Yeah, i’ve read that too… Though I reckon until the soviets get a ship with a 15 inch gun. Its never gunna happen.
The Marlborough is great for taking on Scharnhorsts. I’ve had the best luck with the 13.5" HE . 880 kg of TNT equivalent per salvo is something few ships will shrug off easily.
Maybe that’s why we have been waiting for the Revenge class so long (joking-mostly). I think naval is just neglected.
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I’ve been looking forward to Marlborough (although now I need to get the Orion first), would be nice to see the KGV 1911 too. But yeah I’ll stick to HE particularly as Marlborough has a ludicrous amount of TNT equivalent.
Also out of curiosity how is the Orion? I know historically its very much just a worse Marlborough but gameplay-wise is there a significant difference?
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Well, he repaired his guns and obliterated me and some other poor sod in a battleship without any effort while we were shooting at him from just outside of our spawn, so there’s that, haha.
I’m currently researching it now. It’s the only British ship I don’t have.
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Tried the HE thing out of the 12 salvo’s I bothered with something like 6 hit pretty decently on the bow and I got the flooding down a grand total of 97% (it took 3% off of the normal), i’ll keep trying but at least with 12" HE it doesn’t seem to be doing much, also I can never get those blue irreparable breaches no matter what I try.
When I’m fighting one with HE, I try to aim for the waterline and along the entire length of the ship. It’s good to destroy the bow and stern, but I believe the armored citadel has enough buoyancy to keep it afloat. In my experience, both fighting and sailing the Scharnhorst, it can get down to 40% buoyancy with some good hits, but will stabilize and require an additional flooding area to sink.
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Alsace???
Ofc you have to flood multiple hull sections to sink it. The problem is when Scharnhorst is intact, the 35mm hull is approximately 1.5 - 2m over the waterline, and if you shoot HE shells straight at the citadel it’s not going to work very well unless in rough seas. So I always start with shooting at the bow first, where the waterline is protected by only 70mm belt, if you get this section destroyed and flooded, the ship will lose 7%of buoyancy, which isn’t much but the ship will start to trim towards its bow. I will then shoot at the second forward hull section, namely the front magazine, where the 35mm hull is now very close to the water due to trim, and by destroying and flooding this section the ship will have only 65% buoyancy left. At this stage the ship is pretty much doomed as the 320mm belt is now completely submerged and any HE shell hitting other citadel spaces will lead to catastrophic flooding and usually the ship will sink in a minute.
To be fair the most difficult and crucial part of this tactic is to get the first two sections flooded. If aiming properly it usually wont take more than 4 minutes, after which you can sink Scharnhorst pretty easily. Another important thing is to get yourself alive if Scharnhorst is shooting back at you. By getting in range no more than 9000m (so diving shells to ammorack you would not happen) and no less than 2000m (to avoid Scharnhorst torpedoing you), proper angling, and wise damage control, Scharnhorst should never able to kill you in the same time span.
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At the time I’d forgotten about the Alsace Class.
You all know Germany made Turtle Back armor for a reason… right
and you know that Scharnhorst was pretty much defeated by HMS Belfast, a Town-Class light cruiser alone?
The point is that its insane that vessel like HMS Hood, HMS Renown and HMS Glorious (along with other 15 inch calibre ships) get a severe artifiical nerf to their accuracy of their main guns for “balance reasons” but a vessel like Scharnhorst gets armour that can’t be penned by most ships and you have to employ creative tactics to even damage her. Its fine for some Battleships with HE, but not all do. I was fighting one in my Renown the other day and my 4.5 inch HE shells were doing more damage than the 15 inch SAP and AP shells I was firing at it and that is just insane in my opinion.
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The fact that irl German turtleback does not protect the ship’s reserve buoyancy leading to a funny conclusion that Scharnhorst and Bismarck ended up being technically the worst-armoured battleships built after 1930. Their effective side armour that actually protects the ship from sinking is just 320mm vertical belt. Compared to the other two least-armoured treaty battleship classes, namely the KGV and North Carolina, KGV has 14in vertical belt and North Carolina’s 12in belt inclined 15 deg would have equals to 13-14in vertical belt depending on occasions, not to mention both classes had much better deck protection.
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You know every major seafaring nation in the world either stopped using it after WW1 or just didn’t use it?
If it was going to be this effective in-game then Gaijin should have introduced it later, the way Scharnhorst is right now nothing short of a 16-inch gun would get through that turtleback. Hell it makes even a KGV class (the most armoured ship per tonne) look like it would be balanced. Yet Scharnhorst still has no true peer counter in-game after 2 years, although as this thread suggests there are methods to kill it.
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Yet people still cry about krohnstadt, lol
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I think the Krohnstadt will always have a reputation in WT from when it was added. My god, that was insane. But all the recent changes to naval as a whole have mitigated it to a more acceptible level.
Though I do fear the future of paper ships where they have to make up parts like they did for the Kron.
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Ma guy, check your sources
It was Duke of York, a King George V class battleship actually inflicted the fatal blow to Scharnhorst, when she destroyed Boiler Room 1.
Belfast did spotting work and together with her task group (which also included HMS Sheffield, another Town class and HMS Norfolk, a County class heavy cruiser) destroyed Scharnhorsts radar, but she didnt defeated Scharnhorst in any shape or form
Defeated by HMS Belfast alone lmao
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As Gaijin remake the hull break system, HE is better to anti-Scharnhorst or other heavy armor BBs, last time I used 305 mm HE killed 3 Scharnhorst, they were sinking like U-boats even they have at least 70 crew members.
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Cope harder with your garbage bullshit lies
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