Brits: Catastrophic Hits

[ExMachina]

If I enable the advanced critical hits for the British ships, I don't seem to get the added bonus of an increased rate of fire.

So, could someone please explain how ROF is determined? Is it fixed? Are Brit and German ROF different??

Thanks (love the game :D)

[Bullethead]

If I enable the advanced critical hits for the British ships, I don't seem to get the added bonus of an increased rate of fire.

So, could someone please explain how ROF is determined? Is it fixed? Are Brit and German ROF different??

"Poor ammo handlings" is IMHO a bad name for this setting. It should be "Highly dangerous cordite". IIRC, the wiki has a long post from me in it explaining the mechanism why British ships were more likely to explode and how the ACH thing works in Jutland.

But regardless of that, the rate of fire of guns is limited by the speed with which their ammunition can be delivered to them. For big guns, the limitation was the speed of the ammo hoists. That was fixed. Thus, it didn't matter whether or not the guys in the magazines piled up extra cordite in the handling rooms, it still couldn't get to the guns any faster than it did normally. IOW, there was a hardware-limited maximum ROF.

This max ROF is only used when the range is short enough that range spotting isn't a big issue. In the game, this is used out to about 5km. Beyond that range, ROF is slower because they have to wait to observe the fall of shot and make aim corrections. The time of flight and the time needed to make corrections were approximately the same on both sides, so at these ranges both sides have about the same ROF. The German guns had a slightly higher max ROF, but this is only apparent at short ranges.

At Jutland, the British didn't use their max ROF at longer ranges, but fired at the same rate as the Germans.

[ExMachina]

thanks for the clarification.

the gamesquad discussion on this topic has been helpful as well:

http://forums.gamesquad.com/showthread.php?t=87306

[Admiral Von Gerlach]

I can happily point to this thread as complete proof of the care taken with this game and the research and accuracy of the sim.

Another factor btw was the superior German optics and range finding technology which actually gave them a bit of an edge on ROF, but as Bullethead points out, the hoists were the main factor for speed for RN ships, those shells were HUGE and many injuries and even deaths on the turrent and ammo handling crews resulted from their size .... many dangers at sea back then.... but the men put to with a will and did their duty on both sides. Amazing to look back and see how they coped with the limitations of the technology, when things were scaled up they did the best they could.