Hood outranged?

[Godofthunder]

Just had a look at the preview of Victory at Sea and have just one query. The Hood has a range of 33inches with her 15" guns but the Hipper (with 8" guns) outranges her by 4 inches? And the Kongo with 14" guns also outranges her.

Surely some mistake?

 

[DM]

Technically this is correct, but only by virtue of the fact that VAS allows main guns to fire to their extreme range rather than the limits of fire control. Hood's 15" guns could fire to 30,180 yards (ships firing the newer shells tghat Hood never got could fire out to 33,550 yards), whereas the German 8" had a maximum range of 36,680 yards and the Japanese 14" on the Kongo out to 38,870 yards.

HOWEVER

Warship fire control systems (even with radar directed gunnery) and pure physics (e.g. line of sight issues) would not allow engagements at much over 27000 yards (the longest hits on mobile targets being Warspite at Guilio Cesare (26,200 yards) and S&G at Glorious (26,440 yards). Reading through the gunnery manuals of various navies it becomes apparent that fleet doctrine forbade enaggements at extreme ranges anyway. Since VAS has an (undeclared) scale of 1" = 1000 yards you ought not to be able to engage other ships at more than about 30". I use this upper limit in my games and it makes things much more realistic (and makes things more playable on a 6x4 table). Shooting at longer ranges is possible if spotter aircraft are used but in a recent discussion with some of my naval gunnery expert chums it transpired that this wasn't attempted against mobile targets and should therefore only be allowed against immobile ships or shore targets.

I have however maintained consistency with the approach taken when developing new ship sats (such as my Russian article) - I've seen what happens in other sets of rules when someone develops new stats without being consistent with the main body and it gets ugly really quickly!!

This was another area of some debate between the playtesters

 

[E Nicely]

Oh god you got DM started on technical explanations :shock:

 

[DM]

Scary, isn't it? 8)

 

[E Nicely]

yes

 

[Hugbiel]

Just had a look at the preview of Victory at Sea and have just one query. The Hood has a range of 33inches with her 15" guns but the Hipper (with 8" guns) outranges her by 4 inches? And the Kongo with 14" guns also outranges her.

Surely some mistake?

I didn't have my book here but I wonder how VaS handle range ( -6 to hit at more than 3/4 of max range ? ) and on witch stat they base their number. I'm not sure for the Hood but as a WW1 class ship she may have turret elevation limited by armor and so limited max range. But the range to look for the value to hit is still the theorical max range.
For exemple Bretagne is limited near 30° so is base max range is 30% greater than is real max range.

Firing at extreme range is useless and costly but may sometime be attempted for support : a cruiser or battleship may want to scare a formation in order to help destroyer to reach torpedo range.

But for gaming purpoose it sould be 8+ to hit on a D6 ...

 

[BuShips]

Well, I can't see an 8" gunned cruiser outranging a 15" gunned ship. I'm likely to play like DM, limiting the extreme range to about 30".