Fan made Italian tech tree

[Deamon93]

13 minutes ago, NothingButTheRain said:

I'm not really sure what the complaining about the sources is about. I've studied warships in the past (hence part of my interest in old warships) and getting the information you're seeking for is not as easy as it sounds and sometimes can even be contradictionary, inaccurate or even false or a bad copy+paste.

 

And they have deadlines. Yes WG isn't perfect and yes they want your money blah blah. But they obviously have an interest in the gameplay here as well, it's not some cheap rip-off and it certainly isn't without any passion whatsoever. Yes things get rushed and things can break but as a hobbyist in modifying games and having other play these mods, I know sometimes errors can linger for years even. Of course I was never paid so I don't really have any deadlines except for the ones I set myself to.

 

If someone were to complain to me about how I would create these warships based on the fact that I have to go with the information I have at hand,it would be more constructive to give more sources. And of course critics should never be silenced, they will usually have a good point somewhere. It's about communication.

I checked on the USMM(Ufficio Storico Marina Militare, the office overseeing the archives for the Navy) and their rules and regulations are a nightmare. Don't know wether it's the case elsewhere but I wouldn't enjoy working with the USMM ever, even as Italian (because foreigners have even more paper to fill before even setting foot in the archives).

[SparvieroVV]

I’m going to go watch Linea Verde now. It’s supposed to be Venezia this week. 

[SparvieroVV]

2 hours ago, Deamon93 said:

The Motherland granted us pieces of its power

 

Yeah it is a double edged sword. Abruzzi will lose that armor strake and Roma will possibly have a piece of armor reduced in value. Although as a premium it may be immune. 

 

I’m more miffed about their attitude on HE given all the benefits given to Japan, German and British HE. In other news it is Saturday and I’m watching sette giorni showing a story on ed sheeren instead of Chiara Giallonardo and Venezia. 

[Historynerd]

Guys, I wanted to share with you the book I just bought! It's only tangentially relevant to our discussion, but whatever, I think it's cool!

 

 

It surprised me... for its detail and its technical complexity! It wasn't the "here are the FCS systems used on the ships, blah blah blah" stuff I expected; it's a painstakingly accurate on the theoretical and mathematical process with which these systems worked, compared to what foreign nations used. Practical stuff is limited, but still relevant. As a final judgement (not that I am not still trying to get my mind around this thing, it's sooo difficult!), the author says that the FCS was pretty much as sound as it could be, but what held them back was the old manual "follow-the-pointer" concept (I hope I am not mistaking anything... that is the translated terms for "sistema a controindice", right?) that allowed for human error that could've been avoided with full slaving of the guns to the directors.

Two anedoctes: the author denies Norman Friedman's claim in his "Naval Firepower" that the Italian FCS was derived from the Barr & Stroud's FCS fitted to the Trento-class cruisers, stating that they got it only because the Italian system (developed by De Feo and Bergamini) was not ready yet; also, he says that in terms of FCS the Conte di Cavour and the Giulio Cesare were hardly fitted with the best thing available, and what they got ultimately wasn't on par even with what the two Duilios got, don't mind what was on the Littorios (I knew there was a reason why these two older rebuilds were so cheap compared to the last two).

[SparvieroVV]

DO WANT! That pretty much fits with my understanding. Negatives usually leave out that the comparison is against systems that are developed later. ;) Russians didn't like how the system calculated angle to target(?), took years to develop a new one but act like it was always better. Late 1930s optical FCS vs 1944 all radar FCS,  etc. 

 

So it definitely states there was no automated RPC? Rather odd since Friedman or someone else talks about Italians showing off an automated RPC system to the USN in the 20s but it being woefully under powered. Follow the pointer has always been a detraction for Littorio class. Does it talk at all about the scartometer? That was pretty much judged to be a complete waste, afaik. And no automated input from Gufo on Littorio? I could of sworn I read it stated that the Germans had let slip this was all done automatically on their ships while demanding a princely sum for access to the relevant materials from the Italians.

 

That  R2D2 on II turret doesn't come cheap. 

