[Beery]

Originally Posted by Palidian

Well maybe it could e possible you might be wrong with your ROF, I have found nothing to support a 40 second ROF.

There is no 40 second ROF in RFB. While it could be possible that RFB's ROF is wrong, it is based on historical rates of fire taken directly from combat submarines' logs. As such, if it's wrong the submariners' reports are mistaken and more data will uncover the mistake. BUT we don't get to a correct rate of fire by just basing a ROF value on our opinion of what it might be. In order to get accurate info we have to do research and find ROF values that are most likely to be accurate. That's why I demand that any change to RFB's ROF is based on an actual WW2 US sub's timed gunnery during a combat patrol. Anything else is wide open to error.

There are many unanswered questions to historical ROF, like weather, and range.

But that doesn't mean we should discount compelling evidence when we find it. Weather and range would be as much of an issue in the sim as it was in reality.

I have found ROF ranges from 8-20 rounds per minute, this to me covers autoloader and manual loading.

Once again, textbook ROF listings CAN'T BE USED TO APPROXIMATE THE COMBAT RATE OF FIRE. They have no relationship to the combat ROF and they're not meant to indicate how fast a gun could be fired in combat. There's no way they could possibly do that because a particular gun can have very different methods of being served that they'd have to have twenty different rates of fire - one for each platform. I mean PLEASE people, STOP posting textbook rates of fire in any RFB thread! They are meaningless for our requirements.

Textbook rates of fire are for THE GUN SYSTEM ONLY. They only measure how fast the gun can be fired if it is served perfectly, mounted on a motionless platform and aligned perfectly on an unmoving target - i.e. with shells right beside the breech, with the gun mounted nowhere near a boat or an ocean and firing at a fixed target - none of which are the case in submarine combat. Textbook rates of fire only indicate how fast the gun mechanism works. They don't take into account the distance from the ammo store to the gun, how the ammo is carried to the gun, rangefinding, pitch and roll of the sub, the need to re-align on a moving target, or the fact that there even IS a target. For these reasons these figures are almost completely irrelevant when it comes to figuring out how fast a gun mounted on a submarine could fire in a combat situation.

How many times must I say that we have reliable figures for combat rates of fire? We KNOW how fast sub guns fired. We have reports made by sub crews at the time the gun was fired. We know how many shells were fired and the number of minutes it took to fire them. We know these details straight from the pens of the guys who were there on the submarines recording individual actions and recording how many shells were fired during those actions. So it's not as if we need to approximate the info based on the gun mechanism's technical ROF from a textbook.

We also know - WITHOUT A DOUBT - that combat rates of fire for a WW2 US submarine were nowhere near the rates of fire listed in textbooks for the guns in question. Often the sustainable ROF for a gun that's being fired under combat conditions is anywhere from three to twenty times slower (depending on the gun in question and the platform it's mounted on) than the listed ROF that can be found in the technical specs for the gun or in textbooks.