neil hilton wrote:Haven't read the thread about long range gunnery but from what you say it is similar to what I'm saying here, ie long range hits are possible under the right circumstances. And just how rare are those circumstances? Which thread is it BTW, maybe I can stick my oar in there too.
I really think the Warship International article is key to understanding this. It's in two parts and many pages long. They examined a large number of practice shoots and combat results.
One of them has over 900 entries. Happy reading. The last ten pages are probably the most relevant to long range gunnery.
Ideal circumstances are:
1. Clear weather.
2. Mark 8 Mod 0 or better radar, enabling a plan view of the salvo impact in relation to the enemy ship.
3. Full salvoes fired to make MPI determination more accurate.
4. Hot guns, or at least all guns at the same temperature.
Iowa and New Jersey both achieved straddles against a Japanese destroyer at over 35,000 yds, but of course it was much too small to have a reasonable chance of actually hitting it. Iowa straddled on her first salvo. A battleship sized target is of course many times larger.
Steve, you left out No 5 - using very good quality guns and very very good quality AP shells. Any slight imperfection of the guns/shells, at that range, would result in a fail.
In the 'naval weapons' forum. Haven't even looked in ther yet. I'm still pretty new to all this stuff. Thanks for point me at it.
All dependant on the weather eh? figures, the rest are somewhat under the ships control. Clear weather at both ends of the firing arc is the real killer here, its pretty rare to get good shooting weather at sea. My point exactly.
Veni, vidi, verrimus!
I came, I saw, I swept the floor!
neil hilton wrote:In the 'naval weapons' forum. Haven't even looked in ther yet. I'm still pretty new to all this stuff. Thanks for point me at it.
All dependant on the weather eh? figures, the rest are somewhat under the ships control. Clear weather at both ends of the firing arc is the real killer here, its pretty rare to get good shooting weather at sea. My point exactly.
Maybe rare in the North Atlantic. Not in the Pacific. In the summer it was often clear and very hot, with scattered cumulous. Nowaki was disappearing in the haze at about 39,000 yds.
neil hilton wrote:In the 'naval weapons' forum. Haven't even looked in ther yet. I'm still pretty new to all this stuff. Thanks for point me at it.
All dependant on the weather eh? figures, the rest are somewhat under the ships control. Clear weather at both ends of the firing arc is the real killer here, its pretty rare to get good shooting weather at sea. My point exactly.
Maybe rare in the North Atlantic. Not in the Pacific. In the summer it was often clear and very hot, with scattered cumulous. Nowaki was disappearing in the haze at about 39,000 yds.
Still sounds pretty rare to me, its consistancy that counts here I think. Unless you only want to come out of port during the summer or only when the weather is clear and hot. BTW I assume that sea swells are accounted for in the FC solution and such ship movements due to sea movement or are these conditions classified in the 'Clear weather' circumstance?
Veni, vidi, verrimus!
I came, I saw, I swept the floor!
neil hilton wrote:
Still sounds pretty rare to me, its consistancy that counts here I think. Unless you only want to come out of port during the summer or only when the weather is clear and hot. BTW I assume that sea swells are accounted for in the FC solution and such ship movements due to sea movement or are these conditions classified in the 'Clear weather' circumstance?
Have you spent any time in the Pacific? It isn't rare at all to be able to see 20 miles. Obviously battleship combat is dependent on the weather. The worse the weather, the shorter the effective gunnery range, even with radar. Does this mean you design your ship so it can't fight an opponent at long range just because part of the time it isn't possible to do that? Obviously the USN and the IJN both designed their battleships so they could fight at long range if necessary.
Fire control systems account for swell. If it's slow enough for gun elevation rate to handle, you fire normally. If not, you have to fire at a certain point in the roll.
Let me turn your question around. Do you design your ship so it can only come out of port when the weather is bad? Or do you design it so it can fight effectively in all types of weather?
neil hilton wrote:All dependant on the weather eh? figures, the rest are somewhat under the ships control. Clear weather at both ends of the firing arc is the real killer here, its pretty rare to get good shooting weather at sea. My point exactly.