 

[Deamon93]

3 minutes ago, SparvieroVV said:

DO WANT! That pretty much fits with my understanding. Negatives usually leave out that the comparison is against systems that are developed later. ;) Russians didn't like how the system calculated angle to target(?), took years to develop a new one but act like it was always better. Late 1930s optical FCS vs 1944 all radar FCS,  etc. 

 

So it definitely states there was no automated RPC? Rather odd since Friedman or someone else talks about Italians showing off an automated RPC system to the USN in the 20s but it being woefully under powered. Follow the pointer has always been a detraction for Littorio class. Does it talk at all about the scartometer? That was pretty much judged to be a complete waste, afaik. And no automated input from Gufo on Littorio? I could of sworn I read it stated that the Germans had let slip this was all done automatically on their ships while demanding a princely sum for access to the relevant materials from the Italians.

 

That  R2D2 on II turret doesn't come cheap. 

 

Of course R2D2 doesn't come cheap, we all know Star Wars is his saga after all :D

 

Joking aside I'm not too familiar with FCS and how they worked, I just saw it in La Spezia at the museum but never actually investigated on the matter. 

[SparvieroVV]

Speaking of expensive I'm about to send money to my uncle and I'm tempted to add a little bit of money with instructions to have my cousins grab a couple of books since they are coming over in a couple of months. I still kind of want to get Quando tuonano i grossi calibri - Punta Stilo 9 luglio 1940 despite the controversy.

[Historynerd]

2 hours ago, SparvieroVV said:

DO WANT! That pretty much fits with my understanding. Negatives usually leave out that the comparison is against systems that are developed later. ;) Russians didn't like how the system calculated angle to target(?), took years to develop a new one but act like it was always better. Late 1930s optical FCS vs 1944 all radar FCS,  etc. 

 

So it definitely states there was no automated RPC? Rather odd since Friedman or someone else talks about Italians showing off an automated RPC system to the USN in the 20s but it being woefully under powered. Follow the pointer has always been a detraction for Littorio class. Does it talk at all about the scartometer? That was pretty much judged to be a complete waste, afaik. And no automated input from Gufo on Littorio? I could of sworn I read it stated that the Germans had let slip this was all done automatically on their ships while demanding a princely sum for access to the relevant materials from the Italians.

 

That  R2D2 on II turret doesn't come cheap. 

 

 

The author says that the adjective "automated" has been used for the 1930s FCS, but a bit improperly, since these systems have always required a lot of input from operators and left quite a bit to the "savoir faire" of the directors, which he does qualify as guys who knew their stuff, though. So there's that to begin with.

I went and re-read what Friedman saw, and he was talking about the Centrale Salvagnini, the system fitted to the Cavour. Santarini says that, as it was a complex with all the devices connected together to reach the solution, it deserves the name "Centrale". However, he says that as a whole the system at most was contemporary to what the British and the French had developed during the war (no surprise, since he does acknowledge the derivation from the Le Prieur system", which was simply not enough; the most glaring fault was the delay in which the useful data came from the director to the turrets, which meant that it took a sweet time to get a useful solution. Also, it ignored the time spent by the shell on air (it didn't care about what would be called the "punto futuro" so to speak), so the solutions ended up having rather large errors anyway,

When you ask about the scartometer, are you perhaps talking about the "gimetro"? Because if I have to be completely honest, I am still scratching my head trying to wrap my head around how the bloody thing worked; I've never been good at math and geometry, but now without it there's no way to understand that. But I got that, basically, the gimetro was included in the package that was obtained by the work of De Feo, Iachino and Bergamini, and in the Italian system its theoretical precision made it irreplaceable by a simple gyrocompass like on the foreign ships. He does state, though, that while all the other ships had only partially stabilised gimetri, which led to errors, the Littorios had fully stabilized ones that eliminated that possibility.

Santarini doesn't say much about the Gufo, other than stating its immaturity and its rather modest performances, but he does say that the data it got wasn't automatically fed into the network, but it had to be communicated via phone.

 

Oh, another interesting thing.

