Karl Bohm
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Posted - 2006.10.23 19:11:00 -
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My longstanding criticism of the Battleship design -- The Raven - which I use is its inexplicably limited power capacity and its inadequate cargo hold.
These are supposed to be large combat vessels. They should anchor a battlegroup - yet you've consistently underpowered them and made their cargo capacity that of lower class vessel.
I'd be satisfied with double the cargo hold and half again as much cap -- Furthermore, these ships should be able to mount the 6 siege launchers they now have plus an additional number of smaller turret hardpoints.
These ships should be truly formidable - go back and read Massie's Castles of Steel to see the kind of role these ships should play.
Pre-dreadnoughts, from the period 1890 to 1905, were typically fitted with 3 or 4 different calibres of weapon. The main guns were usually approximately 12-inch caliber, secondary weapons usually 6-inch but typically in the range 5-inch to 7.5-inch. Guns smaller than 4.7-inch are usually considered "tertiary". (Many pre-dreadnoughts also carried 9.2 to 10-inch "secondary" guns, but these are usually treated instead as a mixed-caliber main armament.)
Secondary guns were "quick firers", and could fire 5 to 10 rounds per minute. It was this attribute, rather than their destructive power or accuracy, that provided the military value. Secondary guns were almost universally carried in "casemates", or a long armoured wall through which the battery of guns projected.
Such weapons were designed to fire at both capital ship targets and smaller targets such as torpedo craft and destroyers.
Small targets were of course vulnerable to 6-inch projectiles, and a high rate of fire was necessary to be able to hit a small and evasive target.
In this era, secondary weapons were also expected to engaged capital ships. Heavily-armoured areas of battleships would not be vulnerable to 6-inch fire, but there were large areas that could not be heavily protected. These lightly-armoured and unarmoured areas would be "riddled" at the expected ranges of perhaps 3000 yards. This would knock out the enemy's secondary armament, punch holes in the lightly-armoured bow and stern, perhaps knock down funnels and spotting tops, and destroy the bridge and command positions. In short, secondary guns were a very important factor in battleship combat.
Dreadnought Era
Dreadnoughts were characterized by an "all-big-gun" armament. Broadly, this era spans from 1906, through the super-dreadnought era, to the end of WW1.
During this period, there was some variation in the selection of secondary weapon. British practice, at first, was to mount very small guns (3-inch and 4-inch) that were considered a tertiary battery. These guns were often mounted unarmoured in the open, or later, in a casemate battery. Later, the guns grew to 6-inch size. In other navies, the 6-inch size was commonly mounted throughout the era as a casemate battery.
British doctrine at first held that the small guns were for anti-torpedo defense only. Other navies, with a larger secondary battery, held that they should also be used against capital ships. For instance, German doctrine, for fighting in the North Sea, held that poor visibility provided a good opportunity for the shorter ranges at which smaller guns would be effective. Britain later came around to this point of view, although the primary justification for mounting a 6-inch battery (in the Iron Duke class) remained fighting against the increasingly large torpedo boats and destroyers.
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