Yes it is one of the most effective strategies in warfare, if you have more resources than the enemy you should be very aggressive, UK basically traded capital ships with germany on a 1 to 1 basis which is very good for UK since losing 1 out of like 30 is not that much but for germany losing 1 out 4 is 25% of their capital ships gone. Soviet on the Eastern front used the same strategy which basically meant germany lose the initiative since they was forced to defend against soviet attacks on the whole front, thus could not conduct offensive on their own and thus also lost any chance to defeat the soviets who could afford losses better than germany.
Wrong and Missing Ships: How to correct them ALL
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Sorry for not taking the bait of a land warfare matter that does not belong into this thread. I'll keep it restricted to this: initiative and momentum are key matters when it comes to being successful.
As i pointed out before, sinking Allied warships was not the primary goal of the comparatively tiny Kriegsmarine - it was a side effect. The strategic outset was as different as a thing can be. Still, the Allies of course lost much more tonnage in warships to the kriegsmarine than they inflicted on them.
Here is one interesting list but it does also contain other theatres of the war.
https://uboat.net/allies/warships/war_losses.html
If a 2-1 numerical advantage against a 20 years older opponent of comparable size is not a sufficiently favorable circumstance, then what is?
Or - were the 11" guns a critical weakness in the design, reducing the Scharnhorst's odds against much older ships of comparable size?
Edited to add: The ships were built from 1935 to 1938, the issue of 11" vs 15" guns was brought up in 1935, at that point Germany lacked the technology to develop and deliver 15" guns on time for completion. E.g. Germany was behind on battleship gun technology.
Since you successfully evaded to read my post and the article i referred to, i even cite it for you:
Convoy HX 106 was the 106th of the numbered series of Allied HX convoys of merchant ships from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Liverpool, England. Forty-one ships departed Halifax, Nova Scotia on 30 January 1941, eastbound to Liverpool, England.[1] The use of convoys was a standard tactic throughout the Battle of the Atlantic as a defence against U-boats and German commerce raiders.
On 8 February 1941 the two German battleships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, appeared over the horizon.[2] The German squadron was under the command of Admiral Günther Lütjens. The captain of Scharnhorst offered to draw off the escorting Royal Navy battleship HMS Ramillies, so that Gneisenau could sink the merchant ships. This strategy, if successful, would have entailed little risk to Scharnhorst as she was 11 knots (20 km/h; 13 mph) faster than Ramillies, and her newer 11-inch (279 mm) guns outranged the 1915 era 15-inch (381 mm) guns of the British ship. However, Lutjens strictly followed Hitler's directive not to engage enemy capital ships, and withdrew.[2]
I would argue that's actually a useless point - the Axis sunk more Allied shipping than the Allies sunk Axis shipping because there was a nearly infinite amount of Allied shipping, while the Axis basically ran out of shipping and the sea lanes became too dangerous for what little was left to keep trying. On a tonnage sunk per raider basis, and on the basis of actually achieving the ultimate goal of trade interdiction, the Allies actually outperformed the Axis.
Similarly on a warship basis, sinking more tons of Kriegsmarine ships than the Allies lost to all causes would be mighty difficult because there was simply so little tonnage of Kriegsmarine ships by comparison to the Allied fleets. And yet, the Kriegsmarine failed in its goal (stop Allied trade and/or break the Royal Navy) while the Allied fleets succeeded in theirs (break the Kriegsmarine).
I know Scharnhorst and Gneisenau together were under orders not to engage capital ships.
I also know Bismarck was allowed to engage capital ships.
Ergo, the German high command considered Bismarck to be more powerful than Scharnhorst and Gneisenau together. Most likely because of the latter's inferior 11" guns. Which they were equipped with, because when their construction started in 1935 German naval industry was unable to develop and deliver 15" guns on-time. E.g. they were behind on naval gun technology.
Please provide a template (hulls and modules) how you would set thm up and we'll add them to the guide.
Reworked it. How does the Netherlands entry look to you now?
This is quite the problem with imported equipment. Hopefully this will get some mechanic when Sweden get an expansion (Nordics or Neutrals focused DLC). Until then it seems better not to give them the tech lest Netherlands build many more ships with advanced guns while in DIE. (historically the De Zeven Provinciën-class was not finished until 1953).
Strictly speaking, I don't think Bismarck was supposed to engage Hood and Prince of Wales either and Lujtens's plan was for Bismarck and Prinz Eugen to just book it and get away without bothering to engage in a risky gunnery duel, but Captain Lindemann (who I get the impression was the more hot-headed of the two) overrode him as commander of the ship and returned fire, famously shouting that he would not have his ship shot out from under his ass.
Indeed.
From my perspective, I'm trying to make two points:
- The Scharnhorst-class would have been superior if equipped with 15" guns, this was not done due to the state of German naval armament industry being unable to develop and deliver on-time. In game-terms Germany lacked the technology.
- The Bismarck-class not powerful enough for its size. With the given displacement constraints, contemporary British or American designers would have built a more powerful ship. Again, in game-terms Germany was technologically behind.
