Question on ship building and AA capability

[DiFool6]

Re-reading the manual, I note that there's no category for AA guns in the ship build screen. Closest is "Sec" which I assume is for secondary guns. One of the biggest conundrums shipbuilders faced when designing BBs was whether to go with dedicated 6" anti-ship secondaries, and a smattering of smaller caliber AA guns, or 5"/5.25" dual purpose secondaries. Part of this undoubtedly is tied up with AA tech (I'd assume) and things like proximity fuses and gun tracking speed (if modeled that deeply). Or do the 5 levels of "Sec" model these kinds of decisions in some way?

[goodwood]

Just to add to your point the ship designer allows u to build specialist AA escorts, but what about dedicated AA light cruisers?
Ron

[tony_glazebrook]

Just to add to your point the ship designer allows u to build specialist AA escorts, but what about dedicated AA light cruisers?
Ron

Guys - to answer yoiur questions, the ship designer has simplified things a little regarding secondary and tertiary armament. This is one of those compromises I made in the interests of making the game accessible, and concentrating on the things I thought were of most importance.

For BBs, Cruisers, Carriers and Subs, the "Sec" factor essentially is a scaler for determining the volume of fire available from secondary and tertiary guns suitable for both surface and /orAck Ack. It also affects the volume of short range Ack Ack from light Ack ACk (eg 40,mm and 20mm).

But I don't discriminate between a mixed battery arrangement common on Eurpoean BBs and UK/US practice of single calibre. The extra effort wasn't IMO worth it.

A very large BB with a sec rating of 5 (the maximum) would be have a very high capability both for surface combat when engaging secondary targets, and in an AA role. A smaller BB with the same 5 rating would have a lesser but still high capability. That same BB with a sec rating of 1 would have a much reduced capability. Note: you can have AA cruisers with say 5 or 5.25 inch guns (the Dido and Atlanta classes are both in the game); in this case, the AA capability comes both from the main guns (which give long range AA) and from the sec factor (which is meant to model close in AA capability). The sec factor also helps determine the fire control abilities of a ship.

For Escorts, the value helps determine the ships torpedo armament, ASW, AA and mine capacity. I do not let players specify particular things like the number of torpedo tubes. The number is abstracted. When an escort specialises, the capability is doubled in that area and halved in other areas.

This way, the 'sec' factor allows you to sort of control a ships secondary and tertiary weapon strengths, but in a more abstract way.

Bear in mind that my main goal with the ship designer was to find a practical way to let the non-grognards design the main charactersitics of a ship simply. I also wanted to avoid the complexity of having a ship designer have to produce designs exactly like their historocal counterparts in every detail, ie with the exact same number of TTs, or sec or tertiary guns, or ASW weapons or whatever. It was the overall capability represented in a semi abstract way I was more interested in with secondary and tertiary weapons.

Also, as has been noted, a ships capability is also affected by your technology in certain areas - like fire control, ASW etc, plus of course the training and experince levels on any particular ship.

I hope that answers

[DiFool6]

Fair enough Tony-I've just been salivating over all the designs I have come up with in my head, and at least for starters you apparently have provided more than enough meat to work with.

Hope that the US Snail Mail gets it to me tomorrow...