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BFG: WWI

 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Fri Jul 16, 2004 5:04 am 
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Great info G/G !!! :;):

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Fri Aug 06, 2004 9:09 am 
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What??? No progress??? What have you been doing, having a mega game???  :p  :;):

OK, despite the warnings in WTJ I'm going to use the Jane's book as a basis for the ship profiles as it's the only one I got from the local library.

So far, I've thought to use the following method for determining armor. I'll comb through the book and get both the highest and lowest armor thickness. Then I divide the range into five brackets to get armor values from 2+ to 6+. Not very accurate, but as said before I'm after a game rather than a simulation.

Any better suggestions? I know there are several enginseers and other math geniuses in here...

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Fri Aug 06, 2004 10:30 am 
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Your friendly (well, more or less) neighbourhood enginseer will be away to Gozo to attend a wedding and have a couple of days break - but I'll mull it over in the meantime, Mojarn. One thought in passing - try different armour values for decks and sides, and heavy-ish damage tables (as suggested elsewhere) for some large, light cruisers to represent magazine flashes. Cheers.:laugh:

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Fri Aug 06, 2004 12:13 pm 
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Quote (vanvlak @ 06 2004 Aug.,10:30)
One thought in passing - try different armour values for decks and side

I thought of that, but then I'll have to invent some procedures to differentiate said hits without changeing the rules overtly much as, at present, the BFG only differentiates Front and Side armor. Hm. How does one achieve deck hits anyway? Doesn't that require a "falling shot"?

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Fri Aug 06, 2004 12:42 pm 
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Correct Mojarn - at good ranges and gun elevations the shells drop down from above.

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Fri Aug 06, 2004 4:05 pm 
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... and if you are on the receiving end ... that is a bad thing ! :(   :laugh:

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 7:15 pm 
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Hello all! Long time no see :) Been working on my dissertation basically and had to format my HD (bloody viruses...) so lost al my links.

Anyway, back on topic.

IMO the armour of a ship in BFG also represents how difficult is to hit it appart from its actual armour. I might be wrong here, but I think that ship fire was not very accurate so I would give all the ships roughly the same armour: 5+. BB would get more hits, but not more armour than cruisers. That would represent that they are tougher but easier to hit due to their bigger size wich compensate each other. Now, BBs would be able to sustain more damage before becoming crippled or being sunk, so there we go.

Maybe make them something like this:

- BB: 14 hit points
- BC: 12 HP
- Cruisers: 10 HP

And so on. The smaller ships, kin to escorts should be 1 or 2 hit points only, representing that they are lightly arnoured and so easy to sink. The increased general HP is because there will be no shields, and so it would be easier to cause damage on an enemy ship

WEAPONRY: everything should be weapon batteries, with most of them being mouted on the dorsal part of the ship, so LFR, even if there were smaller turrets on the sides of the ships. Remember that there will be REAR-Left-Rigt weaponry as well here!! :D

Some torpedoes should be present as well, but IIRC they were highly inaccurate.

The damaged weaponry (critical hit table) results should be more common and I would say that a critical could be caused on a 5+ instead of a 6+. reapairs on a 5+ as well (few ships burned down IIRC).

Appart from that, everything is fine to represent WWI naval battles with BFG rules IMO. Maybe allowing single ships to get out of squadrons when they disengage instead of disengaging the whole squadron, but appart from that, it is fine :)

Regards,

Xavi

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 10:30 pm 
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Quote (Xavi @ 20 2004 Aug.,19:15)
IMO the armour of a ship in BFG also represents how difficult is to hit it appart from its actual armour. I might be wrong here, but I think that ship fire was not very accurate so I would give all the ships roughly the same armour: 5+. BB would get more hits, but not more armour than cruisers. That would represent that they are tougher but easier to hit due to their bigger size which compensate each other.

No, I wouldn't agree- The gunnery table does this; it represents the relative easiness of hitting a larger target better- larger BBs will get more dice against them, as they are easier to target, so they can have higher armour than smaller ships...
I think you are right about the innacuracy of fire though Xavi- perhaps firing over 30cm should get two colum shifts or something to represent this...? ????
Could we even restructure the firepower table a little to fit it better to reality?

..and welcome back from your spell away!

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 2:17 pm 
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Yup, right. My bad. You don't play BFG for 2 months and this is what happens, you forget about the gunnery table!! :O A lot to do with only using the column for escorts against eldar and playing mostly with lances against IN, heh.

I wouldn't rise the armour of the bigger ships too much, though. Say 5+ for BB and BC and 4+ for cruisers? Since there are no lances and the gunnery table can be (certainly we can do that) rewritten it shouldn't affect the smaller vessels too much negatively. To tell the truth I have no idea on how poeful/poo the average cruiser of the period was. IIRC they had "BC squadrons and flotillas" or something like that, so I would assume that what is called a "BC" for the WWI period is what would be called a cruiser in BFG. Am I right? What proporions of cruisers to BC to BB had the fleets? And for smaller vessels? Which ones of those were deployed for a fleet battle?

I guess that most smaller vessels would lurk in the coasts or acting as scouts, without taking much part in large battles. Dunno if this is correct or if small vessels were deployed as smokescreens and ablative armour for the bigger ships.

