Hypothetical Ships in a Supplement?

[Hugbiel]

[up]

I strongly disagree. It's a matter of purpose but I you want to stick with the historical IMHO you had to go with section deployments too (as in task force 37 ).

If as me you like to play a game, I don't see the point to stick to what was written by the hazard of history. The building cost of ship is it's priority level, and some what if are useful to balance some fleet.

 

[jfox61]

Unfortunately history is never ever balanced. How much fun would it be if everyone was limited to exactly the same as everyone else just for the sake of balance. Just check out the historical scenarios in the Rulebook, how many of those are balanced, I think you will find none are balanced. They reflect history. If you are going to admit hypothetical ships to a historical game I think it should be limited to those actually in the building stage and almost completed (like Aquila and Graf Zeppelin for instance). Blueprints and on paper designs are exactly that. Paper specs have no historical foundation for any speculated performance. Any projected performance is purely guesswork. Anyone can stick a list of stats on a piece of paper and say this ship would do this or this ship would do that. Until tested no one knew how good a design something was. Leave them out there are enough REAL ships designs to keep anyone going for years.

 

[juggler69uk]

Scenario driven games are the way to go IMHO

For those that want balanced fleets and "competition style" equal fleets the rules already supply that with the ability to select more of a particular class than were actually built.

for example to "even up" the USA's four Iowa class the Japanese player could field 4 Yamoto class even though only two saw service. Or the Brit player could field multiple HMS Hoods, the German player could field ten Bismarks if they want, there simply isnt the need to add "what ifs" in the name of Balance.

The note at the beginning of the fleet lists on P.46 says it all when using the lists

.....every fleet in the game has a reasonable chance of defeating any other

 

[Soulmage]

Except for the fact that the Bismarck is so badly outclassed by the Iowa. Your hypothetical German player with ten Bismarcks will find himself blown out of the water by a US player with five or six Iowas.

I think the hypotheticals should be added to eliminate that kind of disparity in what a particular fleet can put to sea. Nothing says that you have to use them.

To the folks concerned about real ships being excluded in favor of hypotheticals. . . I would reply that I would think many similar classes of ship that actually existed would have substantially identical stats to others at the level of granularity present in the VAS rules. So one set of stats could potentially cover a wide range of closely related ship classes.

 

[jfox61]

Although I disagree with the use of Hypotheticals in the game, Soulmage does have a point about the actual combat capabilities of the ships. But this is a problem with the actual priority levels in the game rather than the inclusion of fantasy ships to balance the game out. Increase the amount of priority levels by one and place all the super AP ships in there. Then you will get 2 Bismarck class ships for every 1 Iowa or Yamato Class ship, then you have game balance. At least you will be pitting ships against each other that actually existed and not some make belief ship with a theoretical and quite possibly overrated performance. Even some of the more powerful ships weren't as powerful as people thought. Indeed The Iowa's in later life could only fire their main armament by firing 1 turret at a tme in a ripple effect. Also the Yamato and Musashi were widely believed to not be able to fire a full broadside due to the possibility of instability and damage to the ship itself due to the excessive forces involved in firing such powerful guns in one go. Unfortunately the rules are not in depth enough to simulate this, but adding pretend ships to balance out rules problems isn't the way to go IMHO.

 

[DM]

Indeed The Iowa's in later life could only fire their main armament by firing 1 turret at a tme in a ripple effect.

Really?

I think not

 

[E Nicely]

That is one nice picture.

 

[Swan]

Mongoose has already set a precedent for ships allowed with the Graf Zepplin. This ship never saw combat, and so her capabilities were all hypothetical. All of the ships in the VaS list show their stats as hypothetical though. The combat abilities of each ship are based on a mathematical formula, depicting the size and number of guns, speed, armor thickness etc… Using this same math placed on a hypothetical gives you a ship stat line in VaS that is as accurate as the stats for any constructed ship.

While scenario driven games are one way to play VaS, the game also has a campaign system attached to it. Currently we have a nine player campaign game running, and we are enjoying the game quite a bit. We have had to arbitrate some of the campaign rules a bit for game play though. Play is toughest on the French and Italian players with a lack of ship choices, and the Italian player would truly love to see his Air Craft carrier and planes show up in the supplement. As the German player, facing off against Iowa class BB’s is one tough fight, and the lack of AP (except for the Bismarck Class BB) means that there is little chance to tale one of these ships down. Adding in the hypothetical ships would go a long way to balancing out the forces for this style of play.

Finally, the granularity of the VaS system. Many can agree that there are definitely better choices of ships in each priority, and there are fleets whose ships do not match up at all to others of their class (Nagata, Iowa, Yamamoto etc…) The question really becomes, how granular does the system need to be? Is an Iowa worth 2 Bismarcks? Should there be plus-levels, which would make a ship worth 50% more then its class, and not 100% more like moving up a level?

