Battleship Command

[Hitman]

HUDs that can give many good ideas are the tank ones, as gunnery is paramount on them also.

The ship silhouette from above could also show how the turrets are trained in real time.

My question would be, could the turrets in local control use the computers still and communicate with the plotting rooms to get target calculations? If lets say the three main directors are knocked out.

Warships have many redundant systems just in case, but I tend to think that communication was mostly one way i.e. the main directors gathered and created the target solution and relied it to the turrets for their operators to train and aim them. Via phone/comms or maybe even making it appear in the turrets own computer.

Only when the main directors where knocked out, or when instructed to fire on their own (F.e. the secondaries against smaller fast torpedo boats or too close vessels) would they create their own target solution.

It is logic to think that the topmost rangefinder and highest position director (Main bridge, next to plotting room and radar) had the best solution, so they would usually rely it to the rest. I also know the secondary directors were many times used when forced to split gunnery between several targets independently, and in that case acted nearly independently.

Until you encode multiplayer and allow several players to share a ship as directors or other roles, you can have the usual CIC map seen from above and use right click on the enemy ships identified to assign them to be followed/attacked by specific directors/guns.

[Hitman]

Originally Posted by bracer

That's something I will consider!
Yes, and the silhouette would also need to indicate which turret is connected to which director/computer/plotting room.
All of the three main director stations could control any of the three guns aswell as the secondaries.
So this schematic would need to be clear for the player.
There was also seperate night battle fire directors.

I cannot swear on this, but I believe there was a computer for each main gun, that's how I have modelled it now.
My question would be, could the turrets in local control use the computers still and communicate with the plotting rooms to get target calculations? If lets say the three main directors are knocked out.
The radar was also in a seperate compartment, so it might still be useful for range data, even for the local gunners.
Allthough many of the radar matresses/antennas was sitting on the directors, so if the director is hit, the radar is certainly history...


I am trying to remember which hit caused Scharnhorst to loose it's radar during the North Cape battle.
The Bismarcks radar broke by the shock from it's own guns IIRC.

I have started the mock-up of an interface and I think you will love it

You can easily see how complex a battleship is when thinking about this all, if I tried to implement all options the real ship had, functions and buttons would skyrocket quickly, so simplifying this while keeping it realistic is a challenge.

I will start with the interface of the 3 directors, each of them will have rangefinder, radar and computer, and will be able to control main or secondary guns. My base concept is to work with targets instead of with directors, which I believe is way more flexible and accurate to the real life procedures.

So for example when you detect a set of enemy ships, what you will do is identify and assign each of them to a director, then you assign to each director what guns are to be used against that target, and finally jump into the rangefinding/shooting procedure to asume yourself the role of any of the directors and work on the target assigned. The others meanwhile will do the same job with the AI, according to the orders you gave them (Hold fire, salvo, fire at will, etc).

With the interface I am creating this will be really quick to do, and from any of the directors you will be able to switch targets for your or any of the other directors, easily and intuitively.

The best part is that it all works with simple buttons and dials that, as far as I can see, are for the most part already implemented in your current version.

Stay tuned

[bracer]

Sounds great!
I am looking forward to see your ideas!

[Hitman]

I'm sorry for the delay, unexpected things happened in real life and I am busy as hell right now, but I will show you my ideas as soon as possible.

[bracer]

No need to hurry Hitman! I have plenty of things to implement in code before the work on the HUD and interface can be finalized anyway.


Currently I am working on the water wakes/foam behind the ship.
In the current version I am using particles for the water foam, but now I am trying to move it into the shader using textures instead.