RJW gun ranges -- hits at 20K yards?

[themattcurtis]

I love WCDB for fighting out WWI or WWII actions...but have a hard time with the fact that playing with Russo-Japanese hulls sees the computer and I both landing hits at 20,000 yards on occasion. I've played this era with a few tabletop rules, and it's hard to land hits at 7,000 yards between armored cruisers under the best circumstances -- and I've read accounts where Togo's decision to open up at Yellow Sea at the range he did (still under 10k) was pretty aggressive.

But playing with WCDB, I see the Japanese landing a few hits on me at 20,000 yards. Even if the guns could reach that far, the targeting back then wouldn't allow for that.

So how do I fix it? I could limit visibility -- restricting gun fire to something like 2 or 3 range bands. But then they'd start hitting each other like nuts. Would doing that, and then dropping crew quality to poor or something, make it more accurate?

Matt

[Warship NWS]

To Matt,

First, one cannot go on just a handfull of actions that took place during the RJW to base a reasonable analysis on nor can you go just by naval doctrine which may contradict the actual capability of the weapons themselves. Some of the IJN guns *could* shoot that far. Even if the FCs did not give you good accuracy the guns could physically engage targets out to around 20-24kyd. Could it be a waste of ammunition for the low number of possible hits? Yes. Could they at least fire at the targets? Yes. Many ships of WW2 were able to fire at targets far beyond their ability to really hit anything as an example.. but that did not mean they would not at least try if the situation presented itself .. example ranging shots vs spotted fire... if nothing else at least your not leaving an enemy ship completely unmolested by naval artillery. Now if you think the hits are too frequent please feel free to send me AAR snippets of what your seeing and I will look them over to make sure everything is in order.

Thanks.