In any case, we are currently enjoying the game, but would like to increase our fleet options.

 

[jfox61]

Although that picture is nice and it does show a broadside being fired I still maintain that not all Guns were fired full broadside as a general practice. As proof I draw your attention to the following link. It clearly states guns were fired three guns at a time at 1 second intervals. This took effect after the refits of the 1980's. Link Below


http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:HJhKRdU11wMJ:www.battleship.org/html/Photos/Gallery.htm+iowa+class+refits&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&lr=lang_en

 

[jfox61]

And here is a picture dated 1988 to prove it. I also apologise as my description was slightly misleading stating 1 turret fired I actually meant 1 gun per turret.


http://www.battleship.org/images/bb61fb.jpg

 

[jfox61]

The Iowa is probably not worth 2 Bismarcks but would provide a much closer fight than a 1 on 1 battle. It all boils down to what you are prepared to play yourself. Hypos or historical. As far as Graf Zeppelin is concerned it was basically a platform for flying off planes at sea. The keel and the majority of the ship were completed. The Aquila was in the process of completing sea trials. On other hand blueprints were exactly that. Just because a gun was powerful or a ship looked good on paper other aspects of a ships design were not readily apparent until after completion. For instance, although Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on paper were great ships they were proven to be far from it with very poor seakeeping qualities to the point where turrets would fail to operate reliably. Even a modification of the bow failed to right this problem completely. I am not against hypothetical and nearly completed ships but I think that all in service ships should be included as a priority over hypothetical ships. Even if all mongoose do is to say treat class 'a' as class 'b'

 

[Wishbone]

I agree that the priority should be to get ships that actually existed out there first. I also see nothing wrong with getting unbuilt designs and uncompleted ships statted up, but I think they should be a secondary priority.

Also, as a complete geek I feel obligated to make some points about the Aquila.
firstly, whilst she was designed to carry upto 51 RE 2001 fighter/bombers, only 36 of them were to be manned. the remaining 15 were to be strapped to the hanger ceiling to be used as spares and to replace damaged planes.
secondly, I don't believe that she was even as near completion as everyone thinks. for a start, it is debateable whether or not she would even have been able to recover aircraft, due to turbulence caused by the island structure. i firmly believe that rather than get her out there as a platform for launching fighters as a one use wonder, the italians would've reconstructed her to fix her faults.
Thirdly, if the Aquila gets published, then the germans should be limited to just the graf zeppelin - the arrester gear and catapults from the second carrier were all installed on the aquila.
lastly, she was, after all, a converted liner. this means internal subdivision would be very poor, and that she would not have an armoured deck. in short, she would've been an easy target.

 

[DM]

I've checked with my US Navy chums and there were no restrctions on broadside firing on the IOWAs (or other US BBs) and no knowledge on restrictions on the Yamatos either.

You may be thinking about salvo firing and full broadside firing which were used by all BB-operating navies but not for the reasons you suspect. Rather than paraphrasing other sources here's an extract from a paper I have on file from Bill Jurens.

Salvos could be fired as full salvos, where all guns were discharged more or less simultaneously, as partial salvos, where half the main battery (usually either the forward after group) fired together, or as split salvos, where one gun of each turret fired together. Each system had its own advantages and disadvantages. Full salvos looked spectacular, but resulted in relatively large patterns which were difficult to spot and which arrived at relatively long intervals, thus making corrections difficult. Partial salvos reduced the pattern size, made spotting easier, and meant that corrections could be made (on the average) twice as often. Split salvos, due to the extreme separation of the guns, lead to the greatest accuracy and, theoretically, to the highest rate of fire as the director could fire as soon as any arbitrarily selected number of guns was ready to shoot.

Checking the gunnery manuals for the ships concerned bears out this fact; full broadsides were generally restricted to short range engagements where the issues discussed above were minimised and the imperative was for maximum weight of fire. Its also worth noting though that the errors introduced by full broadides were negated somewhat when the transition to radar FC took place.

 

[Soulmage]

Can anybody give me a few sentences on how radar guided FC worked? Seems awfully sophisticated for WWII era ships. . . but obviously they had it and it worked. Maybe I'm just thinking it was more that it actually was.

 

[DM]

In very simple terms the radar gives target range and bearing, which is essentially the same as what you would get from an optical system (things like target speed, aspect, etc. would have to be deduced from a plot so its not identical, but close). That would be fed into the ship's fire control system and used as target data for the guns. One aspect that was initially missing was the correction aspect that visual spotting would give (spotting the shell splashes to determine whether the shots were long or short) but later FC radars were able to detect the shell splashes (and even larger shells in flight) and a correction could be determined from this.

