I’ve read some of those reports on SRBP and honestly, it was quite surprising how fast the guns were capable of firing. I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical at first but I realized after further research that a lot of the longer reload values were subject to non-ideal conditions and does not necessarily contradict values from SRBP.
My initial objection at first was to bring up the firing test that USS Idaho underwent in 1942 where she fired 156 salvos with her forward guns in order to test the ability to maintain a rate of fire over a prolonged period. Out of all the salvos fired, the fastest interval 49 seconds long. However, there was some interesting factors that wouldn’t make this a true test for rate of fire. First of all, these salvos were fired at a range between 17 and 25 km. At those ranges, you would be waiting close to 40 seconds at most to actually see the shells land before actually spotting them and make the necessary corrections. In addition to this, they were training officers in spotting techniques and had a relatively green crew handling the charges. Another interesting thing to note is that the reload times increased with the test up to 2 minutes mainly due to the crew having to transfer the projectiles and the charges from the farthest corner of the storage rooms. So due to all these factors, I do not consider the USS Idaho test to be a true benchmark of reload performance while SRBP were by all means a performance test.
I do agree that there needs to be a more consistent definition set for what constitutes as a “fair” reload value in game. For every reload figure that you come across, there are multiple factors that need to be taken into consideration. The stress test USS Idaho underwent demonstrated that even in an isolated non-combat environment, you can have a wide range of values due to crew, spotting and correction, range, ammunition depletion, etc… that would greatly increase the reload time as opposed to a test like SRBP that minimized these factors by having the crew blast away at pretty much point blank targets at the maximum rate of fire while remaining under safety measures.
I believe this has happened before, though granted before the accepted report. Some poor guy bought an ace on Mississippi over it but all they changed was the x-ray rof in hangar. It would be nice to see it get changed of course but I suspect the br change to Arizona and the 14”/50 getting a marginally better dispersion stat than other 14” guns means they have no intention of fixing the rate of fire.
Not sure if you two are aware @scorpian@Tallguy48-psn, but there’s a bug report that recently went through that referred to the documented performance of USS West Virginia’s gunnery during Surigao Strait.
The document shows that even at a starting range of around 20 km, the reload cycles were as low as 35-38 seconds between salvos 1-2 and 5-6.
I’ve skimmed the Surigao Strait reports of the other battleships, namely Maryland and California, but I didn’t immediately see a gunnery report like on West Virginia. It might still be worth digging a bit. Hopefully it gets accepted, there shouldn’t be the whole issue of ready shells stored in the turrets pre-modernization, which I think was the last thing we’ve heard from them with the SRBP reports (?)
I believe that the idea of ready shells affecting the standard reload cycle was already debunked by another accepted report as quoted below.
The findings by Tallguy48 in the bug report was an annual 1935-36 report that states:
“In the past year the rate of fire has exceeded previous records, with no diminution in the percentage of hits. Commencing with Short Range Battle Practice the results have exceeded all past performances.”
So although we do not have SRBP reports that go into the late 30’s (none that I know of at least), this annual report states that SRBP performance improved from the 20’s going into the 30’s, rather than decreasing from “ready rack” modifications as some would have imagined.
However, it seems the current issue at hand is that the standard firing cycle was limited to 40 seconds according to certain documentation as claimed by the bug report manager. I’m curious to see this document as well as the context of it because I haven’t been able to find documentation on firing cycles of any standard battleship.
Good job digging that up, I think that report should be very hard to deny. Hopefully they actually implement it, after the recent fire changes the standards feel like glass cannons minus the cannon and could really use some help. Also thank you @Admiral_Bofors for letting me know about this, I haven’t been looking at the bug report much recently.
Ah right, I had gotten that report on Colorado mixed up with one of his earlier reports for the 14" guns Community Bug Reporting System which is still marked as accepted at the moment. Thanks for the update!
Also I did go back and look at USS California’s report at Surigao and found this, but unfortunately the time format only mentions the hours and minutes, not seconds, so it’s not of much use.
Turns out that according to the latest response in @Dese_Tsuterikka’s bug report, that “reload time is a balance value that may be changed at developers’ discretion”.
I can’t help but wonder if this is all really for balance, in what scenario would a standard realistically “overperform” compared to other ships at the same BR? I keep hearing consistent complaints of slow reload, blown shell rooms, and massive crew losses from explosions.
I’m not one to bring up stats, but currently Statshark shows that for the past 3 months, the US has one of the lowest winrates in naval realistic at 7.0 (admittedly arcade is more of a mixed bag).