Anyone willing to make a "historical master class" for the dudes around here with not much WWI knowledge? :cool:

Regards,

Xavi

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 3:43 pm 
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Well, I'm not a Sailor !   But a BB is Battleship with lots of armor and big guns. A BC is a Battle Cruiser (or very heavy cruiser) with less armor then a BB but guns close to as big as a BB's. The smaller ships DDs, CLs, CAs, etc. support (and in some cases screen) for the larger more powerful ships (BBs).

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 5:14 pm 
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And after stating this, that is the only thing that we already knew :lol:  :;): what was the relative numbers from each kind of vessel in real navy units? This is the key point.

So, I think that we can make the following statements/points:

1) We could make each kind of vessel type have a different armour value OR we could make BBs and BCs have the same armour value BUT put both in the same "size" category to hit them with weapon batteries. I would opt for this:

BBs and BCs: armour 6+. Both get loads of weapon batteries, say 20 for BB and 14 for BC as reference. Particular vessels will have this numbers modified to up to 30 or down to 10.

Ironclad BBs (I think they were still around at the time) and cruisers would get armour 5+. Ironclad BBs are shot as if they were BB in size. Cruisers will be shot as, well, cruisers :)

Ironclad cruisers (did those exist?) count as cruiser size with armour 4+.

Smaller vessels like CL will get armour 5+ as well, but have much less hit points.



In general, if a vessel is made of iron and steel it gets the following armour and hit points:
BB: 6+
BC: 6+
Cruiser: 5+
Light cruiser: 5+
escorts: 5+ or 4+

Ironclad versions get -1 to their armour values. Wood versions, if they existed, get -2 armour.

Plan B is to drop the armour values of BBs and BCs to 5, but give them plenty of hit points..

For firepower I will wait for more learned persons to check. Most armament will be dorsal for most kinds of vessel, as opposed to BFG, though.

How about this? :cool:

regards,

Xavi

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 9:17 am 
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I think this is better than my (overly complex) idea of messing with actual armor values. However, unless my memory core is totally corrupt the BCs did not have much more armor than CAs. Reason: they were intended to be heavily armed but also fast enough to keep up with the cruisers, i.e. they were an attempt  to marry the firepower of a battleship to the speed of a cruiser. That's why they couldn't have all that heavy armor (it would have slowed them down).

As for the weapons, everything will be weapons batteries as you suggested. For a simple way to make up the differences in British & German gunnery I propose that british batteries have more firepower (heavier guns) but get more gunnery table shifts at long range (more inaccurate) while the Germans get less gunnery table shifts (more accurate) but have less firepower (lighter guns).

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 9:38 am 
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So, for what you are saying the actual design of BCs and BBs fit this almost perfectly: In BFG, BBs are slower but have more shields and hit points than your average cruiser. BCs on the other hand do NOT have more shields or hits than normal cruisers, but have improved firepower. Actually I think that the improvement of firepower is quite poo usually but hey :)

Were there an intermediate design between BCs and BBs? In BFG this is the role of the grand cruisers, that are an intermediate between the 2.I guess a pocket battleship could fall in this category.

And yes, I wouldn't go real ship by real ship, even if that can be fun if done propperly :D The idea is to have a design system that works without having to spend every waking our taking care of selecting if Prince of wales had firepower 22 or 23, hehe. I would go for broader (and less accurate) categories
, that save work and still make for a greatly enjoyable game :)

Regards,

Xavi

PS: can a ship perform the equivalent of come to new heading (CTNH) or burn retros?

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 2:08 pm 
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Xavi

Quick run down of WW1 fleet strategy / tactics

Main aim of BBs in WW1

Destroy other BBs at sea or force them to remain in port by shore bombardment, blockade, either close or long range (e.g. in World War 1 British Grand Fleet based at Scapa Flow and Firth of Forth to stop any German Breakout)


Main aim of BCs

To hunt down enemy cruisers and sink them with combination of superior speed and fire power e.g British Battlecrusier Squadron at Battle of Falklands in 1914. On Basis they could outrun anything they could not outfight and outfight anything they could not outrun.

However as loose German cruisers were hunted down by 1915, BCs were used with BBs to add weight and speed to the main BB battleline. However as Jutland showed (3 british BCs blew up) the could not take punishment in a job they were not designed to do.

Cruisers.

In the German / French navy, to destroy enemy merchant fleet as they could "cruise" around looking for targets e.g the cruise of the "Emden" in the indian ocean. In Royal Navy they protected convoys and merchant shipping from enemy cruisers e.g. Cruiser "Sydney" hunted down the cruiser Emden. They were also used with the main fleet in battle to protect BBs from enemy detroyers and in scouting role

Destroyers (and submarines)

Means exactly what it says on the tin. They were there to "destroy" BBs by hitting them "below the belt" with torpedoes. They were supposed to move in large groups and absorb any losses through speed and numbers. They could also be used to "herd" enemy battleships towards BBs gunfire through threat of torpedoe attack or drive them off with same threat as German Destroyer "screen" did at Jutland to allow German BBs to escape Royal Navy trap. Also had a scouting role.

BFG with its almost exact copy of WW1 ship types pretty much covers this (although BFG cruisers are more like WW2 cruisers than WW1 ones, in that they have almost the same armament as battleships,. WW1 cruisers were much lighter armed than battleships).

Hope this helps your games

Try this link for more info

http://www.gwpda.org/naval/n0000000.htm#swt

Best wishes

Gaunts Ghost

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 Post subject: BFG: WWI
PostPosted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 4:25 pm 
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Good stuff G/G !!! :;):

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