"Pre-Dreadnought Gunnery and Battlefleet 1900/Seekrieg" Topic

I'm very interested in the pre-dreadnought era and I really like the looks of War Times Journal Battlefleet 1900 rules – except for their laissez faire approach to gunnery. They seem to have no considered opinion at all what the historical accuracy for this period's gunnery should be. And I'm assuming it's probably not just WWI with shorter ranges.

How does Seekrieg V (or other rules) handle pre-dreadnought gunnery?

I believe that you will find that during this time gunnery was not all that accurate – I know that Torpedo boats in the Russo-Japanesse war did very poorly. Also, some the ships took a very hugh beating from shell rounds without ships sinking.

One aspect of this period seemed to be the learning and development of gunnery as well as shell runs.

Right – but how inaccurate? How does accuracy correspond to range compared with other periods? Battlefleet 1900 just gives you three or four different methods – none of which seem to have any real thought given to them. (One is range guessing, and the others seem to be essentially arbitrary percentages designed to give slower or quicker games rather than any historical accuracy according to their description.)

I remember reading -- unfortunately, I can't remember where I was reading -- that in the two naval battles of the Spanish-American War, only 1% or 2% of the shells fired hit. It was the post-battle analysis of this that caused the re-thinking of gunnery techniques that led to the improvements in gunnery in time for the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905.

It's also important to keep in mind that gunnery ranges were very short during this period -- usually 2000 to 3000 yards, rarely over 4000 yards. The shells could travel much farther than that, but doctrine usually kept the gunners from firing at longer ranges because their chances of hitting anything were not worth the expenditure of ammunition.

I just ran across a reference that one of the Chinese captains at Yalu opened fire at 6000 yards and was criticized for wasting ammunition.

Wargamers like to plink at very long ranges though, so I'm tinkering with ideas for a set of rules that don't allow firing at anything longer than 4000 yards because of doctrinal restrictions.

The Americans (with their shiny new telescopic sights and eight foot base rangefinders, were considered daring for opening fire at 4000 yards in 1898. The low hit percentage is somewhat suspect due to bioth methodology (visual inspection of the unburned, still above water portions of the Spanish cruisers) and the people doing the analysis. Fiske and Sims were very much in favor of improved gunnery training and methodology, so it was in their interest to make current shooting look as bad as possible.

Certainly USS St. Paul, an Auxiliary Cruiser (armed liner) with a Naval Militia crew did much better than that at San Juan. IIRC, about 10% of the shells fired at the Terror seem to have hit her.

The Japanese, with 24-foot rangefinders, sometimes opened fire at up to 8000 meters in 1904-05. At that range, hits would be few and far between, but inside 6000, anywhere from 5 to 15% seems to have been attained.