Santarini says that, disregarding any other comment about what the Bolzano was or wasn't, either if it was a well-made ship or not, he does say that it had this going for it, that among all the Italian heavy cruisers it had the best FCS, even better to what the Zaras had.

 

3 hours ago, Deamon93 said:

Joking aside I'm not too familiar with FCS and how they worked, I just saw it in La Spezia at the museum but never actually investigated on the matter. 

No issue, as I said this doesn't matter for the game.

Otherwise the Montana would beat the heck out of the Yamato each and every day of the week.

And we'd have a lot of people complaining about it on the forums, now that I think about that...

[SparvieroVV]

The scartometer was the device used to measure the splash of the shell to figure out range between the shell and the target. Obviously it wasn't very effective in practical use from my understanding. The earlier systems used water tubes to determine pitch of the ship iirc. I believe it is once again in Friedman's work where this is talked about as comparison to USN love of all things gyroscope. Otherwise I only know about the system in reference to the Italian Dalek.  https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparecchio_di_punteria_generale

 

Basically as you stated Littorio class was the only class in the RM that didn't require to be at the top of the roll to fire. It would be interesting to note if a later ship class such as the Capitani Romani had this limitation. 

 

==========================

This is more of a joke and not serious. In a long distant future WG might be able to spin out two cruiser lines for Italy.

 

Garibaldi VII, Ciano VIII, Spanish Ansaldo 152 IX, Spanish Ansaldo 203 variant TX
Bolzano VII, Zara VIII, Spanish Ansaldo early variant TX, Ansaldo 254/55 BC TX.

[Deamon93]

6 minutes ago, SparvieroVV said:

The scartometer was the device used to measure the splash of the shell to figure out range between the shell and the target. Obviously it wasn't very effective in practical use from my understanding. The earlier systems used water tubes to determine pitch of the ship iirc. I believe it is once again in Friedman's work where this is talked about as comparison to USN love of all things gyroscope. Otherwise I only know about the system in reference to the Italian Dalek.  https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparecchio_di_punteria_generale

 

Basically as you stated Littorio class was the only class in the RM that didn't require to be at the top of the roll to fire. It would be interesting to note if a later ship class such as the Capitani Romani had this limitation. 

 

==========================

This is more of a joke and not serious. In a long distant future WG might be able to spin out two cruiser lines for Italy.

 

Garibaldi VII, Ciano VIII, Spanish Ansaldo 152 IX, Spanish Ansaldo 203 variant TX
Bolzano VII, Zara VIII, Spanish Ansaldo early variant TX, Ansaldo 254/55 BC TX.

If they buff the crap out of the lower tiers (perhaps Zara excluded) it could work. Then again it has to work, Duca d'Aosta won't go anywhere

[Historynerd]

In the latest issue of Storia Militare, there's an article by De Toro on the Duilio-class, which however says relatively little about them that I already didn't know about.

One thing is interesting, though, about why on them the old bow wasn't retained, but was outright replaced.

Basically, on the Cavour and the Cesare, despite whatever armor bonus it provides in-game (the chance of it mattering IRL would have been small, I believe), the added weight caused them to be rather heavy on the bow, so it was decided to discard the whole thing.

[Deamon93]

On 6/3/2018 at 6:01 PM, Historynerd said:

In the latest issue of Storia Militare, there's an article by De Toro on the Duilio-class, which however says relatively little about them that I already didn't know about.

One thing is interesting, though, about why on them the old bow wasn't retained, but was outright replaced.

Basically, on the Cavour and the Cesare, despite whatever armor bonus it provides in-game (the chance of it mattering IRL would have been small, I believe), the added weight caused them to be rather heavy on the bow, so it was decided to discard the whole thing.

I guess this is one of the many reasons why their reconstruction costed considerably more from what I recall.

 

On another subject I forgot to put the reworked cruiser line I made, taking into account the downtiering taking place. 

