Sailor Steve
11-21-12, 10:37 PM
Don't read this if you're easily bored by historical shenanigans. You've been warned. It's a perverted sort of geekdom to the max.
As I've mentioned many times in the past, I've been working on my own tabletop miniatures naval game for a couple of decades. I'm no closer to being done than I've ever been because I keep finding out new things and adding them in. Honestly I worry that my real hobby is doing the research, and actually playing the game is something I can take or leave. We did a little playtesting back in 2001, but not much since.
Part of the problem is that I'm weird to begin with. I played several naval games back in the 1990s and had objections to every one of them. Some of them were too simple, being designed to enable the player to run a whole fleet, or at least a task force or squadron. That's fine. In fact, that's what most players want - something they can play in a couple of hours and have fun sinking their friends. Other games are more complex and more detailed, and I like that. My problem there was that they were usually detailed in ways I didn't like and not detailed enough where I wanted them to be. I wanted to feel like I was on board the ship, and none of them made me feel that way. I stress "me", because my objections are my own and I don't expect other players to see it my way.
This has lead me to create individual charts for each ship class (and often each individual ship within the class) showing how they handled in bad weather, acceleration calculations, turning radius, gun descriptions and penetration charts and individual critical hit charts for each ship, with armor values for each specific location.
I vowed that I would not do any ships earlier than 1890, mainly because I wanted ships that served in the First World War. This has been scotched a couple of times because some classes had ships that were built in 1887 and the last one in 1891 (the British 'Admiral' Class battleships are a good example). I just finished the American protected cruiser Chicago yesterday, and planned today to start the British Mersey class cruisers of 1889. I went back the extra year because some of them served all the way through World War Two. My research showed that the Merseys were actually identical to the preceding Leander class of 1885, except the later ships had a protective internal deck extending the length of the ship whereas the earlier class's deck only covered the machinery spaces (engines and boilers).
Then I discovered that the class preceeding those, the Iris class of 1879, were in fact identical except for not having a protecive deck at all. The Irises were also the very first steel ships built for the Royal Navy, so including them was probably a good idea, and since it's my game I can do whatever I want anyway. I then found out that another difference between the classes was the guns they carried, and that the guns changed from time to time. No problem, that's true of a lot of ship classes.
So I checked all the sources at my disposal on the Iris class second-class cruisers, and discovered that their original armament was ten 64pdr RMLs. Yes, these ships were so old they were originally built with MUZZLE-LOADERs, just like back in the sailing ship days. In fact despite being the first steel ships and having quite powerful engines for their size, they also still carried sails.
http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a325/SailorSteve/Iris-03.jpg
http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a325/SailorSteve/Iris-23.jpg
Okay. I started doing research on the 64pdr, and found out that there were two different versions. The original was the gun that outfitted the first all-iron warship, HMS Warrior, back in 1860. It had a bore diameter of 8" because an 8" round iron cannonball weighed 64 pounds; or more properly a sixty-four pound roundball was eight inches in diameter.
Not long before this they had designed a new 64pdr, this one having a diameter of 6.3" and a rifled barrel. I knew that an oblong shell can be narrower but longer and still have the same weight, but I wondered why six-point-three inches and not six, or seven? It made no sense to me, but I had to find out. I started reading more, and what I found was to me both weird and wonderful, and ultimately so typically British, that I had to share it with anyone who might be interested.
The best example of that roundball vs oblong shell is the 12-pounder. The 12pdr Napoleon was the primary field gun from Napoleon himself through the American Civil War, and dating back to the 1700s for ship use. A round cannonball weighing twelve pounds is 4.62" in diameter, and that was the size for all 12pdr guns until the British Army changed that in 1859. They wanted a rifled gun firing an oblong shell and figured that the best diameter for that would the three inches. All 12pds (and 13 and 14pdrs) used on ships as anti-torpedo-boat guns right through the First World War were 3" in diameter.
Anyway, back to the main story, if you're still with me. Why on earth did they pick 6.3 inches for the new 64pdr gun? Well, it seems that the old 32pdr roundball was 6.3" in diameter, and they had large stocks of them just sitting around unused, so somebody decided that the new 64pdr gun should be able to shoot them as well, just to get rid of them. Okay, so the new gun is 6.3" across. So why stick with sixty-four pounds? Modern (WW1-era is modern to me) 6" guns fire a 100-pound shell. They could have made the shell for this gun longer and heavier, which would have been a good thing. Or they could have made it shorter and weighing only fifty pounds, which might not have been so good because it would have been less stable in flight. But a longer shell would have been more stable, which is even better.
So why insist on calling it a 64pdr? Because we weren't authorized to make a 6" gun, or a 6.3" gun, we were ordered to make a new 64pdr. We have to design the shell to weigh sixty-four pounds, or it's not a 64pdr anymore!
