Sabre said:
What I want is a device in the gun-director tower (high on the superstructure to give greater line-of-site), with optical range-finder marks and a powerfull zoom (something like what the tank site does.
Well, the only way I think this would work without taking the skill and stuff out of it would be if the gun director was a separate crew position that did NOT fire the guns but simply transmitted target range and bearing info to other players in the turrets.
I envision it working like this: the CA main battery director position would be like the buff bombsight in that when you look straight ahead, you see out a window in the front of the director with a wider but unmagnified view with no reticle marks. You use this for initial target acquisition. When you look down, you look into the rangefinder itself, which is zoomed in somewhat and is what actually does the useful work.
The view in the rangefinder would be a split screen showing 2 halves of the same image slightly out of line with each other. The job of the gun director player is to line the halves of the image up and keep them that way, like a stereoscopic rangefinder. This will be difficult to do perfectly because of the small number of pixels involved (magnification won't be that much). He also has to keep the target centered in his field of view by rotating the director.
The point of all this is to generate target range and motion data over time. Having the range at a given instant by itself is totally useless because both the firing ship and the target are moving. This means lead is required, just like in air-to-air deflection shooting. However, it's 2D lead, both in range and bearing. And the only way to know how much lead to apply is by observing the target's relative motion for a few minutes, to build up knowledge of its course and speed.
This is why the director player must keep the rangefinder focused for range and centered on the target for bearing all the time. In real life, WW2 ships had analog computers that monitored how fast the rangefinder's range settings were changing, and how fast it was turning to keep the target centered. This gave it the target's range and bearing rates and allowed it to calculate the relative future position of the target at a time when the shells would arrive there if fired now. Which in turn is a function of the range, range rate, and time of flight of the shells to that distance.
In AH, therefore, there'd have to be some routine that emulated the old analog fire control computers and combined the range, bearing, range rate, and bearing rate generated by the director player. It would then calculate the guns' range and bearing settings needed to hit the target and display this to the gunner players in the same place they get target range and bearing for shore targets when they click on the map. IOW, this would be the pointers from the director. But these pointer numbers would only be accurate after a couple of minutes of the director player constantly keeping the target properly aligned and focused in his sight. Before that time has passed, they're just a rough estimate.
So now you have 2 skills that affect sea battles. The director player has to learn how to keep his sight aligned all the time and the gunners have to be good at matching the pointers. And the gunners always have the option of going to "local control" and just shooting as they do now, watching their own splashes. Having this sort of system I think would be a nice enhancement: realistic and requiring skill. Plus, it would open up the possibility of the director position being knocked out.
I don't think we need AA directors. Players can already splash planes with the 5" beyond con range.
You would use the map-click capability to find the approximate range and bearing to the land target, or the optical range-finder to determine the approximate range to a naval target.
I agree that the director system outlined above should only work for sea battles. Before I became a Marine, I was in the navy briefly, during which I was actually part of a fire control party in CIC during NGFS exercises. For this type of firing, clicking on the map is a very realistic simulation of how fire control works in real life. That's exactly what happens--you (or usually an observer) pick a point on the map and shoot at it. When you miss, an observer radios you with the corrections needed to hit what you want to hit. You adjust and then shoot again. So IMHO no systems changes need be made to shore bombardments. We just need to get players into the habit of adjusting fire on the radio.
The gun you're controlling should "follow the pointers" automatically (yes it broke down often in real life...so did the N1K2's engine, but we don't model random mechanical failures in AH), with the option to "lay the guns" manually. The gun-director interface should than allow you to make adjustments to range and azmuthe, such as in the DOA artillary directing. Perhaps using a dot command to alter the "pointers."
With this I disagree because it lets fewer players take part in the shooting. Instead of up to 4 players in the CA (3 gunners and a director) it would just be the director player keeping the target properly aligned and focused, and firing the guns himself as they track to the target data he's generating. While this in fact was standard equipment on most WW2 ships, I just don't like it from a gameplay standpoint. I'd rather see 4 guys doing this, each of them having to play with skill. And like I said, the automatic turret controls frequently malfunctioned anyway.
Any maneuvering of the ship would result in the auto-gun pointing being inaccurate; in other words, you couldn't hit squat if the ship was turning.
Or if the target was turning. I agree. This is covered in the need outlined above to observe the target over time to get range and bearing rates. If either you or the target changes course, you have to start observing it on the new course to build up data to predict future position. This doesn't take as long as starting from scratch, but it should throw the director data off for a minute or so.
Finally, exploding naval shells should have a blast radius as do bombs.
I would qualify this by saying "the same blast radius as bombs of
similar explosive content". Naval HE shells didn't contain nearly as much HE as bombs of the same weight because they required much thicker walls to withstand the shock of firing. In WW2, shells for 8" guns typically weighed about 200 pounds. This is less total weight than the wimpy 250-lb bomb, and they had proportionally less HE content. And the 5"/38 rounds weighed about 55 pounds total. So you're talking popguns when compared to the bombs routinely carried by aircraft. Therefore, even CA main battery shells shoulnd't come close to the damage done by even 500-lb bombs.
Also, and this is VERY important in my book, each shell that explodes on land should leave a dust cloud that dissapates.
So should every bomb and MG bullet that hits the ground, and every moving tank. But that sounds like a massive framerate hit to me
.
Splashes in the water should probably last a second longer, too, I think...
Agreed. Naval shells had very specialized designs--not only did they have to penetrate and do sufficient damage to the target, they also had to make the biggest splash possible to facilitate spotting. After all, most shells were going to miss. Getting optimum splash size was a real squeak requiring special fuzes as well as shell design, but they did it.
Splashes obey simple Newtonian gravity laws. The water goes up slowing down, stops, then falls back. The typical 8" AP shell could throw water up about 200 feet in the air based on pictures of very near misses and comparing splash height to the known length of the target. Using the standard forumla
d = (1/2)at^2 + vt + s, with d = 200 feet, a = 32 ft/sec^2, and v and s = 0, this becomes 200 = 16t^2, so t (time for a 1-way trip either up or down) is 3.5 seconds. IOW, it should take 3.5 seconds from shell impact for the splash to reach its full 200-foot height, and another 3.5 seconds for it to all fall down.
Oh yeah, and guns with multiple barrels should have some dispertion to the rounds and make multiple craters/splashes.
Not much dispersion between guns in the same turret--they tried very hard to eliminate it in real life. By WW2, they had pretty much succeeded.
-Bullethead <CAF>
------------------
In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is strength, in water there is bacteria
