I would lean towards the 1/72 scale as that would make even some of the small boats (like torpedo boats or destroyers) more possible to take part in combat. There's a pretty big range for that scale as far as sizes go - for example, mammoth like large armored cruisers like Gromoboi at 6.7ft or Scharnhorst at 6.6ft down to TB-6 USS Porter at 2.4ft. But Many ships, including the oddball ships that really need love like monitors and even battle ships, would fall into the 3.5-5.5ft range. I would propose, and if we could contemplate, for a pre-dreadnaught game fleet defined as "any ship in service in 1880 or laid down prior to December 2nd 1905" That would make a list of ships that's more than 800 names and there's probably many many more! The pre-dreadnaught period still saw many older ships like the French all steel central battery ship "Redoutable" still in service into the 1910's. Other thoughts: a) HO scale fittings I think would probably work fine on 1/72 scale boats b) The 20% larger boats in the 1/72 scale gives a bit more needed space for electronically driven turrets/guns using Arduino steppers c) If a boat or components are 3D printed it's a bit easier to print and easier to incorporate detail at the 1/72 scale Also I have been designing RC ships in Fusion 360 in 1/72 scale already =)
Dang those are nice. Ive been playing around trying to model the Virginia class PDN but just cannot find any good hull references. Everything is top and side view. Any tips?
Something like these? they are not the official drawings but I suspect they are quite close to how the ship turned out -
Some of the "Marine Engineering" issues going back to the 1900's were digitized by Google - I probably pulled them up in a search but I have not found the complete volume those are from - the frames are both from a 1901 and 1904 edition - if I could find the complete 1904 issue there's probably more frames that would be of a higher accuracy but between the two there's enough there to model the ship's hull. Every weekend I spend about 4-6 hours looking for photo's and drawings of ships.... I'd like to say it's a passion but it's more like an addiction - there's a big 'high' I get when I finally stumble across some plans. I often have to search in the language of the country the ships were from.
So. If I may offer a few suggestions to help this along. with this 1/72 scale, one would assume that the main guns would be on a scale with the 12-13" guns as like the 1/4 inch Big gun setup, with a scale back to like .177 fastguns for the secondaries/light combatant main guns. that being said, hull sheeting would play a huge role. so like standard plate could be 1/32", and any armor belts could be scaled up from there up to 1/4" for the thickest armor belt. this would really make ramming doable. also, with the 1/72 scale, like said before, those smaller ships that were built specifically for ramming would be of usable, operational size. great starter boats for noobs! and the boat speeds could be fast enough for the rams that they do "damage" but slow enough that it's not actual, serious damage if you built these boats properly with the armor belt in sections, and having a 1/32 sheeted hull behind them, you could get into a major fight, and if an 'armor plate' gets wrecked too bad to patch, just pop it off and replace it. it'd be a tad more time consuming than fastgun to patch, but the game play would be frickin' slick. I would legit build an ACR for this.
So I did some research on the scope of pre-dreadnaught gun calibers - 17inch is the largest and that goes down from there and of course there were secondary guns too. For instance USS Iowa (BB4) had 4 × 12 in. main guns and 8 x 8 in. secondary's, the Russian ship Retvizan had 4 x 12 in main guns and 12 x 6 in secondary's, and the French Cruiser Victor Hugo had 4 x 7.6 in. main guns and 16 x 6.5 in. secondary's... There were typically a small number of 'main guns' on a pre-dreadnaught and the secondary guns had real significance (more of them and MUCH faster firing) If you take a look at the damage done to the Spanish cruiser Almirante Oquendo during the Spanish-American war - the vast majority of the hits were from 6-pounders (2.2 in.) 4 in. and 5 in. - I only count three 8" hits, on the Spanish Maria Theresa there were two 12" and the rest were in the smaller calibers too. So my thinking is three different size projectiles for guns: (large caliber 12 in. and above = 1/4 in, medium caliber 12 in. to 8 in. = .177 in., and then small caliber .156 in. (5/32") Alternatively metric ball sizes might make things simpler: large caliber = 6mm, medium caliber 5mm, small caliber 4mm
that sounds like a pretty great scheme. yeah I was reading Massey's "Dreadnought" and apparently there was a thought toward building battleships with a ton of small, quick firing guns and no main guns for a while there, specifically to make them monsters in close combat back when they didn't really think long range gunnery was gonna pan out. It'd be really cool to see what would happen with the secondaries and medium caliber armed in broadside, I think the main guns would take a back seat except for when it came to punching holes in the thicker balsa of the armored belt.
The RN Italia & her sister ship Lepanto did ! 4x 17" - they are some serious pop guns! Very large ships that took about 9 years to complete, started in 1876 and finished in 1885! The theory behind the design was big ship and thin armor to let enemy rounds pass right through but carry gigantic guns that could defeat the heaviest armor.
