I did not mean the fanboy remark to be taken so harshly, and I retract it. I am also a fan of the Italians, and would have lumped myself in that category.
I appreciate your agreement to disagree about the powder charge issue. But you utterly wrote off the muzzel velocity argument, and the gun construction arguement, and yet the italian navy did, in fact, continually attempt to reduce the muzzle veloctity of its wepaons. This is not somethign I made up, the numbers and the history are all readily available.
This Italians had other problems leading to dispersion, including inconsistent shell manufactuing, and naval architecture which regularly place weapons too close together. It was not simply a matter of the powder charges being incosistent. And At times, Italian naval gunfire was very accurate, what ever issues they had with the powder, or the gun design.
A study of the various guns used by the italians, however, does, in fact, show that they had on ongoing problem with unreasonable muzzle velocities.
In contrast to both our arguments, at least one person blamed the projectiles. This is taken from
http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNIT_15-50_m1934.htm
"The Model 1934 was extremely accurate and was able to deliver very consistent and predictable patterns with devastating hitting power - with the ammunition used for trials. Unfortunately, the materials and supply process in Italy works differently than it does in most other countries. In the U.S., for example, if one wished to test a sample of 16" shells, they might pull an example from stock, and inspect it directly. In Italy, the firm producing the equipment would have the advantage of providing the item for test, thereby possibly delivering an example which would be of atypically good quality with respect to serialized units. This was the problem with the Model 1934 - the firms producing the ammunition did not all produce projectiles of proper quality. [Admiral Angelo] Iachino complained about this in post-war books. Some actions showed a run of good projectiles, where others were plagued by terribly bad examples. Possibly the greatest contrast was seen between the shooting of Littorio in the first battle of Sirte Gulf and that of Vittorio Veneto in the 28 March Guado encounter. Despite the fact that Littorio was shooting at targets 32,000 yards away while Veneto was attacking at first Orion and afterwards Gloucester at only 24,000 yards, the Littorio's shot groups were significantly more consistent, despite the greater range, doubtlessly owing to a batch of properly fabricated 381-mm projectiles."
I highly recommend the Navweaps site.
DM you are correct in suggesting that armour penetrations discussed here are theoretical, but the orginal point of the thread was to place a dividing line between AP and super AP. I think the theoretical armour penetration is a fine place to begin. After all, the random variables that apply to combat are better summed up in the to his and damage die rolls, and not the statistics of the weapon. What is ultimately more theoretical than wargames design statistics?