If I remember, the Bismarck was specifically allowed to engage an enemy battleship if it were escorting a convoy, such that Prinz Eugen could sink the merchants.
It would have been difficult for the German Captains to know simply from silhouette until it was too late if they were facing HMS Barham with 20 degree elevation guns or HMS Malaya (which they certainly must have known was modernised in the mid 30s) with the BL 15 MK1 (N) having 30 degree elevation, improved firecontrol (and by 1941 type 281/284 radar) and was considerably more dangerous than her sister ship as a result.
They certainly could have tried to engage the relatively obsolete Rs but they might not have been confident in identification of them from as they looked very much like Barham and Malaya, and also, those 11" guns.... Even 2 vs one if you cant be confident of breaching the armour of your target then those 11"ers might as well be 4.5"
A raider has to avoid being drawn into close combat with brawlers, Scharnhorst paid a terrible price for getting caught with her pants down well within optimal range by Duke of York.
The forum ate half the template code. I opted to post a whole template since there was more than one change. Let me re-word it in the style you used in the other recommandations:
De Ruyter Class CL: upgrade Hull to Tier II cruiser hull, upgrade light cruiser battery to tier II, upgrade AA to tier II, add armour I
I would like to again mention the French - Richelieu was every bit Bismarck's equal or even slightly better in nearly every technical measure, and yet came in about 4000 tons lighter both standard and fully loaded and actually looked treaty-compliant-ish if you squinted. The weight savings from the AB layout and Richelieu's advanced engines are very real.
In that case, she still probably wasn't really supposed to engage at Denmark Strait because Hood and PoW weren't acting as escorts, but rather specifically trying to engage Bismarck.
Exactly my point.
To be fully effective as commerce raiders the Scharnhorst-class needed 15" guns, which German industry could not deliver on-time - e.g. they lacked the tech.
For Bismarck the gun-tech was available, but the ship was still overweight for its combat effectiveness - again, Germany was lagging behind in naval tech.
With the battleship escorts (distant cover force) provided to each arctic convoy, the Scharnhorst had to always be lucky. The Allies only had to get lucky once.
In the North Atlantic a surface raider (group) had to be able to deal with a single obsolete battleship, to be effective in its role.
With regard to CL guns having AA attack, I'm a bit dubious about that since a lot of large-caliber guns were theoretically-designed to do that in WWII, but suffered from either tactical or technical problems that made it unrealistic (for instance, Japan had equipped its newer heavy cruisers with DP capability on their 8-inch guns, and theoretically even the Yamato could fire shrapnel shot at aircraft). Most of the time these guns simply couldn't track aircraft effectively, rendering the whole issue moot (large turrets are not good at tracking aircraft, except at long range). At-best, the 1944 CL guns could add limited AA firepower (2?) but the DP variants would also have reduced firepower compared to regular ones (which could use more guns per turret).
Also, one thing people are overlooking about the 28cm guns on the Scharnhorst is that the ship was designed to counter the Dunkerque-class, not necessarily to counter British capital ships. Germany had two different naval buildup plans in the works, one for the very long term (Plan Z) with a whole armada of new ships, while the simpler and more realistic short-term plans were for not fighting the British at all. As a result, the 11-inch guns of the Scharnhorst were considered fine for defeating the 9-inch armor belt of the Dunkerque (although oddly enough, the French thought their armor belt was fine in the same scenario and didn't upgrade them despite redesigning the ships repeatedly during construction as new threats emerged, such as the Italian dreadnought refits). Remember too that the Scharnhorsts were built instead of the second series of pocket battleships, which were cancelled in light of both the Dunkerque's construction (which was basically designed specifically to kill pocket battleships) and the Anglo-German naval treaty.
The Anglo-German naval treaty had significantly-reduced tensions between Germany's new naval expansion, and as I recall (can't remember the source though
) the Germans didn't want to risk an arms-race if they could help it. Furthermore, they built the actual 38cm guns to mount later on the Scharnhorst, but never quite got around it until halfway through the war (right before Hitler lost his mind over another ineffectual convoy raid in the Arctic and--not for the first time--ordered the surface navy scrapped, which resulted in Gneisenau's guns being pulled off and the larger ones never installed).
The Anglo-German naval treaty had significantly-reduced tensions between Germany's new naval expansion, and as I recall (can't remember the source though
) the Germans didn't want to risk an arms-race if they could help it. Furthermore, they built the actual 38cm guns to mount later on the Scharnhorst, but never quite got around it until halfway through the war (right before Hitler lost his mind over another ineffectual convoy raid in the Arctic and--not for the first time--ordered the surface navy scrapped, which resulted in Gneisenau's guns being pulled off and the larger ones never installed).
This is a bit of a disingenuous response, as you've already noted that the slow engine modules aren't available in the vanilla game to get those British sloops in there without giving them even more ridiculous HP numbers than has been suggested for Eritrea (which also has light cruiser battery one for the same armament as a British A class destroyer - effectively overstating Eritrea's firepower by more than a factor of 2). The DD_4 hp (a similar tonnage to Eritrea, but built using more advanced techniques) is 60 - suggesting that Eritrea's should be 40-50, but instead she's given a HP of 100.
