Kitakami and Oi

[chcrawfish]

What would the results have been if those two had ever gotten involved with the surface actions around the Solomons? Would they have been the fleet killers that they were designed to be, or would they have been supremely vulnerable to single hits causing catastrophic explosions of their torps?

[Bgile]

I don't feel that one ship is going to be decisive either way. In the actual events the Japanese were able to put a lot of torpedoes in the water anyway. Whether they blew up or not is also just luck. Obviously not every ship was even hit by gunfire at all.

[RF]

I would tend to agree with bgile on this - one or two ships acting on their own are unlikely to be effective. But several of these vessels acting together would have made a better chance, if they had been availble....

[chcrawfish]

Back in my college days (mid 80s), I was part of a naval wargaming group. One day we ran a Solomons-type scenario with the IJN having 1 KONGO-class BB, 1 CA, OI and 1 other CL, with about 4 DDs. The USN had WASHINGTON, 1 CA, 1 BROOKLYN-class CL, 1 SAN DIEGO-class CL, and 4 DDs. The scenario ended quickly, as OI was able to get all of her fish into the water...sinking WASHINGTON, the CA, the BROOKLYN, and a DD by herself. The CLAA and 2 other DDs caught Long Lances from the rest of the IJN ships and went down, leaving 1 DD to face the whole IJN force. We didn't allow OI or KITAKAMI to be used in our scenarios after that for some unknown reason.

[Bgile]

Back in my college days (mid 80s), I was part of a naval wargaming group. One day we ran a Solomons-type scenario with the IJN having 1 KONGO-class BB, 1 CA, OI and 1 other CL, with about 4 DDs. The USN had WASHINGTON, 1 CA, 1 BROOKLYN-class CL, 1 SAN DIEGO-class CL, and 4 DDs. The scenario ended quickly, as OI was able to get all of her fish into the water...sinking WASHINGTON, the CA, the BROOKLYN, and a DD by herself. The CLAA and 2 other DDs caught Long Lances from the rest of the IJN ships and went down, leaving 1 DD to face the whole IJN force. We didn't allow OI or KITAKAMI to be used in our scenarios after that for some unknown reason.

Hmmm... If it was that easy the USN would have lost all the night battles in the Solomans. As I said before, the long lance wasn't unique to Oi and Katami. There was something seriously wrong with your simulation if swapping for them ton for ton made the scenario unwinnable for the US. It sounds like pretty much every torpedo hit it's target, for example. The IJN woujld sometimes fire 50 torpedoes and get one or two hits if they were lucky. They fired a large number of them against Washington and SoDak and not one hit either.

Something wrong with that picture.

[lwd]

Back in my college days (mid 80s), I was part of a naval wargaming group. One day we ran a Solomons-type scenario with the IJN having 1 KONGO-class BB, 1 CA, OI and 1 other CL, with about 4 DDs. The USN had WASHINGTON, 1 CA, 1 BROOKLYN-class CL, 1 SAN DIEGO-class CL, and 4 DDs. The scenario ended quickly, as OI was able to get all of her fish into the water...sinking WASHINGTON, the CA, the BROOKLYN, and a DD by herself. The CLAA and 2 other DDs caught Long Lances from the rest of the IJN ships and went down, leaving 1 DD to face the whole IJN force. We didn't allow OI or KITAKAMI to be used in our scenarios after that for some unknown reason.

We played with them fairly often. However they usually got id'd fairly quickly and attracted the attention of the nearest BB. Even without special rules for what happens if they got hit with all those oxygen torpedos they didn't usually last long enough to launch anything.

[dunmunro]

. The IJN woujld sometimes fire 50 torpedoes and get one or two hits if they were lucky. They fired a large number of them against Washington and SoDak and not one hit either.

Something wrong with that picture.

Well, they did hit 3 of the 4 escorting DDs, IIRC.

[Bgile]

Well, they did hit 3 of the 4 escorting DDs, IIRC.

All four were disabled or sunk one way or another. I was thinking they were all hit by torpedoes but I could be mistaken.

I think they were all aimed at the battleships.

[chcrawfish]

In our scenario, the CL launched all 40 fish rather quickly, before the USN spotted her over on one side of their formation. They saw the other IJN ships making torp runs and started evading from them only to run into the two spreads from OI. About 1/4 of her fish found their marks. The DD caught one, the two cruisers caught two each, and the BB caught about 5. The rules we were using were based on the game KRIEGSMARINE. Over the year or so that I was with that group, any US DD that caught a Long Lance was almost certainly a goner from the combination of point damage, shock damage, and flooding points. The cruiser hits were probably in the vitals for only 2 to kill 'em outright (engine rooms, boiler rooms, magazines).

[Bgile]

Obviously your simulation had an unrealistic number of torpedo hits for one reason or another.

In a lot of games torpedoes are unrealistically effective. For example, it's not unusual for the guy with the torpedoes to make contact with the enemy and then on the next "turn" supposedly a minute later, every one of his ships fires all of it's torpedoes in a perfectly calculated salvo designed to have a torpedo every 100m (or less) all along the length of the enemy line.

[chcrawfish]

When we fired fish, we wrote the firing order down and tacked a protractor to the floor. At the appropriate time interval, we opened the order and laid out tape measures along the angles from the center of the protractor to see if they intersected the ships' movements at the times when the fish and ships were there. Misses were definitely the regular result, but that night the luck was definitely with the guys running the IJN forces.

[lwd]

That's pretty much what we did as well. However the ship scale wasn't the same as the ground scale from what I recall. Lead to a higher hit prob for torpedoes although we usually knew when someone fired them as well so you could try and outguess sooner.