Maneuverability of various classes of ships

fredmiracle · **fredmiracle**

Naval ignoramus question, I thought maybe the experts could set me straight

It seems like the conventional wisdom is: "destoyers = small and maneuverable, battleships = slow and ungainly"

BUT... when I look on websites, I seem to have a hard time substantiating this. To my untrained eye, the tactical diameters and top speeds appear similar for destroyers, cruisers and fast battleships.

I took at peek at the free SeeKrieg distribution to see how another game handled it, and basically the rules came right out and said it was fudged--even with each turn being just 2 minutes, still any ship *should* be able to turn 180 in that time--but the game doesn't let big ships do it.

So what was the truth of surface maneuver in WW2? Was there really not that much difference between various classes of ship? Or do these stats not capture the nuances?

(I'm beginning to wonder if the difference isn't more about expendability--you don't mind deploying the destroyers more aggressively since they are less costly and irreplaceable, but you will choose to maneuver more conservatively with your capital ships...??)

Diamondback · **Diamondback**

I doubt we're gonna come up with much on tactical radii until Tiornu shows up again, but I suspect expendability is part of it. Put the cheap, less-crewed tin-cans at Bad Breath Range and keep the big "Cities at Sea" back as far as you can, so you only have to write letters to a couple hundred mommies/daddies/widows/orphans rather than a few thousand. (One Brooklyn-class CL required a crew of about 2000 and change, roughly equivalent to the entire combined student-body and staff of my alma mater... which was a sobering thought, reading about a CL sunk then looking around and imagining the entire campus's population lost at sea.)
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hansfranz · **hansfranz**

I just came across this from the official advanced rulebook under speed and movement and was going to post when i saw this topic. it reads "Ships
and Submarines can maneuver freely within the limits of their movement—the turn represents about 10 minutes of real time, and in that time even the biggest Battleship can execute several turns. Similarly, facing doesn’t matter, since over the course of the turn it’s assumed that your Ships and Submarines can maneuver to bring their batteries to bear."
I had read about advanced rules using facing, but it appears that that would have no bearing on movements within this time frame.