Shiphandling should be upgraded from the boat era

Game Discussion General Discussion
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While there have been changes to fire control, damage model etc, controlling the ship is basically unchanged from when there were only tiny boats.

  1. Steering
    Pushing A or D constantly to turn is fine when you’re in a boat but its ridiculous when you control Yamato.
    There should be a key for setting the rudder to a fixed position like “full right rudder” and a command where you come to a specific heading (“Steer 090”) as big ships have helmsmen and it is honestly a bit hard on the fingers to mash these buttons so long. And its just not realistic.

  2. Speed control
    Another thing is the throttle control. It is too responsive at least in RB. One of the metaest things people do (often driving Moffets or similarly obnoxious premium ships) is change back and forth constantly. WW2 ships couldn’t do this. Today’s gas turbine driven warships can accelerate or decelerate very quickly but not in WW2.
    While we certainly don’t need the 45 mins HMS Hood took to 30 knots in reality, acceleration and switchover from forward to reverse should be based on the indidual engine type of the ship in question.
    Very early ships like WW1 dreadnoughts with direct drive turbines or expansion steam engines (same for the few boats with them like Flower class) should be almost impossible to reverse in short time because you basically need to reverse the whole engine or divert the steam to dedicated reverse turbines.
    Most WW2 turbine ships had geared turbines with reverse gear but here it should also take time to uncouple the forward gear and put in reverse. Some like the big french destroyers still used dedicated reverse turbines though.
    Diesels and Gas turbine driven ships would be least affected by this.
    This would not only be realistic but also eliminiate some meta behaviour.

  3. Smoke
    Having five uses of smoke is unchanged since naval beta and equal for all vessels. However like with tanks, there were various methods of producing smoke:

  • chemical smoke generators onboard
  • smoke floats (also chemical) dropped overboard
  • Generating smoke by changing the oil mixture in the boilers (infinite use but slows down the ship a bit and is not good on the engine). This was a main role of WW1 and WW2 destroyers, arguably as important as torpedo attack.

Every ship should get the capability it had, e.g. boats get the chemical generators or floats while destroyers get the engine smoke generation. Here, diesel ships are at a disadvantage as it wasn’t possible to use diesel engines for smoke generation (unless you wanted to break them).
Battlefields would get a lot smokier but would also be more realistic

There’s other stuff like Radar or Torpedo modes but these are not as important.

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