The stats suggested in your post do not in any way represent a historically plausible description of Eritrea's combat effectiveness - they more than double it. Eritrea was a good ship (if you're keen on her, there's a great feature article in Warship 2016, which gets into plenty of detail), but she had less combat effectiveness than an interwar destroyer, and was in no way, shape or form comparable in combat effectiveness to a light cruiser. It's also worth noting that while she was originally designed to have a seaplane, it was never embarked, so it's not entirely clear how effective her capacity to support aircraft was.
The last thing I want to do is to provide more ship templates that wildly distort the capabilities of ship's represented in the game, which is what I'd have to do (as has been done with Eritrea) if I was to provide suggestions.
Going from memory (but I can look up as necessary), but there's some question mark over this attack.
I'd say this is fairly straightforward. The net weight of metal and explosive than can be fired over a time period (when I've looked at it, I've used broadside throw weight/minute) is the firepower, and the armour-piercing capability of the shell the piercing. In terms of the ships in question, based on calcs I did for my naval mod, Renown/Repulse had a (very roughly - these figures should always be considered pretty rough) ten per cent advantage in firepower over the Scharnhorsts, and about a fifty per cent advantage in piercing.
The story of the Scharnhorst's main armament is a lesson in why it's important to bed the design down before starting construction! When the first was laid down, it was to a design with two triple 11-inch turrets, with a third added requiring the re-laying down of both ships (still with 283mm weaponry, although 330mm, 350mm and 380mm was considered), with an eye to possibly re-arming with larger-calibre guns down the track. According to Breyer* and Skwiot's German Capital Ships of World War Two, one of the reasons the 350mm guns weren't in favour was because it would only be possible to store 130 rounds per gun at that calibre, compared with 150 rounds per gun of the 280mm shells/propellant. However, there were also issues of writing off 11 million RM spent to-date on developing the 283mm guns and their triple turrets. Ie, it was a combination of technical, political and financial reasons why they went ahead with 283mm weapons, and during the design stage, it sounds like 330mm and 350mm guns were stronger contenders than 380mm. From the sources I've read, the impression I get is that it was preferred to get heavier armament on the ships, but sunk costs and trade-offs in lower ammunition stowage/time to build meant that the 283mm guns got the nod.
* Siegfried Breyer is one of the best authorities on German capital ships I'm aware of, so I consider this a strong source.
This is one of the many "slanted statistics" when looking at the KM in WW2 that's often brought up, and is very misleading - the KM's losses often only count surface vessels, whereas the vast majority of the KM's build (and combat) efforts were in subs (while the Allies effort was much more in surface vessels). Adding the hundreds of thousands of tonnage of submarines lost during WW2 changes the picture substantially (but I'm not sure which side ends up on top in terms of tonnage lost, I can't recall that off the top of my head).
I think you are are overthinking things a bit. The HP being wrong is something that will be true for most ships as the game doesn't make any diffrence between sizes of Cruisers. The guns isn't a problem as you can actually give Destroyer type Light Batteries to a Cruiser, wich is obviously a bad idea normally, but it works out this time to give Eritrea some weak guns. And quite frankly, the HP is only usefull for soaking hits for other ships as it wont be able to kill a kitten by itself.
Italian Cruiser Eritrea:
Guns slot: LB1
On the other hand, it's really strange that number of modules have no impact on the hp for a ship. I think it would be nice if some of the base health was reduced and returned when optional slots are filled. It's not terrible important though as poorly equiped ships are bad anyway, so their extra hp matters not that much.
What would really help though would be if Carriers scaled with number of hangar slots. You can make a Light Carrier right now, but there is no benifit in doing so as while it costs less to build so will it still need the same amount of manpower and fuel as any full sized Carrier. Even the Cruiser conversions that can have fewer Hangar slots uses up about as much fuel as a larger Carrier, despite that it used much less fuel as a Cruiser with the same engine. And alternative to scaling carriers would be to at least reduce fuel usage by Cruiser conversions and add a 1 slot carrier hull the uses even less fuel.
Another Naval issue is that Destroyer guns to far too little damage compared to what they should do. For instance the UK type A destroyer guns fire about twice as fast a standard Light Cruiser gun, making up for the lighter shells, meaning they should do about as much damage as a Light Cruiser Battery, but with less penetration. But in game they do 1.5 (thanx to tier2) vs 4 for a Light Cruiser. Destroyers were ment for Destroying Torpedo Boats, but they can't really do that in game as they have pee shooters that do no damage.
I suggest doubling all damage for Destroyer Light Batteries (keep the penetration). That will open up the option of using Destroyers to kill other Destroyers as right now Light Cruisers are the only real option. It will also make Cruiser Armor matter more as right now it hardly matters as it doesn't protect against other Cruisers or larger guns and Destroyers do no damage anyway.