Remove shell room (NOT magazine) detonation

Machinery of War Discussion Navy
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Except all the secondary 4" ammo in the Hood’s secondary magazine was fixed (in shell casings) as well, not in charge bags, and that room clearly experienced a secondary high-order explosion of great violence, possibly after an initial fire or possibly nearly instantly. (Yes, shell walls on bigger shells are thicker.)

The tests on whether you can chain react shell explosions in the absence of an increase in ambient temperature that a fire would produce are not really on point here. That just proves the initial single detonation inside the shell room won’t by itself lead to the whole shell room exploding. But if it produces a fire that is heating up all the shells at the same time, you don’t need to have the capability to chain react for a large high-order event.

Moving those big shells around requires machinery, and machinery requires grease and oil, so there will be things that can catch fire, same as anywhere else on a ship. I would suggest the chances of a fire in a shell room leading to explosion are certainly not nil. Again, though, in real life it would require the crew literally having no ability to fight the fire or flood neighboring compartments in time for it to lead to ship loss, so examples are likely rare.

Hood is another example of the previous WWI-era design philosophy of putting the shell room below the waterline and the magazine above; I have read somewhere that that was because at the time a magazine explosion/fire was seen as less of a risk than one in the shell room. So clearly at the time people still thought there were some pros and cons here. I don’t know we can conclude they were wrong with absolute certainty. It seems there should be still be residual (but differential) risks to fires in both types of compartment.

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That being modelled in game already, when the ammo elevator is destroyed there’s a chance to catch fire and the fire can spread down to the magazine quickly. I have got quite some kills in this way :)

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So have I! However, the chances of fire is way too low. Ive repeatedly hit turrets and barbettes of Kongos, Mutsu and Scharhorst to the result of no fires at all.

Scharnhorst is also very strange because theres something weird about her turret armor that ive seen shrug off repeated on target 14" AP hits.

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Nope, the old arrangement of magazine over shell room was more of a result from the fear to sea mines as they explode under the keel. At that time AP shells were not believed to have the capability to reach deep inside the ship (cough cough British AP shells in Jutland) so the gunfire damage wasn’t regarded as the first threat in consideration of placement of magazine and shell rooms.

I agree with you that shell rooms could have the ability to catch fire in game, and I am a not entirely against to them being possible to detonate out of gameplay purposes, but the explosion of the shell room itself shouldn’t be strong enough to set off the magazine, but the fire can spread across the ammo spaces and detonate magazines if they player fails to treat the fire fighting properly.

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To be honest, considering how many people didnt read my thread thouroughly, confuse shell rooms and magazines repeatedly and the amount of likes Old Ironsides first post got. If Gaijin does read around the thread itll just further fuel their decision to have shell rooms stick with their unrealistic explosion size.

I hope im wrong, but from what HK said of their reasoning for shell rooms current performance they’re not exactly wrong.

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In fact the US Navy was very well aware of the potential risk of barbette storage of shells, as in 1980s when the Iowa class was put back into service, trials were carried out specifically on the 16" HE shells to verify their safety from detonation, because at that point the majority of the ship’s ammo became HE rather than AP.

Another example being the HMS Vanguard, since the old 15" BL Mk 1 was designed for magazine-over-shell layout, they had to fit additional elevators between the magazine and shell room to take the propellant charge to the loading mechanism, which is now located at the level of the shell room. In fact back to the time of Hood the Royal Navy was proposing switch of the placement for her magazine and shell room, but the progress of the ship’s construction was far too ahead to make it possible by the time, but the switch was applied on her proposed sister ships.

Just saying don’t simply assume those professionals to be stupid enough to ignore the so obvious problem that can be easily identified by gamers nowadays. The safety of shell storage on ships had been studied and tested over and over again, and the placement can a matter of life and death. Had the Hood stored her shells over magazine she could have had a good chance to survive.

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AFAIK they are not only proopsed but at least laid down. So maybe more pain to British players!(maybe not pain)

Besides I heard Royal Navy once study about Admiral class using eight 18’'/40 guns. Any progress made?

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Whats really odd about this whole situation is that the community had the exact same talk when it came to ground forces. Players found it incredibly odd that tanks with two piece can be ammo detonated if the shells got hit. Espesially since sometimes these shells were literally metal slugs, but i have seen arguments that APHE sells were almost impossible to set off.

Now things have been changed and you need to hit the propellant if you want a tank to blow up.

For some reason here at naval the whole situation doesnt apply to ships for some damn reason. Players were readily able to accept the logic that shells themselves dont blow up but for some reason dont apply that same logic ships.

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As one of those professionals myself today, I’d say it happens a lot more often than people would think. A LOT.

It’s not that gamers are any smarter individually, it’s that there’s a collective power to thousands of people engaged in a 24/7 military simulation and finding the most efficient success paths in continuous competition with each other that dwarfs what any single person can ever envision or test for comparable real-life systems. It’s many flaws and game-isms aside, people involved in current or historical military research ignore what games like War Thunder have as their emergent “findings” in that sense at their peril.

The law of GIGO still rules of course. The quality of a game’s predictiveness is only as good as the quality of its inputs and modelling. Just saying one should avoid both extremes on the opinion scale here.

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But HK just provided that the professionals did experiment with the issue. And all results agreed that the danger of a shell room cooking off was a nonstarter. Every sign is pointing to that shell rooms are not fragile explosive hazards.

Also Gaijin has constantly gotten things wrong. The formula they use for modeling armor penetration is constantly derided as oversimplistic and unable to factor in things like shell quality. It also just straight up contradicts a majority of documentation and test figures.

So excuse us for not buying into the games current ‘modeling’ and applying it to irl. Shell rooms in its current state is just simply wrong, period.

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I’m pretty sure you can blow most tanks by hitting their ammo, even if it is just the shell and not the propellant.