It doesn't neccesarily require "clear weather" at both ends of the firing arc. While there is defintily a weather dependency it is no a binary thing or even linear. For instance as Bgile has implied sea state may have little or no effect up to a certain point and then a rapidly increasing one. Radar can see through fog and clouds but may be degraded by rain. Light rain for instance may have little or no impact while heavy rain will have an increasing one. All in all "good shooting weather" is hardly rare. In certain locations and times of the year it will be more or less common but over the oceans as a whole I suspect that you'll have it well over 50% of the time.
Bgile wrote:
Have you spent any time in the Pacific? It isn't rare at all to be able to see 20 miles. Obviously battleship combat is dependent on the weather. The worse the weather, the shorter the effective gunnery range, even with radar. Does this mean you design your ship so it can't fight an opponent at long range just because part of the time it isn't possible to do that? Obviously the USN and the IJN both designed their battleships so they could fight at long range if necessary.
Let me turn your question around. Do you design your ship so it can only come out of port when the weather is bad? Or do you design it so it can fight effectively in all types of weather?
I have been in the Pacific, enough to know it was seriously misnamed. No, just a few months althogether, in which time only a few days were good ones!
The ship design thing. I would design it as you would, to be as effective in all types of weather as much as possible and with as long a firing range as possible simply because you never know what will happen in the real world.
Veni, vidi, verrimus!
I came, I saw, I swept the floor!
neil hilton wrote:All dependant on the weather eh? figures, the rest are somewhat under the ships control. Clear weather at both ends of the firing arc is the real killer here, its pretty rare to get good shooting weather at sea. My point exactly.
It doesn't neccesarily require "clear weather" at both ends of the firing arc. While there is defintily a weather dependency it is no a binary thing or even linear. For instance as Bgile has implied sea state may have little or no effect up to a certain point and then a rapidly increasing one. Radar can see through fog and clouds but may be degraded by rain. Light rain for instance may have little or no impact while heavy rain will have an increasing one. All in all "good shooting weather" is hardly rare. In certain locations and times of the year it will be more or less common but over the oceans as a whole I suspect that you'll have it well over 50% of the time.
Ships shooting ballistically shoot very high into the air and the shells may enconuter varying winds going in different directions, even on a clear day.
Modern warships have weather radar to adjust for this. Anybody know how ww2 ships coped?
Veni, vidi, verrimus!
I came, I saw, I swept the floor!
My impression is that was one of the reasons you used fall of shot to correct fire. This should work quite well as long as the winds aloft are consistent. Not as well if they are highly variable. Anyone know how much impact winds did have on battleship main gun projectiles?
lwd wrote:My impression is that was one of the reasons you used fall of shot to correct fire. This should work quite well as long as the winds aloft are consistent. Not as well if they are highly variable. Anyone know how much impact winds did have on battleship main gun projectiles?
No, but Iowa straddled Nowaki with her first salvo at about 35,000 yds.
lwd wrote:My impression is that was one of the reasons you used fall of shot to correct fire. This should work quite well as long as the winds aloft are consistent. Not as well if they are highly variable. Anyone know how much impact winds did have on battleship main gun projectiles?
No, but Iowa straddled Nowaki with her first salvo at about 35,000 yds.
Which could have been pure luck.
Veni, vidi, verrimus!
I came, I saw, I swept the floor!
Bgile wrote:Have you spent any time in the Pacific? It isn't rare at all to be able to see 20 miles.
On both a frigate and a minesweeper. Best I can recall... the water looked about the same as the Atlantic. Can you see farther in Pacific waters, than in Atlantic?
20 miles...that's a long ways. Won't see any hull that far out unless you're really high...
lwd wrote:My impression is that was one of the reasons you used fall of shot to correct fire. This should work quite well as long as the winds aloft are consistent. Not as well if they are highly variable. Anyone know how much impact winds did have on battleship main gun projectiles?
No, but Iowa straddled Nowaki with her first salvo at about 35,000 yds.
Which could have been pure luck.
Never admit it was good gunnery and a good system ... it was always pure luck.
No, just a few months althogether, in which time only a few days were good ones!