Obviosuly it was a lot more complex in practice but thats the gist of it. I've tried this for real at sea, shooting blind using radar only as well as using various sources of correction and its an awful lot of fun!!

 

[Soulmage]

Although I disagree with the use of Hypotheticals in the game, Soulmage does have a point about the actual combat capabilities of the ships. But this is a problem with the actual priority levels in the game rather than the inclusion of fantasy ships to balance the game out. Increase the amount of priority levels by one and place all the super AP ships in there. Then you will get 2 Bismarck class ships for every 1 Iowa or Yamato Class ship, then you have game balance. At least you will be pitting ships against each other that actually existed.

Unfortunately, the priority level fix you suggest doesn't actually solve the problem for historically based games.

If you have a concern with hypothetical ships that never existed being included, then you should have a problem with hypothetical additional ships that never existed of existing classes being used. Thus, a German player should never be able to field more than 2 Bismarck class BBs.

In that case, your solution doesn't work. Consider a 5 point war game. The U.S. player can purchase 2 Iowa class battleships and 6 Fletcher class destroyers.

There is just nothing in the German fleet that can stand up to that configuration. Short of extraordinary Hood-style luck, the Bismarcks will be blown out of the water by the Iowas in short order, and from there on its just mop up.

 

[jfox61]

You are correct on both counts. No it doesn't fix historically based scenarios but then again it isn't meant to. Historical scenarios are exactly that and should not be tampered with to create artificial parity. The challenge is to better your historical equivalent using only the rules. And yes I do have a problem using more ships than were actually built. I don't use them so therefore 2 bismarck 2 scharnhorst's 2 Yamato's etc. This of course is a personal choice and in no way criticises players who wish to use more of a type than was built or use hypotheticals. But the thread is about whether to include hypos in the supplement. I for one am not against it, so long as all historicals are represented first. Even if this means they refer you to another ship type because performance wise they were identical

 

[Swan]

Just because a gun was powerful or a ship looked good on paper other aspects of a ships design were not readily apparent until after completion. For instance, although Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on paper were great ships they were proven to be far from it with very poor seakeeping qualities to the point where turrets would fail to operate reliably. Even a modification of the bow failed to right this problem completely.

This is a good example of the granularity of the game. I have no clue as to the validity of what you stated, but taking it at face value, the rule system in VaS does not take these examples in account. There is no rule for the Scharnhorst turrets failing to operate short of being crippled or taking a critical hit. They never need to roll for sea worthiness, and on paper and in the game they are really good ships. Whatever flaws may or may not have occurred had some of those blue print ships been built would not matter to the VaS stat list. They would have performed exactly as the rules state, with the range/damage/save that was created from the armor/weapons they were listed as having. Using the theory of class 'a' uses the same stat line as class 'b' would work as well for hypotheticals as it would actual ships. I would just hate to see this game relegated to the Pacific theatre since no other nation could field a navy on par with the Japanese and Americans.

One last note on precedent for the Hypotheticals. Signs and Portents put out a fleet list for the Russian navy which is accepted as a valid navy by Mongoose. In this list hypothetical units are listed, one more reason why other navies should be able to receive some of their 'missing' units.

 

[juggler69uk]

Historical scenarios are exactly that and should not be tampered with to create artificial parity. The challenge is to better your historical equivalent using only the rules.

I agree wholeheartedly

And yes I do have a problem using more ships than were actually built. I don't use them so therefore 2 bismarck 2 scharnhorst's 2 Yamato's etc. This of course is a personal choice

This also is my personal choice

But the thread is about whether to include hypos in the supplement. I for one am not against it, so long as all historicals are represented first. Even if this means they refer you to another ship type because performance wise they were identical

Again I have said it before I agree

I would also like to point out that if all these hypothetical ships are included then it could totally unbalance the game.

e.g a fleet full of Hypothetical ships could make some navies redundant and giving the player wanting to play to historical accuracy no chance

 

[Hugbiel]

I would also like to point out that if all these hypothetical ships are included then it could totally unbalance the game.

e.g a fleet full of Hypothetical ships could make some navies redundant and giving the player wanting to play to historical accuracy no chance

Play with historical accuracy mean not only use the same ship but also under the same "doctrine" in some realistic theater etc. It's a kind of big job that some may not want to do.

But balancing the game is not a matter of using real ship. Real ships unbalance the game since the winners of this wars have better opportunities to build better ships. Balancing the games is more a matter of game design, and I still think that a shortened tourney list for balanced games is needed.