Hello this is my solution to the Scharnhorst problem.
currently at 7.3 Scharnhorst is too strong her armor is just too good, but her guns are similar in fire power to WW1 battle ships. my solution is give Scharnhorst same refit as the Gneisenau as her guns are very strong and she can compete with even 8.3s, excluding South Dakota also this would more evenly fill in the gap at the battle cruiser line with her being moved to 7.7-8.0.
history
the Scharnhorst has same barbettes as they are sister ships and would both require them to be cut out to refit the 380mm cannons.
Scharnhorst never had the opportunity to undergo the refit due to it be canceled at the start of the war the only reason Gneisenau did is because she was sunk in 1942 and also political pressures preventing the refit
" It had been originally planned to regun the Scharnhorst class with 38 cm guns and then use the surplus 28 cm turrets to arm the first three of a new generation of Panzerschiffes, the “Kreuzer P” class. Additional guns and mountings were to be built to arm additional units of this class. However, all of these plans were abandoned at the start of the war.
After Gneisenau was badly damaged during a bombing raid in 1942, her guns were then used for coastal artillery emplacements. Turret Caesar still remains as a museum exhibit at Austrått Fort (Batterie Ørlandet) which is near Trondheim in Norway. Turret Bruno was used at Fledt, near Bergen. Turret Anton was too badly damaged to repair, so her individual guns were used to arm batteries in Denmark and the Netherlands."
“it had been planned to rearm the small battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau with these weapons. No serious work ever started for Scharnhorst , but three turrets were under construction during the early 1940s to rearm Gneisenau . After Gneisenau was badly damaged in 1942,”
With historically accurate reloads times of 70+ seconds right? As both Scharnhorst and Gneisenau would lack loading assistance due to the smaller size of the ships
im gonna try to get them moved up as scarnhorst is unbalanceble in her current state as she lacks the fire power to do any meaningful damage to a 7.7 or higher but has armor of a 8.3-8.0
even the weakest 7.7s with just 400mm of armor can cause her rounds to detonate early doing no damage
and they set reload times to whatever they feel is balanced nothing i can say can change that
Most ships she sees that isn’t the SoDak are generally screwed the instant she’s within 10km range unless they manage to get a detonation through the barbette or the bow if she’s facing forwards due to the disgusting firerate.
The 17.2 second reload is enough to make a Tosa sweat at 9 to 11km.
I really think Naval would be a good place to test refits in the form of modifications affecting BR, although with this new boiler explosions that magically disappear if you turn the engine off mechanic I don’t think I will be able to stomach naval anymore, that’s just so stupid it hurts to think about.
un true you cannot do any meaningful damage of the rodney or prince of wales or hood the only 7.7s scarnhorst can damage is the glass cannons even some the japanese ships can stop your rounds scarnhorst has comparble pen to most WW1 12 inch dreadnoughts
scarnhorst 11inch 582MM of pen 7.3
USS texas 14inch 636mm of pen 6.7
SMS kaiser 12inch 525MM of pen6.7
SMS Bayern 15inch 593 MM of pen 7.0
HMS RODNEY 16 inch 696mm of pen 7.7
HMS prince of wales 14 inch 626mm of pen 8.0
HMS hood 15 inch 655MM of pen 7.7
This is untrue due to the 28.3cm APCBC having far better post penetration performance in comparison to WW1 era AP with even higher penetration. Settsu, who’s AP is technically better, will not penetrate at the same angles as the 28.3cm APCBC despite the card saying otherwise.
A Scharnhorst likely won’t instantly kill opposition with main guns but its firerate more than makes up for it despite the lower penetration. It’s also a faster ship than most of its contemporaries as well. Even a Tosa breaks out in profuse sweating within the 28.3cm’s effective range and this isn’t hyperbole - those guns are gross within 10km and the only balancing factor is the fact the guns are kind of arse until they’re in plunging distance or within 10km.
Most of the opposing ships it fights has more than double the reload time. Iirc Rodney has 34 seconds aced. All the americans 40. The IJN has 24 to 30 depending on 41s or 35.6s.
Versus 17.2 seconds aced. The fastest battleship caliber reload in the game.
Only three of those ships have proper APCBC and at that range you have G7As. Most other ships either have nothing or terrible fixed angle torps to contest it.
maybe cause there 283mm and not 410mm or 356mms what next gonna say the fletcher is a match for the kongo cause reloads in 1.2 seconds ?
the 283mms have a massive performance gap you would have to drain the crew of the enemy ship which takes forever while they can target your barbettes like this and one tap very easily cause they have 700mms of pen or more
The shot by doria above would have same result as the Rodney shot anything that has good pen can easily sink a scarnhorst this way reload does matter
Mind you doria has way less filler than Rodney with similar pen
scarnhorst is the naval equivelant of a jumbo 75mm her barrbettes are machine gun ports basically
Comparing a destroyer caliber reload to a battleship caliber is weird mental gymnastics. You’re comparing 12.7cm SAP with barely 55mm of penetration at 7.5km to 35.6cm with almost 620mm at the same distance.
