GURPS Vehicles: Steampunk Conveyances

[Steven Marsh]

Originally Posted by whswhs

In one of my supplements, I had rules for locating a target by triangulation, with increasing length of baseline giving more accurate position. I'm afraid I don't offhand recall which one it was.

I believe that's GURPS Supers, pp. 106-107.

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Each ship used the same colour for all its guns. This let ships avoid trying to adjust based on someone else's splashes, which never gets anywhere.

Chasing the splashes works fairly well, until they realise that's what you're doing.

IIRC HMS Tiger at Jutland ranged on another warship's splashes. So while the ship's complement was thinking they were shooting wonderfully, Tiger's shells were actually hitting some 2,000 yards over . . .

Also.

At Coronel, Nov. 1914, Kit Cradock's armored (armoured?) cruisers failed to score a single hit, while Graf von Spee's Far East Squadron shot the British ships into sinking hulks. While the Germans, at first, had superior shooting conditions (the RN ships were silhouetted vs. the afterglow of sunset) after an hour the skies darkened and conditions were equal. Despite rough seas the extraordinarily skilled German gunners continued to hit at far higher rates than the "just-out-of-training" or "no recent training reserve" crews of the RN armored cruisers. [According to Massie's "Castles of Steel," via Wikipedia.org, Scharnhorst's gunners scored 35 hits out of 422 shots, a rate of roughly 8 percent -- very good under the conditions.] I believe that HMS Glasgow, a modern light cruiser with a regular crew, did score some hits.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym

IIRC HMS Tiger at Jutland ranged on another warship's splashes. So while the ship's complement was thinking they were shooting wonderfully, Tiger's shells were actually hitting some 2,000 yards over . . .

Of course, the dye packets where invented by the British around 1930. possibly because of mistakes like that. Doubly emphasizing how rapidly things where changing in that field.