As I said, that strikes me as extremely odd to say the least, but it also strikes me as so quintessentially British as to make perfect sense, in its own perverse way.
As I've mentioned many times in the past, I've been working on my own tabletop miniatures naval game for a couple of decades. I'm no closer to being done than I've ever been because I keep finding out new things and adding them in. Honestly I worry that my real hobby is doing the research, and actually playing the game is something I can take or leave. We did a little playtesting back in 2001, but not much since.
Part of the problem is that I'm weird to begin with. I played several naval games back in the 1990s and had objections to every one of them. Some of them were too simple, being designed to enable the player to run a whole fleet, or at least a task force or squadron. That's fine. In fact, that's what most players want - something they can play in a couple of hours and have fun sinking their friends. Other games are more complex and more detailed, and I like that. My problem there was that they were usually detailed in ways I didn't like and not detailed enough where I wanted them to be. I wanted to feel like I was on board the ship, and none of them made me feel that way. I stress "me", because my objections are my own and I don't expect other players to see it my way.
This has lead me to create individual charts for each ship class (and often each individual ship within the class) showing how they handled in bad weather, acceleration calculations, turning radius, gun descriptions and penetration charts and individual critical hit charts for each ship, with armor values for each specific location.
I vowed that I would not do any ships earlier than 1890, mainly because I wanted ships that served in the First World War. This has been scotched a couple of times because some classes had ships that were built in 1887 and the last one in 1891 (the British 'Admiral' Class battleships are a good example). I just finished the American protected cruiser Chicago yesterday, and planned today to start the British Mersey class cruisers of 1889. I went back the extra year because some of them served all the way through World War Two. My research showed that the Merseys were actually identical to the preceding Leander class of 1885, except the later ships had a protective internal deck extending the length of the ship whereas the earlier class's deck only covered the machinery spaces (engines and boilers).
Then I discovered that the class preceeding those, the Iris class of 1879, were in fact identical except for not having a protecive deck at all. The Irises were also the very first steel ships built for the Royal Navy, so including them was probably a good idea, and since it's my game I can do whatever I want anyway. I then found out that another difference between the classes was the guns they carried, and that the guns changed from time to time. No problem, that's true of a lot of ship classes.
So I checked all the sources at my disposal on the Iris class second-class cruisers, and discovered that their original armament was ten 64pdr RMLs. Yes, these ships were so old they were originally built with MUZZLE-LOADERs, just like back in the sailing ship days. In fact despite being the first steel ships and having quite powerful engines for their size, they also still carried sails.
http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a325/SailorSteve/Iris-03.jpg
http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a325/SailorSteve/Iris-23.jpg
Okay. I started doing research on the 64pdr, and found out that there were two different versions. The original was the gun that outfitted the first all-iron warship, HMS Warrior, back in 1860. It had a bore diameter of 8" because an 8" round iron cannonball weighed 64 pounds; or more properly a sixty-four pound roundball was eight inches in diameter.
Not long before this they had designed a new 64pdr, this one having a diameter of 6.3" and a rifled barrel. I knew that an oblong shell can be narrower but longer and still have the same weight, but I wondered why six-point-three inches and not six, or seven? It made no sense to me, but I had to find out. I started reading more, and what I found was to me both weird and wonderful, and ultimately so typically British, that I had to share it with anyone who might be interested.
The best example of that roundball vs oblong shell is the 12-pounder. The 12pdr Napoleon was the primary field gun from Napoleon himself through the American Civil War, and dating back to the 1700s for ship use. A round cannonball weighing twelve pounds is 4.62" in diameter, and that was the size for all 12pdr guns until the British Army changed that in 1859. They wanted a rifled gun firing an oblong shell and figured that the best diameter for that would the three inches. All 12pds (and 13 and 14pdrs) used on ships as anti-torpedo-boat guns right through the First World War were 3" in diameter.
Anyway, back to the main story, if you're still with me. Why on earth did they pick 6.3 inches for the new 64pdr gun? Well, it seems that the old 32pdr roundball was 6.3" in diameter, and they had large stocks of them just sitting around unused, so somebody decided that the new 64pdr gun should be able to shoot them as well, just to get rid of them. Okay, so the new gun is 6.3" across. So why stick with sixty-four pounds? Modern (WW1-era is modern to me) 6" guns fire a 100-pound shell. They could have made the shell for this gun longer and heavier, which would have been a good thing. Or they could have made it shorter and weighing only fifty pounds, which might not have been so good because it would have been less stable in flight. But a longer shell would have been more stable, which is even better.
So why insist on calling it a 64pdr? Because we weren't authorized to make a 6" gun, or a 6.3" gun, we were ordered to make a new 64pdr. We have to design the shell to weigh sixty-four pounds, or it's not a 64pdr anymore!
As I said, that strikes me as extremely odd to say the least, but it also strikes me as so quintessentially British as to make perfect sense, in its own perverse way.