Obviously, player statistics doesn’t tell the whole story but I’m pretty sure current game mechanics work a lot more against standards than they do for many other ships such as lengthened reload time from repair and complete ammunition removal from shell room detonations.
Yeah, at this point im gonna have to call @HK_Reporter .
This is the second time that a moderator declined a RoF buff for standards because of so called ‘balance’ reasons. Now, the last time this happened with @Tallguy48-psn bug report, you explained that mods dont have the full picture on how the naval devs do things, explaining that the balancing explanation was more of a assumption rather than hard reasoning.
This is the second time that a RoF buff for a standard was rejected for ‘balancing’ reasons. As Admiral stated, how naval works is utterly hostile to US battleship design philosophy and that much more meta ships, such as Amagi, is allowed their most optimal RoF.
Whats going on here? Do the naval devs not know their own damn game? Or is this just another story of tech mods taking balancing decisions in their own hands.
What gave you the illusion that they played and understood the naval battle mode? If you look at their records you will see that they even play China more than they play naval battle.
I looked at Tennessee’s and California’s report in detail and it seems that their approach was very different than that of the West Virginia. A few pages before that data sheet from California, it mentions that they were holding salvo fire until a radar spot was applied and the solution from the rangekeeper was checked. Tennessee appeared to be firing at precisely timed intervals of exactly 45 seconds, primarily half salvos from the front turrets in order to conserve ammunition.
Out of the three action reports I’ve gone over, only West Virginia’s report mentions the use of rapid salvo fire, which means that California and Tennessee were probably waiting for a solution from the splashes of the previous salvo before firing the next one while West Virginia was not.
West Virginia also reports on being low on ammunition with only 110 AP shells left after the engagement. I previously mentioned that the “stress test” USS Idaho had demonstrated that running low on ammunition would also impact firing cycles due to having to transfer the shells and charges from the farthest corners of their storage spaces as the closer ones get expended. Despite all this, West Virginia achieved a 35-38 second reload in two of her salvos at a range of 20 km.
All this demonstrates that yet again, it is extremely unfair to implement one ship based on performance tests with ideal conditions and yet for another ship refuse to implement the best reload value recorded in combat situation where conditions are far from ideal.
Another naval update another reason to revive this thread! Italian players have been fighting very hard in getting Roma a more competetive reload as seen in the bug report here. As we can see, the mods are obsessed at the charges and rammers of the Littorio class, asking for the nitty gritty of details. Meanwhile, Bismark is in the dev server with a 2.6rpm despite it being factually known that she cant maintain such speeds because it broke her hoists.
Now, may I turn attention to this bug report here, once again by the excellent @Tallguy48-psn . Unrefutable evidence, where initially the mods happily accepted. Only to then be rejected by saying they were using the museums data and that they’ll ‘consider’ it depending on how the vehicle performs. In other words balancing reasons.
At this point, im essentially accepting of claims that the naval devs favor certain nations over others. Because why hell do the Italians have to fight this damn hard just to make their end of the line BB playable? Why is it when US players provide hard data for their BBs they always get rejected for ‘balancing’ reason. Where is the standard?!
Bismarck isn’t even the worst violation of this. Rileyy brought up the fact that the turrets meant for Gneisenau and Sevastapol did not have power-assisted loading and were pretty much identical to the loading procedure of coastal mounts. Yet in dev, they are featured with the same rate of fire that Bismarck achieved with power-assisted loading.
It’s funny how technical limitations about the loading system and the so-called “ready rack” inside the turret for standard battleships were brought up every step of the way, and the devs just flat out add some premium ships with their full optimal rate of fire without taking any of that into account. Also Richelieu’s rate of fire got artificially increased to what she had after postwar modifications, despite being in her 1943 config.
I understand that bug report managers have their job to forward reports when everything is technically and historically sound, but it’s just weird to have the devs making all of these non-historical balancing decisions in the background.
The most irritating thing here is, this information is readily available on Navyweps. Yes it lacks a source which is part of the reason I haven’t reported it (yet) but I’ve already come across 1 secondary source mentioning it, and all I need for a report is two. IMO its easier to prove a higher RoF than Navyweps claims and start with it even with a 45 second reload to reflect the slowest base reload ingame, than it is for me to get data on the RoF of coastal batteries, the Blueprints of the coastal batteries, the blueprints of the mounts intended for Gneisenau etc…
Sifting through German source documents is however good practise for me in my unending expedition to learn German to fluency.
