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.
They increased drastically the reload rate of the Mariya from 1.9 to 3rpm to let her stay at 6.7.
So, as those guns were clearly unable to achieve that reload unless some dark magic was involved, what are the standards that can change the RPM of a ship to “balance” it?
There are already several ships in game (from different nations) with poor armor or exposed ready racks that now will have a slower reload than a WWI dreadnought and we all know that, as you get hit in the towers, the reload gets even slower or stops completely.
What are the standards to get a minimum reload buff, using even secondary sources, for all those ships that can achieve a better ROF?
Or can we ask, as the topic suggested, a standard ROF for all those ships that are forced into upper Brs but lack the firepower to compete?