"Modifier tracking - something simple has just occurred to me" Topic

I've been messing about with the mechanics for my home brew rules and something occurred to me which makes tracking modifiers for firing just that little bit easier. I may be stating the obvious, but I thought I'd share it in case others might find it useful.

In my rules ships have to achieve a straddle, after which I dice to hit. Once a straddle is achieved they don't need to dice again unless certain things happen, such as a major course alteration or damage, etc.

To straddle a 12 is needed. This never changes, but the number of dice available to achieve this does; deducting dice for heavy seas or longer range, adding them for continuous correction, etc.

It's hardly laborious, but each time I fire I have to calculate how many dice to use. I'll be honest and admit that, as I get older, I sometimes miss things. Then a simple and obvious thing occurred to me; the modifiers don't change that often so why calculate them each time?

What I've started doing now is to keep the correct number of dice for a certain ship with the ship's stats chart, just adding one each turn of continuous correction. This means that, unless something changes, I just pick up the pool of dice and throw them – no working out, no modifiers to go through, I just know I need to get 12.

As I say, just putting it out there just in case it sparks a thought in anyone else.

Nick

That makes sense.

It´s little things like this that make designing your own rules so much fun.

In my homebrew pre-dred rules I was rolling main guns and secondary guns separately. Then one day the light bulb went on and I started using two different color dice and rolling them both at one go. Duh! But why didn´t I think of that, say five years ago?

Bozkashi Jones,
I think you are on the right track. Here's how I see it:

Naval games are an exercise in gunnery. The biggest problem is establishing the correct range. After firing, it's an exercise about range keeping (plotting tables). This is keeping the target range when target and shooter are maneuvering and the range is opening or closing. The better you can establish the range and keep it the better you can achieve a straddle.

Larger salvo lengths have a better chance of achieving a straddle but a lesser chance of achieving a hit. Guns at closer ranges have a flatter trajectory giving a larger danger space and will achieve more hits.

The gunnery officer starts out attempting to build up a range plot (confirming target speed and course) to predict where the target will be when the round arrives considering the rounds time of flight.

Like you said, you are attempting to straddle the target. So how would you predict how many hits can be achieved in a straddle? First, you need to establish the target's footprint on the surface. That's equal to the beam and the "danger space" behind the target based on the targets height, angle to shooter and the rounds angle of descent. This can be somewhat abstracted.

Example: The target is a battleship with a beam of 90 yards and a danger space of 40 yards for a target footprint of 130 yards. The gunnery officer has established the range to a + or – 1000 yards. A 400-yard salvo has a 20% chance of straddling the target in that 2000 yard area. If it straddles a salvo of 8 rounds in a 400-yard sheaf will place a round about every 50 yards (there are other ways to figure this). This would mathematically generate two hits and a 60% chance for a third hit.

Once you straddle, you now know the range to about + or – the salvo length in yards. To achieve more hits you reduce the length of your salvo but that will decrease the chance to straddle (risk-reward decision). A salvo of 8 rounds in sheath 200 yards into a + or – 400-yard target area will have a 50% chance to straddle but generate twice as many hits as a 400-yard salvo length.

This is why when you straddle a target you go into a rapid-fire and as a straddled target you start maneuvering out of the salvo (chasing salvos as an example).

So it comes down to establishing the range error of + or – yards, selecting a salvo length with the number of rounds, determine if salvo straddles, determine the number of hits based on target footprint. Maneuvering targets and shooters will increase the + and – range keeping error, environmental factors, and smoke interference will also increase it.

This is basically the system I've been using. I think Seas of War has the most historically accurate system for naval gunnery.

There are others out there that know more about this than I do but I think I've got it mostly right.

Wolfhag

lol

that's the sort of thing, Jack. Seems so obvious that you wonder why you'd never thought of it before.

Wolfhag – I totally agree, though my rules are less granular, being based on command decisions by the ship's captain. The environmental conditions, though simulated, are the same for both sides – the important thing for me is the captain making the decision to alter course or speed and thinking about how that will effect their juniors; "well, I can turn but I will lose the target, so maybe I should just carry on as I am". On the other hand, if the enemy's got your range before you have then maybe it's the better option – that's what command decisions are about; assessing and managing the risks.

This is where I think you are spot on Wolfhag; acquiring the right range and deflection is the difficult bit, after that it's simply firing for effect and you have a reasonable chance of hits – until the enemy does something to mess it up, which is where those decisions come in…

Nick

B Jones,
I think your considerations for a ship-to-ship engagement are valid. What time scale are you using as that determines how different actions will interact with each other.

Wolfhag

I use a 3 minute turn which might sound laborious but as my interest is mainly surface combat between the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy then I'll often have only one or two ships a side so in play testing it seems to run at a decent speed.

As it is focused on command decisions gunnery, fire control, repairs, damage control, etc are very much simplified. Drawing 'chits' out of a bag for hit locations gives a great deal of flavour and can be laid on top of a plan of the ship so even though I know Renown has just taken hits in the paint store, the ready ammunition for AAA and a waterline hit on the bows it is a matter of moments and I don't need to look up tables.

The important thing for me is that I have two fires and flooding which is not contained so I have to use my command dice to manage these so they don't get worse whilst also maintaining fire on the enemy.

Without this commanding a single ship can be a bit dull as the dice have all the fun (usually at my expense). The reason I started work on this was so that I could be Langsdorf at the Battle of the River Plate or Whitworth at the Lofoten Islands Action and still have more things to think about and to do than which way to point the pointy end and which enemy to lob shells at.

Inspiration started when I watched a TFL Sharp Practice video and saw two lines of AWI (or Revolutionary War) lines battling it out – this should be dull as there wasn't much movement but the players were fully engaged in making decisions about how to use their officers to make fire more effective, to rally off shock, etc. When I started looking at Chain of Command the idea of command dice just sort of clicked.

Nick

Unless I have it wrong in 3 minutes a ship traveling at 18kts will move about 1800 yards in 3 minutes. A cruiser could get off about 6 salvos depending on the range in that amount of time.

I play WWI battleship engagements with 1/6000scale models (I'm not into the modeling and painting thing) on my wooden dining room floor. The scale is 1 foot = 1000 yards. I have room for a 20,000-yard battle. Lucky me! We do play on tables at conventions too.

I use 90-second turns but a less abstracted gunnery system to simulate individual salvos. Each ship or division has a transparent movement arrow showing how far it will move in the 90 seconds. The arrow has 10 markings on it to show movement proceeding every 9 seconds. This really helps to determine torpedo attacks.

A ships rate of fire is determined by the time of flight and gunnery control factor determined by some of the ship technical features, rangefinders, crew expertise and environmental factors. Ships that are turning cannot fire. It works for the things I want to represent in a game which is the gunnery decisions and details.

There are many ideas I copied from other games.

Wolfhag

@ Wolfhag

This calculator is quite handy for knots to yards
link