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Right but this brings us full circle to my original point. In a 15 minute game with multiple ship lineups, ships need to explode. Even the Hood’s time to die, perhaps the shortest naval engagement in WW2, is waaaay too long for War Thunder. So they need a mechanic where they explode, fast. Shell rooms were too explodey a few years ago and that was dialled back. More realism, but also ships lasting longer.

The problem is it’s apparently applying things differentially in unexpected ways for some ships because of other imprecisions in the modelling. Some might like the simplicity of just making shell rooms “inert armour”. But that would require some countervailing mechanic so that all ships didn’t all just become harder to kill in that 15 minute window as a result.

Personally I think the way to generally take that discussion in War Thunder is orthogonally and add new mechanics and complexity, aka “more realism.” In general I think modelling complex vehicle systems more accurately leads to increased rewards for the player skill (because there’s more to do and know). The alternative of simplifying mechanics (removing all risk of shell rooms being hit in this case) because doing so leads to less differential balance between ship types, as a general rule, is less optimal, because the mean you regress to there is just every vehicle being more and more the same.

Again though, that’s just a general rule, a mindset, really. In this specific case there could well be an argument to make shell rooms even more inert than they already are if they are leading all by themselves to a massive balance issue. I’m just saying we need to stay.open to all possibilities, and maybe look for ways to go orthogonally on stuff like this (like more complex damage control mechanics for naval).

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There seems to be an an almost anal fixation with replicating historically corrects model while the game and game play itself has almost zero historical context.

So much technical effort wasted.So much game potential lost. Certainly more prevalent with the tank game.
All this technical concern in a game where ships fire guided misses at old WW 1 Dreadnoughts and Tanks from 1943 face artillery from the 80s firing at them from 100 meters.

You can only really smile at this baffling game and the amount of time and effort wasted in creating these models only to see them abused by the game play

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cope it is realistic, it what sank the Arizona. A bomb went through several decks, blew up, and set off the turret magazine in one of the turrets.

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Magazine = storage of propellant charges

Shell room = storage of shells

Arizona was sunk by the magazine detonation, which is irrelevant to what this thread is talking about. In fact the example you mentioned is actually proving the OP’s point: even after the catastrophe unexploded shells were still recovered around the wreckage of the ship.

Another example being the USS Savannah received a direct hit of Fritz X that penetrated her turret roof, plunging downwards through the shell rooms in the barbette and ended up detonated inside the magazine, no explosion of the shell storage happened and the ship survived the bomb exploded in the magazine, too.

Read your evidence more carefully next time because it may end up turning against you :)

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Seriously, even the game goes out of its way to seperate shell rooms and magazines for large caliber shells. Even then it was thanks to the research of HK and others to eventually disallude Gaijin that shells dont blow up like magazines.

If Gaijin is still insistent on shell rooms being a weakness of some kind then just make hits there be a guaranteed fire instead of an explosion of doom. Their current implementation makes US Standards useless, players are already unhappy with their slow speed and reload. Now Gaijin adds fragile to the list where a Japanese 8" can detonate them.

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Yeah… every time I try to give U.S a shot, I immediately leave in rage after being instantly one-hit killed because a shell hit my barbettes during the 270 second reload of my first salvo.

Does Gaijin think Americans were so dumb that they would design their battleships with such crippling weakness? The reason why shell rooms were located on the barbettes is because THAT WAS NOT A DESIGN FLAW, yet it is ingame, a crippling one.

Playing America is literally pointless because of this, and also their eternal reloads while we have Mutsus reloading their 410mms every 25 seconds.

A Mutsu can literally fire 2x 410mm salvos before an American BB can reload their 356mm guns once. American aced reload could very perfectly be 34 seconds aced (instead of 40) and it would still be realistic and slower than anyone else, except it may be just a bit bearable.

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@SPANISH_AVENGER or @HK_Reporter

A lot of things to read so I’m a bit confused on what needs to be done. If you can, may you summarize the problem and how it’s currently implemented in the game.

What is the solution and how should it be implemented in the game?

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Preface
When it comes to multiple-piece ammunition on warships, there are two distinct parts:
-Shell: the projectile part of the munition. Stored in shell rooms.
-Charges: the propellant which propels the projectile. Stored in magazines.

In real life:
-The casing of modern shells was thick and solid, and the explosive found in them was highly stable. All of these factors made these virtually insensitive, making them safe and unable to detonate upon being hit.
-Magazines were highly flammable, volatile and dangerous, on the other hand.

However, in War Thunder, shells (and therefore shell rooms) are as flammable and volatile as charges, which leads to shell rooms detonating the same way magazines do even though it should not be the case.

This ERROR leads to many ships being severely, artificially crippled.

In real life, American Battleships stored their shells on the barbettes, since they posed no danger and did, in fact, even function as additional protection for the actually dangerous magazine explosions.

However, in War Thunder, American Battleships are extremely easy to disable or sink entirely because shell rooms are an artificial weakness which did not exist in real life.

Therefore, the solution for War Thunder would be to make shell rooms either impossible to detonate, or extremely difficult compared to now.

That would ingrease Battleship survivability across the board, but most particularly, that of American Battleships; making them just a little bit more competitive and closer to their real counterparts.

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It is not that they posed no danger. There is reason why european countries never do that.
Meanwhile, advantage of storing shell on barbette gives faster shell loading compared in theoretical compared to storing underwater hull(Of course there are many other factors affecting the reload speed aside from storing position)

US Navy, even since start of standard battleship to Iowa, was built under the doctring of ‘firing as far as possible that armor can withstand’ rather than ‘we want citadel safe even when we got penetrated’. It was unable to build battleships on later terms for US Navy as parliament and treaty seriously limit tonnage for them.