[Bullethead]

Originally Posted by rubberboot

I made a scenario that pitted 20 older Brit battleships/pre-dreadnoughts, versus 4 Westfalens and 4 Helgolands. I had to turn it off. The brits were mauled, badly.

Bear in mind that the whole gunnery system has a very large number of variables, so that in any given trial, results can be rather different from what you expect. However, the long-term averages are pretty close to what you find in Campbell.

Now, let's consider your scenario. There are quite a few reasons why the Brits force is not as powerful as its numbers would make it appear. Off the top of my head:

1) Predreadnoughts Suck
You can pretty much leave them out of the equation. They have very little chance of hitting anything outside about 10km, because they lack sophisticated fire control. They have a lower rate of fire than dreadnoughts, and fewer guns, so they take more time to get on target, have a harder time staying on target, and are less likely to get as many hits even when they are on target. Plus, their guns are only 40-cal so aren't as powerful as other 12" anyway. And predreads a lot easier to kill than dreads, due to being of older design and smaller as well. So for the most part, they contribute little or nothing in a fight between dreadnoughts, so shouldn't really be considered in the overall numbers of this fight, provided the Germans stayed at long range.

2) Overconcentration of Fire
In 1916, having any more than 2 ships firing on the same target imposes severe accuracy penalties on ALL ships firing on that target (this changed later in the war). If all Brits were firing at once, and fire was distributed as evenly as possible, 20 Brits vs. 8 Germans means that 4 Germans had 3 Brits shooting at them, and 4 Germans had 2 Brits shooting at them. This means that 1/2 of the total German force was getting off lightly due to the overconcentration, while at the same time 3/5 of the Brit force was neutralizing itself with the same concentration. IOW, this alone changed the NUMERICAL odds (counting predreadnoughts) from 2.5:1 in favor of the Brits to 1:1.25 in favor of the Germans (8 effective Brits vs. 6 out of 8 effective Germans, but only 4 Germans likely to take much damage). And this is before you take the predreads out of the equation.

3) Silly Brit Design Issue
I don't know what "early" Brit dreadnoughts you used, but Dreadnought, the Colossi, and the Orions had the foretop behind the forefunnel. These ships shoot rather badly as a result, no better than Brit battlecruisers. So if you had any of these in your line-up, they're weren't contributing much even under the best conditions.

4) Crappy Brit Shells
If you were playing with the Advanced Critical Hit for fragile AP on, then the Brits weren't going to do much damage to the Germans if all they had was 12" guns. And even if you had this turned off, the Germans ships were a bit better at taking 12" hits than the early Brit dreads and predreads.

Above, I said the Germans had only 6 effective ships. That's because 2 of the Nassaus lack directors so are only marginally more effective at hitting that predreads, due to shotgunning larger salvos giving them a slightly higher chance to hit when their solution isn't quite on.

But anyway, at the bottom line, and without even thinking about how you actually played the fight in terms of manuevering, who had the wind and sun advantages, etc., I'm just saying that the force mix wasn't likely to have been anywhere near as favorable to the Brits as the overall numbers make it appear at 1st glance. So it shouldn't really be surprising that the Brits could lose such a fight.

Now, as to gunnery corrections......

Remember that with the numbers given above, 12 out of 20 Brits would be suffering the accuracy problems of overconcentration. This is going to make their salvos look odd, because they're correcting off some other ship's splashes instead of their own.

Another thing to keep in mind is that naval gunnery wasn't anywhere near as simple as many folks seem to think. Many people say that if a ship sees its splashes in a certain position relative to the target, then it just needs to apply a simple correction and the next salvo should be right on target. That's their expectation, and they complain when they don't see that happening. But they're basiing this expectation on false assumptions. It wasn't that way at all in real life. If it had been, ships at Jutland would have shot much better than the 3-4% hits they actually achieved.

