I would also mention that HK is happy to call anyone out on an incorrect conclusion. He’s previously called me out when I swore the KGV class was the best thing since sliced bread.
Do I think its an excellent design still, yes and i’d still argue the best treaty design. But now i’m much more aware of the true limitations and flaws of the design, regardless of whether excuses for them exist.
This isn’t a unique thing to Bismarck.
For some reason people were pissed off like I was praising for British engineering miracle or whatever when I mentioned about the large volume of protected reserve buoyancy as a “opposite design idea compared to Bismaarck”. Like I mentioned somewhere else this was done in exchange of vertical armour belt which leading to one of the worst zone of immunity among treaty designs. KGV was a deign with a lot of compromises due to treaty limitations like many others at the time so there wasn’t really anything I was praising for.
On the other hand the failure to include sufficient reserve buoyancy inside the citadel due to low placement of main armour deck being a serious weakness had been discussed by historians for years and some people still refuse to raise their head from the sands. We’re not even saying turtleback being an absolute trash design, for instance Richelieu still integrated turtleback in a armour box design and she’s a perfect example to give an impression of how Bismarck’s armour scheme could have been improved to be more effective.
Even when shell room detonations don’t insta-kill a ship, they render it unable to fight.
Leaving aside all the catastrophic damages they still cause, a battleship that has had all its ammo removed just can’t do anything at all. At this point you are better off just J-ing out.
All of t his was caused by 2 salvos; one hitting the fore barbettes, and the other hitting the aft barbettes.
So far, this has been my Tennessee experience.
It isn’t insta-killed like the other standards, no; but it is insta-disabled, instead. What an improvement (/s).
My mistake, I misremembered. Still, they were firing on each other for a fairly substantial amount of time before DoY scored her crippling hit.
It’s not that reserve buoyancy isn’t important, it is, but I don’t think it’s as important as you seem to think it is. You can look at strengths and weaknesses on paper but that isn’t necessarily going to reflect how things play out in practice, and in practice, not a single German battleship was lost due to a lack of reserve buoyancy.
The actual weakness of the Bismarck class was its abysmal anti-aircraft armament, in particular, the lack of a dual-purpose gun and a terrible medium calibre gun in the 3.7 cm SK C/30. Germany had developed solutions to both of these in the 12.8 cm SK C/41 and 3.7 cm Flak 36/37 but they never found their way on to a battleship.
Another weakness was, that these ships always operated alone, as they met their demise. Also the lack of naval bases they operated from.
Still the difference remains obvious. Ships of a certain side rarely lasted long. No battleship should ever sink with 3 or 4 torpedo hits, a mine hit or just deonate after a handful of main calibre shells hit. Thats where german desisngs were better.
Yes, German ships rarely lasted particularly long in the war. Bit of a design flaw, to only build your ships to last a couple years, at most.
Warspite lasted from before the first world war to after the second, and nearly escaped the breakers.
All German ships above a certain tonnage; on the other hand, have ended up sunk.
she didnt sink is what im saying very durable well designed ship pretty both scarnhorst and bismarck had to be tag teamed to be sunk while they needed a massive bomb so big it caused three lancasters to crash before one finally got off the ground to sink tiriptz honorable mention prinz eugen got hit by a nuke and stay afloat for hours
to be fair they didnt send a whole naval task force to sink hms warspite in either war
while she was alone
I mentioned this issue on my new thread to try to save USS Tennessee!
Considering that all US battleships moving forward uses barbettes for shell room storage this is a serious problem. Tennessee is an interesting ship in the regards of ‘what if shell rooms dont insta-kill US BBs,’ which then leads into this next issue.
As HK said shells are tough, with some still being intact when Arizona blew up. The only solution here is removing detonation of the shells and make them guarenteed fires instead. That way, US BBs moving forward arent rendered useless in one salvo.
He was likely referring to the reports made by me…
It’s a shame that this had not drew enough attention to the community for a long time. On the other hand naval community is too small to have sufficient voice to put out a pressure. It’s nice to see developers become more and more connected with the air and ground community but this has never been done sufficiently with the naval except one of the developers did open a QA thread back to 5 years ago
Its probably still cause of the lacking cap game mode. I’m unlocking the new German battlecruiser and played quite some BB matches over the last days. The map/cap circle mechanic makes BB and cruiser matches unplayable. There is always a smart boy in a reserve speedboat taking the inner caps and then the team score ticks down in no time. Its often already over before you make it even half way to the cap in your capital ship. Its bad for the loosing team with just capital ship players… But also bad for the winning team. I had this several times. Doing good matches in a battleship take some time. To do the positioning thing and to get into more lethal strike range. Whith two turned zones the game blinks down that fast that you barely get some kills yourself.
Its just not fun. Except for the dude turning the two inner zones in rank 1 reserve and laughing his a** over all these idiot BB and cruiser players whose match just got ruined.
And this happens every time on these standard maps.
consequently the ship can be sunk without having the turtleback penetrated (penetration of the main belt is still required ofc),
I recall you mentioned that in the Sharnhorst thread - and that entirely changed my mind regarding the way that vessel should be balanced in the game. ❤
Such a great point, regarding that and the buoyancy overall that should be taken into account when discussing the topic in this thread.
4 days ago I have posted a suggestion (titled “Remove open sea maps from Naval AB & RB”) to get rid of those circle maps, but it’s still waiting approval by the moderators (hopefully it will appear on the Maps/Missions/Events subforum).
For now, if you have premium, you can dislike and ban them in the preferred missions screen:
Would just say that there is a positive here. Though all US Battleships moving forward do use barbette storage, they also have thicker barbettes.
The last ships likely to be affected by this issue is the Colorado and SoDak (1920) as they have thinner 13-13.5" barbettes, further classes increase this to 16-17.3" so you probably aren’t going to reliably pen them at anything but point blank unless you’re in another US ship. Or fully downtiered.
Considering you can plink the turret with a 5 inch shell and the entire thing goes boom, I don’t think it is the thickness of the barbette that is the problem here.
Yes thats assuming the bug with barbette armour dissappears.
Friedman actually discussed in great detail about the American barbette shell stowage and the Royal Navy evaluation on this design in his US Battleships:
The whole point of storing shells in the barbette was for the sake of simplifying the loading mechanism, hence reduction of the turret weight. As the conventional shell room is eliminated and shells are now stored directly inside the turret mechanism, a lot of power supplied mechanisms are no longer needed and shells were then handled mainly by manpower through the rolling shell deck.
The British, on the other hand, were not interested in such a design, believing that the omission of a power-assisted mechanism would become a problem as the length and weight of the shell increased. They also strongly suspected that the large rotating ‘shell room’ below the turret would add considerable weight to the design, too. It wasn’t because they think that placing shells high up inside the turret is unsafe. At least by the time of WW1 it was already a common knowledge across navies that shells are basically inert piece of steel rather than a big deal of danger.
