[Bullethead]

Originally Posted by tramker

How does the gunnery damage slider fits in ? It changes blast radius of shells or something like that ?

That, and it increases penetration, and makes the explosions more macho.

Anyway, I've liked the gunnery and penetration model from the beggining and that was the main reason I bought the game. But I'm a little underwhelmed by flooding and damage control model, so maybe you should continue you explanation there.

I dunno, it seems OK to me. Do you have Campbell's book? It's pretty much required reading on this subject.

As best we can tell, Campbell did the best analysis of damage. Thus, we ran thousands of tests (literally) to determine the long-term averages and get them about where he says they were. You have to do a LOT of tests because the whole system has so many variables in it that you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from just a few runs.

I particullary don't like the idea of ships with more then 100% damage control, which cannot take in any water unless I manage to reduce their crew number by means of starting heavy fire. It seems to me these should be two unrelated things.

Not true. Any hit that does flooding damage has 2 components, permanent and temporary. Permanent is basically compartments open to the sea in a big way, which there's no way to pump out. The temporary is in neighboring compartments that can be sealed off and pumped out, or at least corrected (up to a point) by counterflooding.

Damage control rating is dependent on crew size vs. displacement and internal volume. Thus, some ships have more "spare" people (and therefor DC equipment) than others, and can have DC ratings over 100. But this doesn't make them immune to damage.

How did the pumping work in the RL anyway ?

Very differently than many folks have been led to believe from older naval games like GNB.

The bulk of a ship's internal volume was divided into a relative few, relatively large watertight compartments. Most of these ran clear across the ship from side to side. These large watertight compartments were usually (i.e., except for engineering spaces) subdivided into many small rooms, but these weren't "watertight". Sure, they might consist of bulkheads solidly welded to decks, but the bulkheads weren't strong enough to withstand the pressure if 1 side of them was totally flooded. IOW, the could localize an overflowing toilet, but that was about it. This sort of compartmentization, a few large spaces, was about all that anything of CL size and below had, apart from some fuel tanks and scattered void spaces. Thus, they had little or no ability to counterflood.

Larger ships usually had wing compartments outboard of torpedo bulkheads, and double bottoms, for most of their lengths. All these spaces were subdivided into many small watertight compartments. The idea was that most damage would be isoloated in these essentially sacrificial spaces, and similar expendable spaces on the other side of the ship could be counterflooded to maintain trim. But only up to a point, beyond which the ship couldn't take any more water inside.

Where a ship took a hit, it was basically impossible to eliminate the flooding. That area was open to the sea with no way to patch it, so no matter how much you pumped there, the same amount would come back in. Thus, the objective was to wall such areas off by true watertight bulkheads, shored up by big timbers, and run the pumps on the "dry" side of these bulkheads. Bulkheads always leak, either from flying fragments, twisted hatch seals, or pipe/wiring pass-throughs.