The rate of fire for those big guns on the Italia and Lepanto must have been very low - will have to find that the reload time was...
rate of fire according to this link was five minute loading time. https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Italia-class_battleship I think as far as rate of fire goes, having like a 30 second reload time in game is reasonable for the big guns and like 10 second medium and 5 second light would work pretty well.
I think your fire rates are a good suggestion Anvil - as far as implementing them I've been thinking of a few ways (electro-mechanical - maybe gear reductions for slower rates , or a circuit board that pulses at the desired rate. I think it would be cool to have secondary guns fire sequentially - so take 10 seconds and divide that by the number of guns (for instance 6 secondary guns) that's one gun shooting every 1.6 seconds. I kind of wonder if we will end up with a Pre-dreadnaught game that creates some advantages for ships in formations...
I hate to put the brakes on the ideas, but... a lot of early warships aren't well-documented. You'll have a hard time proving what portions of a ship were armored and what portions were not armored, plus sheeting sounds like a huge PITA if the ship has a tapered belt or multiple thicknesses. I would also strongly caution against putting any armor greater than 1/8" due to both the difficulty of sheeting with such heavy balsa and the difficulty of penetrating such heavy balsa. I've seen cannons capable of penetrating 1/4" balsa, and they were NOT safe to be around. I'd also like to put a plug in for considering armor type, as well as armor thickness. Krupp steel is much more effective than wrought iron, and even coal bunkers were considered protection in that period. I used to have some conversion factors around, allowing easy conversion between the different armor types. Lastly, fire control. Sequentially firing secondary guns requires a separate firing system for each cannon, which is insanely complex. Either you use Fast Gun cannons with solenoids (imagine the test-switch setup for tweaking 12 secondaries), or you use MJV cannons with servos and poppets, which would still require six servos and an absolutely disgusting amount of plumbing.
point taken on the armor thickness etc. with wooden ribbed or printed boats, it's actually not that big of a challenge. now going off of your point with regard to armor types, there could be some set thickness per class of boat for a 'notional armor belt' and for the ironclads which aren't well documented, or are not the aforementioned armor belt-less Italian Jalopy battlecruiser, you could give them a set amount of area for which a belt of x thickness could be applied. I use stuff way thicker than 1/4" to test my fastguns at home, and they're not even running hot, blasting holes through. *but* that being said, belt penetration by .177, in this context, isn't even intended to be possible. the belt armor creates, to me, an interesting dynamic. in a given battle, I'd expect something like 6-8 belt-penetrations on an entire boat. if I were a cruiser or ship-of-the-line captain, I would focus my efforts on smashing the bow of my opponent to pieces and generally taking the belt hits as a strike with a 50% chance of penetration. If I were a light combatant, I would be trying to ram everyone and poke holes in their unarmored bits with my little popguns Now the staggered firing idea has some merit, and can be pretty readily accomplished using either A: programmable radio (which is, I assume what darkapollo is talking about), some Polulu boards with solenoids or B: with a 120:1 motor like this ( https://www.pololu.com/product/1121 ), activated by a switch, spinning a cam, which in turn flips test switches, activating the solenoids and, like Kotori says, some fastgun cannons. there is one advantage I see in using the slowmotor: with the known rpm, we can precisely calculate and regulate the rate of fire The HUGE advantage for staggering the guns such as Zimmers says: you can immediately reduce equipment by sharing. Say your PDN has six secondary guns. three on a side. let's assume you're never going to be doing anything stupid like driving between two enemy boats and deathblossoming. If staggered at like 1.5-2 second intervals, you could have all of your solenoids feeding off of a single source like an expansion tank. that is enough time for the tank to be replenished between shots. Say you're a monster and have like 12 secondaries with six to a side. you could run the whole secondary battery off of three expansion tanks and *never* have to worry about gas. This can be done. it's possible even for knuckle-draggers like me who prefer mechanical rather than digital solutions. This isn't intended as a refutation to Kotori, or an end-all-be-all. just my perspective. But I believe Kotori has some excellent points that deserve consideration and discussion. what say the rest of you?
another thought: none of these five inch long tight tolerance barrels for the secondaries like in fastgun. and none of those hotrod high-flow guns. Blunderbusses. low powered blunderbusses with like 2 inch barrels sticking out of gunports/casemates and just living their best life hurling bbs at mild velocities to penetrate super-thin balsa. like, Steal Treaty's PSI/velocity regs, or whatever it is they do to keep guns reasonable.
An Arduino? Its just a programable IO board. You can hook it up to an RC channel and when it sees signal on that channel runs some code for output. Sounds complicated but its not really and there is code out there to read RC PWM input. So you have your Arduino hooked up to the firing channel for port secondaries (it can handle more than that but lets keep it simple). You send the channel the FIRE command (you hit the button) and the Arduino sees that pulse and says PIN 8 GO! and pin 8 is the switch for the first solenoid. It then counts down at your designated number (say 1500ms) and says PIN 9 GO! and pin 9 is the switch for the second... etc. similar to your motor-cam-switch idea except handled electronically. Reliable, repeatable, programmable.