The main false assumption people have about naval gunnery is that the firing ship knows the exact range, bearing, course, and speed of the target. If you did know that, then yes, it would be very simple to correct salvos, and in fact there'd be little need for corrections at all. However, this level of accuracy was only approached with late WW2-vintage radars. In WW1, things were very different.

In WW1, the target's range, bearing, course, and speed were all estimates, which rarely, if ever, actually matched reality in all respects, and were usually off in several areas, sometimes significantly. But it was these estimates that the firing ship used to aim her guns. IOW, the firing ship was shooting at where she THOUGHT the target would be when the shells arrived, based on where she THOUGHT the target was at present and what she THOUGHT it was doing. In reality, the target was usually both somewhere else and doing something different to a greater or lesser extent. Call this the "simulated" target data.

However, the spotters were looking at the target itself, not some pencil marks on a plotting table, and were reporting their own estimation (never 100% accurate except on straddles, and sometimes not even close to right) of where the shells landed in relation to the target's actual current position. This correction was fed into the system, which was still based on the target's "simulated" data, not the target's actual data. Thus, because the "simulated" target position and motion were unlikely to correspond to their real values, the correction was definitely not guaranteed to result in a hit next time. In fact, it usually didn't, which is why WW1 hit rates were as low as they were.

Basically, don't be surprised if you see a ship shoot several salvoes that miss fairly close to the same place off the target. What you're seeing is the firing ship's "simulated" target data not agreeing with the actual target data, which is often what happened in real life. But the firing ship would see this happening, and eventually realize her "simulated" data was wrong. So then somebody in the system would make a SWAG correction to the "simulated" target data, and they'd try again.

This is also one of the reasons why WW1 ships had trouble staying on target for more than a few salvos. Picture the "simulated" enemy ship and the real enemy ship on converging courses. Where their paths intersect, and for some distance on either side of that point due to the dispersion in range of the salvos, the 2 sets of data are close enough to equal for hits and straddles. But note that while hitting and straddling, the firing ship has no reason to assume her "simulated" target data is wrong, and in fact quite the opposite. Thus, the paths will eventually diverge and it will take the firing ship some number of salvos to realize she's lost the range.

And then, of course, there was the common tactic in WW1 for target ships to make long, slow zig-zags about their base courses. These were minor enough not to throw that ship's fire control solutions off enough to matter, and were imperceptable to the enemy. This had the result, often enough, of convincing the enemy he'd lost the range completely, when he really hadn't. Then he'd make a spurious SWAG "correction" to his "simulated" target data, with the result that he'd throw himself way off target and have to start over groping for the range again.

I highly recommend watching Tone's numerous and very well-done videos on WW1 fire control systems over at the Dreadnought Project. After watching these, you'll be amazed that anybody was able to hit anything back then.

Here's the link: http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/sim/

Anyway, all things being equal, in the game there are 5 types of fire control systems:

German Directors: Used by BBs, BCs, and newer CLs. Fires a ladder to start with, and usually starts getting hits earlier, but fades over time. Slightly the most accurate system overall, but not by much.

Brit BB Directors: Used by Brit BBs with foretops ahead of the forefunnel. Not quite as accurate as the German type, but the difference is slight over the long run. Thus, it starts out slower getting hits than the Germans, but builds up a nearly identical total number of hits eventually.

Brit BC Directors: Used by most Brit BCs, Brit BBs with the fortetop behind the forefunnel, and Brit monitors. Shoots considerably worse than either of the above. This is due either to lack of training, smoked out foretops, or too few guns for accurate spotting.

Central Aiming System: Used by BBs, BCs, ACs, and CLs that lack directors. Essentially an updated version of RJW-vintage systems. Fires full broadsides instead of 1 gun per turret. Less accurate beyond about 10km than Brit BC Directors, but the volume of fire makes up for that at shorter ranges.

Local Aiming System: Used by all DDs and other ships without any centralized fire control system, plus the light guns of bigger ships. Basically just the gunner's eyeballs. Not very effective at anthing but very short range, but quite effective there.