Settsu is a Kawachi class which existed in real life.
Amagi was a post WW1 battlecruiser that was basically finished but was irreparably damaged by the great Kanto Earthquake of the 1920s.
Nagato and Mutsu were sunk in the 1940s, Mutsu in port, likely due to a Beehive shell detonation. Nagato was captured and sunk at Bikini Atoll via Operation Crossroads. Both were part of the original ‘Big Seven’ battleships.
Tosa was scrapped in favor of aircraft carriers and the Washington Naval Treaty basically hamstringing every nation for roughly a decade and a half. She was also a post WW1 battleship meant to be an improved Nagato class with similar design characteristics as the Amagi. (5 turrets in AB-XYZ loadout)
So… One partially completed battleship somehow equates to almost the entire tree being paper ships. ???
Kaiser and the Bayerns also don’t have the same penetrative performance as Scharnhorst due to utilizing WW1 shells. I would know. I’ve grinded the entire german naval tree and spaded almost every ship in it. The filler isn’t the issue thanks to monstrous firerate. You would think it is but it isn’t.
Similar penetration at close range. Italian palla shells suffer at range and actually ‘underperform’ vs contemporaries of other nations due to worse penetration at said ranges. Although I use underperform in quotations as the penetration isn’t that much worse.
At that angle and range, the Rodney (or in your case, Andrea Doria) could go straight through the bowplate and hit the frontal protector plate which is made of paper - an issue with most of the german battleships. Little less so on the Bayerns since only the very sides of the frontal protection plate are thin.
your right there closer to american 8 inch heavier cruisers in performance which still have half the reload
but my point is a 11 inch even with the good reload is not comparble to a 14-15 inch gun
the pen drop of is to drastic so anything beyond 5 miles your shooting rounds with less pen than some heavy cruisers
rodney mutsu colorado all have way more pen at range
the 11 inch guns are very similar to 12 inch gun thats a WW1 caliber that wasnt used in anything other than a few niche battle cruisers after WW1
scarnhorst is close range specialist forced onto circle maps where the only ones wining are the ones with biggest guns due to more pen at range
reload is nice to have but your really only need a 1.5-2.0 rounds a minute to be effective
for example USS TEXAS 6.7 636mm of pen can beat any other 6.7 BB at range in a 1v1 despite her reload being 40 seconds do to her insane pen allowing her to be able to one tap most BBs
arkansas same rank same br has to get much clloser to targets to get similar damage exposing her self to more damage
Hyuuga and Ise are the exceptions to the rule and honestly not the norm; The Kongous are annoyingly durable at 7.3 and Fusou - in my experience - just takes forever and a day to drop dead.
I have ammo exploded a Hyuuga with an HMS Dreadnought and shellroom detonated another with a Westfalen. Both weren’t exactly fun fights but that part’s irrelevant.
And with the exception of mutsu have more than double the reload time. Colorado has american barbette issues and Mutsu can be crewed out with boiler room hits if ammunition isn’t hittable.
Mutsu is also 8.0 while the other two are 7.7, all three of which will likely get uptiered into a Soyuz match.
Edit
Arkansas also has armor reasonable enough to get close enough unless it’s something that can actually ignore its armor plates.
Either way it’s shutting off the flow of steam to the engines/ turbines which would have no real effect on a boiler explosion, if anything the pressure would rise once the steam flow is shut off.
Ruptured steam lines might require the engines shut off to be repaired as high pressure steam is not good for the crew, but the current implementation of the mechanic has the boilers magically depressurizing the second the engines are shut off, which is completely unrealistic, even the smaller steam trains & traction engines my father used to build took would take the better part of an hour to drop their boiler pressure to safe “blow down” levels where you can vent them after the fire was raked out and those things had a tiny capacity and operated at a fraction of the pressure compared to even a destroyers boiler.
Yep, another nerf for Yamato.
It’s also going to make naval gameplay even more static due to the constant engine cut offs to prevent the explosions. People already just park somewhere and shell, this will only farther encourage that behavior.
I really am unsure what Gaijin’s logic is. Flooding already forces you to drop all speed in an attempt to counter it (something Yamato can’t do as breach repair with a max level ace crew cannot repair a hull breach fast enough in some cases, IE a shellroom detonation if it happened at max speed).
I’m not going to act like I understand the technicalities of steam boilers and how they work - let alone what sort of damage they cause when they detonate - because I don’t but this sounds like another poorly thought out half measure to make naval ‘faster’.
