We all know. Just you don’t know that exist. Though that point is too small to be aimed and pointless to aim there. Also engine is not an critical weakness like magazine or shell room in this game.
My apologies, I didn’t realize I was speaking to The Speaker of All Naval Players.
Also, ya its small, but its not that small, in almost all of the engagements I’ve had vs Scharnhorsts since I’ve found out about this weakness I’ve gotten boiler room and even transmission hits from shrapnel. And this is in a Tennessee mind you, which has subpar HE filler.
Its pretty easy to do, If a Scharnhorst is showing broadside (which they almost always do) just aim center mass right above the water line. If the shells go slight high, you get compartment hits, if it goes low you pick at his underwater armor, which will lead to diving shells sooner or later. if you hit it just right, you get a boiler room hit with massive crew loss.
And as I stated in my last post, Scharnhorst gets fucked if its internal modules take crew loss, shaving 15-25% off is basically a death sentence for a Scharnhorst due to its crew compartments not having much armor.
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There’s a reason the cheater douchebag squadrons love it. Absolutely nerf it. Or better still, decompress all naval to 10.0 and make it 9.3, Tennessee & Hood 8.0
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No, if he don’t repair, the crew number will not continue losing.
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Just for festive leisure I did a funny experiment in user mission: I created a gun that fires 406mm shells in orbital velocity (7.9km/s) and made the shells not to take air drag. I shot several hundreds of shells with this gun on Scharnhorst and this is what I got:
Despite having nearly 20,000 mm of pen the shell still cannot pass through Scharnhorst’s turtleback.
I believe the only possible reason leading to this is the shape of the turtleback: near the waterline, the inclination angle of the turtleback is beyond the ricochet angle of nearly all shells in the game, and due to its thickness (105mm) no shell in game can overmatch it. Since the game checks ricochet first before calculating penetration vs thickness, the shell will be bounced off regardless how much penetration it has:
This again verified my evaluation made earlier in this thread: raising BR or introducing famous ships like Iowa/Yamato is not likely going to solve the Scharnhorst problem. This ship has a very specific strength that can be only offset by introducing other weaknesses such as barbette shots and flooding.
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So, i was correct all along :)
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Wouldn’t the shell going that fast mess up the results a bit, since there would effectively be no angle of fall? I’d been under the impression that something like the 16”/45 might have a better chance of getting through since the pen calculator I’ve used gives it consistently good penetration and the game seems to exaggerate angle of fall a bit, possibly bypassing the ricochet issue. Not to say I disagree with your points of course, I’m starting to come to the position that it was a bad idea to put as much of the crew into the citadel as they have recently, and a move back to closer to older distribution might be better for gameplay overall. Not completely to the level of 2021/22 where a good light cruiser bullied most battleship, but maybe closer to 50/50 behind armor and outside it to give uptiered ships a chance and make the decision on when to repair more impactful. While I don’t think light shell spam should be the be all end all of killing a ship, I’d also say that there were a good number of battleships absolutely crippled by lower caliber hits to the superstructure, Scharnhorst and South Dakota for example, and I don’t think the current way the game handles crew represents that the best. Scharnhorst was always very strong but didn’t become this massive game warping issue until those crew distribution changes came in La Royale.
Very cool to see some actual testing done, thanks for this! A rework to ricochets may be needed too.
Actually ricochet mechanism is not a problem. It is quite near to real life. Problem is, there are still no counterpart battleship against Scharnhorst for most of nations, and some nations doesn’t have any candiate on game environment.
Also, her firepower characteristic compared to big caliber ship is currently exaggerated. Both in penetration and after-penetration damage.
In my opinion the easiest way to “fix” scharns immortality would just be to make it so that all the crew compartments above the citadel actually held 100% of the crew. It’s the engines being a requirement for a crew kill that make it impossible to crewkill scharn.
It would help, but Scharn still plays by a fundamentally different set of rules than all other ships in the game which is what makes it so broken. It can detonate the shell rooms and magazines of any other ship in the game, while no ship can do the same to it with anything approaching reliability. A couple dozen 13.5in HE shells into its bow almost guarantees that Scharn sinks within a few minutes even now, but he will still cripple if not kill you and several others in that time. And then come back with a backup Scharnhorst.
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While I understand what your trying to say and it does help cruisers and destroyers to contribute in battleship teirs, previous experiences only showed the idea to be vreaty flawed.
See, when crew distribution is placed outside the citadel there was almost no point in playing battleships at all. A brooklyn or any other high RoF ship can and did melt a battleship in seconds.
For battleships, it actually does take quite a few salvos to put down a cruiser. This gets worse for higher caliber BBs because the dispersion makes any waterline hit unreliable. So if you have a 30 second reload a Helena can basically melt you down to 50% crew before being out down. Then they jump in their Des Moines or Cleveland or Brooklyn.
Of course, this is an issue that can be solved with range. A Helena will find it pretty difficult to engage targets beyond 15km, while a BB does not have such issues. However, thats an advantage you’ll only find in EC.
I don’t think the current situation is any better, I’d argue it’s gotten worse. Top tier balance isn’t any better than it was in 2022, with Scharnhorst dominating for nearly two years next to uncontested due to the ahistorical durability current game mechanics give it. Repair speed and massive crew reserves that can’t be harmed in most cases unless the other player has bad repair management is too big of an advantage in the current meta, and isn’t historical at all. HE spam was more effective than it should’ve been, but it was as bad as it was mainly due to the HE bug. Now the power gap between 6.0 and 7.0 is so bad you may as well not bother spawning in an uptier, which I think is very bad for long term player numbers and retention. Outside events I feel the mode is getting less and less populated as time goes on, I play far too many games with the same people.
As more and more of the crew moves under the armor superstructure hits of any kind have nearly ceased to matter, which I don’t think is historical at all. South Dakota spent about four months in a yard because of about four dozen hits, mainly to the unarmored parts of the ship, with at most three of those hits being 14” but only one being certain. Scharnhorst was doomed in large part by a single 6” shell to a radar. Bismarck and Kirishima were probably doomed regardless, but their upper works being peppered certainly didn’t help matters. As it stands you can take enough hits to effectively raze your superstructure with very little consequence on many ships, as the breach mechanic requires hits near the waterline to begin taking in water as far as I know. The current system just makes turtleback ships massively better than any other scheme while also making lighter ships effectively unable to contribute at all, which I think should change.
My SMS Derfflinger often faces top end cruisers and does very well. Don’t fear anything except Mutsus or other top calibre BBs, their shells are absurdly powerful. Ger BCs are all well made.
This hurts to read…
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I still have yet to figure out how to actually sink this ship.
Just spent several minutes pumping AP rounds from my Baden into the ammo elevators on one from like 3km out. Zero fires.
I tried hitting other areas a couple times but it did nothing.
Some other enemy battleship sailed next to him so i hit him with 6 rounds and he sunk.
Could they at least give the scharnhorst a chance to have an ammo elevator fire? I do not remember ever setting a fire for one on it. Every other battleship has like an 80% chance of it catching fire if hit.
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They just need to implement flooding between belt and turtleback. Or perhaps a more advanced mechanism for reserve buyouncy.
Yeah, i tried using SAP for flooding, because i figured 50+kg of tnt would do that. Got at him down to at most 95% buoyancy.
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They do, however the problem is that the chance of flooding is too low in game due to the water surface is being simplified as flat in DM. In many cases you punch several holes on Scharnhorst’s armour belt but these breaches don’t take water in as they are located above waterline. IRL the water surface isn’t a flat plane as in the DM of this game, so breaches located over waterline can still take water from bow waves
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