 

I to IV: as I already designed

V: Montecuccoli

VI: either Garibaldi or Trento

VII: either Bolzano or Zara as constructed

VIII: either Zara as construction (with Bolzano at VII); either Zara as originally designed and/or the 4x2 203/53 variant of the Spanish cruiser (with Zara as constructed at VII)

IX: the 3x3 203/55 Spanish cruiser

X: Russian cruiser

 

I don't know wether or not Bolzano would be competitive at tier VII but with Zara at tier VII the line ramps up a bit too quickly for my liking. 

[MungaH]

Alle 8/3/2018 alle 08:55, Deamon93 ha scritto:

I guess this is one of the many reasons why their reconstruction costed considerably more from what I recall.

 

On another subject I forgot to put the reworked cruiser line I made, taking into account the downtiering taking place. 

 

I to IV: as I already designed

V: Montecuccoli

VI: either Garibaldi or Trento

VII: either Bolzano or Zara as constructed

VIII: either Zara as construction (with Bolzano at VII); either Zara as originally designed and/or the 4x2 203/53 variant of the Spanish cruiser (with Zara as constructed at VII)

IX: the 3x3 203/55 Spanish cruiser

X: Russian cruiser

 

I don't know wether or not Bolzano would be competitive at tier VII but with Zara at tier VII the line ramps up a bit too quickly for my liking. 

Is the Bolzano stronger enough than Trento to be considered a proper tier VII ?

Which are the main differences ?

 

I hope Zara will be at T8, maybe with hull A/B differentiations for the original and actual design

[Deamon93]

On 8/3/2018 at 11:53 PM, MungaH said:

Is the Bolzano stronger enough than Trento to be considered a proper tier VII ?

Which are the main differences ?

 

I hope Zara will be at T8, maybe with hull A/B differentiations for the original and actual design

The main differences are in armament (Bolzano had the more powerful 203/53 instead of the 203/50 mounted on Trento) and more powerful machinery. I'm not sold on Bolzano at VII, due to the fact she's almost as big as Myoko but with worse firepower (both in guns and torpedoes) and protection. The only advantages would be on alpha damage for AP and speed, both of them somewhat marginal considering the fact she's essentially a damage magnet for BBs. Zara on the other hand would troll at that tier, being quite protected for a cruiser. She's also considerably smaller than Bolzano, which should translate into better stealthyness

[x_Hasso_von_Manteuffel_x]

Long time nothing posted here ^^

So, here my newest theory about the Italian tree, based on the already released ships and my interpretations out of it ...

 

Spoiler

 

[Deamon93]

8 hours ago, DeadMemories said:

Long time nothing posted here ^^

So, here my newest theory about the Italian tree, based on the already released ships and my interpretations out of it ...

 

  Hide contents

 

Looks fairly similar to mine, except a few minor differences. 

 

Anyway now that I'm free from exams (hopefully) I should be able to dedicate myself to the fine tuning, focusing on cruisers first (being the first to arrive). It will require some time due to how WG placed ships (as example I don't see Trento as tier VII with Algerie and New Orleans sitting there, especially if she doesn't get her torpedoes). 

[x_Hasso_von_Manteuffel_x]

We will see. The changes i made in the cruiser line are my interpretation of Wargamings planes after the Abruzzi becomes a premium ship ;)

[Deamon93]

1 minute ago, DeadMemories said:

We will see. The changes i made in the cruiser line are my interpretation of Wargamings planes after the Abruzzi becomes a premium ship ;)

They could do it in a few ways:

1) Use the French cruiser line as reference, which would make sense historically speaking but would lead to problems at the higher tiers. You could stretch the Spanish CA in two tiers (VIII and IX) but I feel it a bit forced

2) Use the German cruiser line as reference, disergarding the most recent changes entirely. The line could be filled without any problem but would be weird to see Trento at the same tier of Algerie and a tier higher than Pensacola (after all she is overall weaker than the latter, she just has an edge in speed)

3) Use the US cruiser line as reference, going from Montecuccoli at tier V strait to Trento at tier VI, placing Zara&co accordingly. It has the same issue of the French as reference

 

Hard to say which of these three options is the most correct one, especially when #1 and #3 aren't mutually exclusive (you could have Principe Eugenio and Trento being implemented at the same time, since the first ship would require very little work)

[ImperialAdmiral]

Yay, some activity here.

