ColinWright
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Joined: 10/13/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Panama quote:
ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay quote:
ORIGINAL: ColinWright Yes. To be strictly accurate, in the cases I have encountered, naval gunfire has exerted a strong effect only on fighting near the coast -- much closer than the range of TOAW ships would permit. Therefore, the game should simulate that. For whatever reason, most ships did not provide naval support very far inland. I suspect that it was because they generally lacked any kind of good fire control coordination with the army, and so had to confine themselves to shelling what they could see, but that's secondary. Since they generally didn't in reality, they shouldn't in TOAW -- even if the US Navy at Okinawa provides counterexamples. A "fact" used without context is a dangerous thing. I can think of lots of reasons other than "it was not possible". (In fact, it's absurd to think that it was not possible.) For example, that battleships are costly things to repair or replace and therefore Admirals like to keep them out of range of shore batteries. If shore batteries could be placed on interdiction... Not to mention the fact that the sea has a tendancy to move in several directions at once making the shells land in a not so precise fashion. I've never had the opportunity to take part in a live fire exercise from a ship so I'm about as far from knowing anything about it as you can get. But if the ships were at anchor in a harbor... I can think of lots of excellent reasons -- but precisely which are or aren't valid is really secondary. It generally didn't happen. That's all we need to be sure of. When one finds examples of effective naval fire support, they usually occur within a few km of the sea. Over and over -- the panzers can bull down to within about 5 km of the beach. They're not getting torn up and tossed in the air thirty km inland -- they get whacked when they get right down to the coast. Obviously, a system like OPART has to go with what generally happened. Right now, the default assumption is that a battleship can provide devastating fire support up to 30 km inland. If we were going to go with what actually happened, the default would be that ships can only provide fire support in coastal hexes. This could be fine-tuned, and modified, and made modifiable in the scenario designer, and so on -- but that would be the simple solution.
< Message edited by ColinWright -- 2/6/2010 8:56:55 PM >
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