonial empires and needed ships to show the flag but couldn't afford many cruisers (like the Royal Navy or US Navy). American and British sloops can be reasonably assumed to be part of a convoy when they are built. The Eritrea, Bougainville and Afonso de Albuquerque classes filled a role similar to RN cruisers (but much weaker). we wanted to represent this.
The RN had more sloops in 1936 than any other navy, and these were designed with convoy protection and anti-submarine warfare in mind, but iirc also had a secondary "showing the flag" role. While the US Coast Guard vessels were for control of local waters, they were functionally very similar (or more) capable than Eritrea or the Bougainvilles in a surface or anti-submarine clash, and when push came to shove in WW2 were used in this role (indeed, 10 were loaned to the UK and reclassified as sloops, and used in the escort role).
The same underlying logic you've used could be applied to small destroyers used as fleet destroyers by some navies, such that there's no need to in the fleet destroyer role, there's no need to include smaller destroyers for the navies that have fleet destroyers. This isn't an argument I'd make, and rather I'm strongly of the view that ships should be included if they meet a functional criterion, and can be accommodated by the existing techs and equipment. I'm not of the view that those sloops that are being included are appropriately represented by old cruiser hulls (too many HP for their size), and so including them makes the ships selected more out-of-whack with history (given the other sloops can't go in), not less. Including Eritrea and not the Treasury-class Cutters is flat-out inconsistent, given their very similar size and capability, even if I'd argue for excluding both given the current tech/equipment available.
I honestly think the Fire control methods technologies should reduce those penalties indicating the training and familiarity of the ships companies with these temperamental advanced systems, without ever quite removing the malus altogether.
Perhaps by adding 3%/6%/7% reliability per level or something similar.
I'd personally be in favor of fire control just being something that can be disabled by a critical hit rather than itself dropping reliability; that way, an advanced fire control getting disabled means a crapload more than a level-0 one dropping your attack bonus by 5%.
Instead, advanced fire control somehow causes you to take more frequent damage from torpedoes, explode spectacularly more often, lose rudders more often...
I'm strongly in the Paul Ketcham camp here - I'm not a fan of the reliability malus as it's applied to fire control.
Fire Control should actually increase hit chance rather than damage, better fire Control should make ships more accurate, especially in night time and in bad weather. The main weakness of the Japanse battleships was during the night and bad weather such as battle of surigao strait in which the japanse was unable to return fire due to the night while the american ships caused Heavy damage to the japanse vessels.
Keep in mind that one 'tick' in HoI4 is an hour - so it's not one salvo, but possibly hundreds of them. Something that increase the chance to hit increases the proportion of shots fired that do hit, therefore increasing damage. So it's in-effect the same thing, over time, at the level of abstraction in HoI4 (I think - let me know if I've got my brains scrambled).
Argubly US also had the best medium AA gun, the 40 mm which it produced in huge quantities and fitted on pretty much Everything that floated. However I think they only really started to use it in 1942/1943.
The RN and the USN - the British army adopted the 40mm Bofors in 1937, and then Britain paid for a number of US factories to start building it. The US got in on the act as well, and iirc nabbed a lot of the production the British had put in motion, while setting up more of my own. Note that's a very rough recollection, but I'm fairly sure it's more-or-less on point. It was a similar story with the US adoption of the Oerlikon.
It's something that's often not raised a lot in these discussions, but the main medium-strength (ie, not 20mm or less, not heavy) US AA gun in 1941 and 1942, and still in widespread use iirc in 1943, was the 1.1in Mk I, that was not terribly successful.
While it served a heavily meaningful purpose in the real war effort in it's opening days get those aircraft to the front line, in games terms that's not even something we can do. It's historical role as an AKV in game doesn't even exists (even though it was an AV/Seaplane Tender, it's war effort made it into a defacto AKV/Aircraft Transport, a designation that had not yet been created). Land based planes can teleport anywhere at will (God I miss Pacific Storm, where we had to actually transport everything).
Aye, sorry, I agree (but didn't want to come off as too negative earlier) - on balance I'd suggest not including Langley at all, either as an AV or a CV, but I'm not too worried about it going in as either. I strongly agree that the logistics of moving aircraft is simplified to the point it creates significant distortions in strategic choices and challenges.
