Quote:
Originally Posted by crackaces
Thoughts?
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First off, let me state that in our games there is no "base accuracy". Fire control systems of the day were highly dependent on human judgment which varied much in quality both intrinsically (as shown by BCF vs. GF shooting) and over time by the same ships during the same battle. The result is that in any single battle or part of one, an individual ship might shoot very well or very badly, or (more likely) have periods of both. Thus, "base accuracy" is only a long-term average at best, more of a rule of thumb. It's not something to rely on at any given time.
That said, back to the topic....
There was much argument on this subject during WW1, but the adherents of over-concentration (which I define for purposes of this discussion as too many shooters at one target to do good spotting) failed to realize 1 thing. That thing is that you can't reduce the problem to a "NOT" equation because each firing ship wasn't an "independent trial". IOW, the underlying assumption that each ship would have the same base accuracy and suffer the same accuracy degradation, from which odds could be figured, simply wasn't the case.
The main problem was that real ships didn't really know the true range, course, and speed of the target. IOW, unlike the game where you can find this out with the cursor, real ships had to estimate. They periodically took observations from multiple instruments, each of which had a significant level of irreducible mechanical error before you consider potential operator error, and averaged the results. And they had to do this multiple times and draw a best-fit line through the results to see any trends developing.
The result of all this was that each ship had its own idea of where the target would be when the shells came down. Sometimes they were dead on, sometimes they were way off. And the only real feedback they had to correct their errors was observing their shell splashes, because the range they were fired at was the ONLY thing the firing ship really knew for certain. But then, of course, there was also rangefinder and operator error in seeing how far off the splashes were.
As such, it was of vital importance that a WW1 ship be able to tell which splashes were its own. If it couldn't do that, then it really had no way of telling how much to correct, or even whether to correct at all. This is why accurate shooting was pretty much out of the question if more than 2 ships were firing on the same target at ranges were spotting was the key to the problem. Due to the time that splashes lasted, the 2 ships had to stagger their fire so that one's splashes would be gone before the other's appeared. Thus, if more than 2 ships were firing at the same target, none of them could tell whose splashes were whose, and none of them could shoot well. So if a ship was way off the range, it really couldn't tell, and would continue to miss by a wide margin, meaning it would contribute nothing to the overall hit rate, regardless of mathematics.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet from the get-go, and the RN after Jutland, both developed ways of concentrating 3-4 ships on the same target during WW1. These methods worked by removing the need for each ship to spot her own splashes. Instead, there was a designated master ship that did all the calculations and the other ships fired at ranges a bit above and below that of the master ship. The idea was to shotgun the target with what was in effect a single huge salvo, spotted as group, and hopefully wide enough to straddle at some point. It was hoped that, because of the known range offsets of individual ships, the true range would be quickly determined and subsequent group salvos tightened up around that point. Neither system was really tested in combat, however.