 

There was pretty nice debate some time ago if Zara is still considered as a tier VIII material. I mean I do still belive it but seeing that WG puts the treaty cruisers in tier VII some doubt started to appear. I was 100% sure that Algerie will be tier VIII as well and it turned to be wrong.

[creamgravy]

Zara will be tier 7 now all the other early 30s CA have been moved ...and they'll get a crazy new consumable (AOE heal, radar blocker etc)

 

[x_Hasso_von_Manteuffel_x]

Cant follow why the Trento should not fit on Tier 7 ... if i compare the real data of the ships the Trento looks realy fine on Tier 7 ... 8x 203mm L/50 is usable, the armor looks usable, size and displacement fit into Tier 7 and with 35,6 knots top speed they even has some point for this tier

[Deamon93]

2 hours ago, ImperialAdmiral said:

Yay, some activity here.

 

There was pretty nice debate some time ago if Zara is still considered as a tier VIII material. I mean I do still belive it but seeing that WG puts the treaty cruisers in tier VII some doubt started to appear. I was 100% sure that Algerie will be tier VIII as well and it turned to be wrong.

Before the French and the reworked US cruiser lines she was, now I'm not sure. 

 

17 minutes ago, DeadMemories said:

Cant follow why the Trento should not fit on Tier 7 ... if i compare the real data of the ships the Trento looks realy fine on Tier 7 ... 8x 203mm L/50 is usable, the armor looks usable, size and displacement fit into Tier 7 and with 35,6 knots top speed they even has some point for this tier

Her armament is worse, her protection is worse and she is a larger target overall. In a 1vs1 between Trento and either Algerie or Pensacola I would give the edge to the latter two 9 times out of 10 (because flukes could happen). That shouldn't be surprising, after all Algerie was built as an answer to Zara and Pensacola was more reasonable in terms of the balance between firepower/protection/speed. 

[x_Hasso_von_Manteuffel_x]

Just now, Deamon93 said:

Her armament is worse, her protection is worse and she is a larger target overall. In a 1vs1 between Trento and either Algerie or Pensacola I would give the edge to the latter two 9 times out of 10 (because flukes could happen). That shouldn't be surprising, after all Algerie was built as an answer to Zara and Pensacola was more reasonable in terms of the balance between firepower/protection/speed. 

If i look at the Projekt I/10 (aka York) i see no problem with the armament nor the armor of the Trento ;) ... and for all other we have the fine-tuning of Wargamings balancing ^^

[Deamon93]

Just now, DeadMemories said:

If i look at the Projekt I/10 (aka York) i see no problem with the armament nor the armor of the Trento ;) ... and for all other we have the fine-tuning of Wargamings balancing ^^

Hence why I wrote this

 

4 hours ago, Deamon93 said:

2) Use the German cruiser line as reference, disergarding the most recent changes entirely. The line could be filled without any problem but would be weird to see Trento at the same tier of Algerie and a tier higher than Pensacola (after all she is overall weaker than the latter, she just has an edge in speed)

I would rather pick the French and the US cruisers for reference, also because the French were built in response to the Italian ones. Wouldn't make much sense to have Trento stick with Algerie when the latter was designed in response to Zara and isn't that far off from her overall. 

[x_Hasso_von_Manteuffel_x]

I would not say that we can here refer to much to real responses, we have to look who it will fit the best on there technical data ... also a problem is, today we even cant use the real data not anymore as a absolute context, becasue Wargaming goes more and more away from this ... also a good example is the Roma, in reality there guns had a incredible range and the disadvantage of a comperable long reload time ... and ingame she has a relative short firing range and a random reload time ...

So with some minor adjustments on there armor and the gun characteristics the Trento is without any problem a usable Tier 7 ship

And hey, you also dont belived that the Duca d'Aosta will be Tier 6 and the Abruzzi will be Tier 7 what i already predicted one and a half year ago ^^ ;)