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About Xanthro

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  1. You have to really read deeply into individual histories of ships. For example, the book "Blood, Tears and Folly" by Len Deighton states that the Rodney suffered so much concussive damage that this diminished the combat effectiveness of the ship in the Bismark engagement, though most historians and others believe this to be an exaggeration of the damage. What is known is that the concussive blasts from her own guns damaged rivet on the Rodney and required repair. Most detailed history of battleships will show at least some damage from the concussive affects of it's own guns.
  2. 1. IRL, firing large guns when the muzzle is above, or even near, part of the deck, causes damage to the ship. The Bismarck destroyed it's own search radar by firing. A number of BBs damaged their decks, radar, secondaries, range finders and other areas of the ship. 2. The ability of the bow on ship to determine range is greatly diminished, as radar is normally mounted in the superstructure and fire control control coordinates optical range finding with radar when available. Remember not all big ships had radar. Optical range finding accuracy is greatly by how far apart is the aperture of the range finders. Taking a reading from front turret and the rear turrets gives fire control a very long distance to work triangulation and determine distance. Bow on, this is much less accurate, as only identical sets of range finders is available. 3. Ship roll and firing is thrown off. When big guns fire, the ship moves, it rolls. This roll was well understand by gunnery because it dates to the age of sails, but it was understood when firing broadside. Firing straight forward is going to change the roll and speed of the ships in an undetermined manner reducing accucary. 4. Determining distance is the hardest part of gunnery at the time. In fact, ships would sail toward the splashes of shells to throw off the corrections made to gunnery. Being bow on, your ship is either moving forward, stopped, or reversing. Anything but stopped means the ships speed is imparted to the shells. If moving forward at 20 knots, 20 knots is added to the speed of the shells. While this may seem very low, it's more than enough over distance to change the shell landing points more then the width of a typical BB. Remember, relative speed is actually very hard to calculate. Your ship may be sailing at 20k compared to the water, but the water is moving too. 5. A bow on ship would be much easier to hit. Instead of hitting a 25 meter wide target in terms of distance, you get to aim at a 250 yard wide target. Yes, it is more narrow no, but distance is harder than direction. 6. You cannot throw off the opponents aim as easily. By being head on, the ability to make slight changes to distance is greatly hindered. This makes you a much easier target. 7. You cannot determine fighting distance. A ship head on lacks the ability to more easily disengage, as to create greater distance means turning more than 90 degrees. There are distances where your shells are better than your opponents shells, and you want to be in that zone. 8. Once your opponent locks on, you are dead. Ship to ship combat at the time is like a shotgun. The ships fire a blast of shells, see where they land and compensate. Once range is determined, unless the target can change the range, the target is at a huge disadvantage. A bow on ships can't change distance, and gunnery will be able to roll shells all over the ship. 9. A bow on ship normally can't use a significant part of their firepower. Rear turrets can't contribute to the battle. So the weight of shells being fire at you is much greater than you can fire back. 10. Armor layouts are built to fight broadsides. The armor is literally designed to be stronger broadside that head on. The entire ship is built around the concept of fighting broadside. Most BBs, during WWII, have what is called all or nothing armor. The bow and stern and not actually armored at all. Plus, ships protection is meant to take shells from the side. When big ships try to fight head on, such as when the Bismarck and fought the Prince of Wales and Hood, look what happened? While the Hood is not the most heavily armored ship, she literally exploded because her armor was not designed for bow on fighting.
  3. For those unfamiliar with Christmas sales, the Black ships are not available. But Christmas sales offer the best values in buying available ships.
  4. I want a Minotaur B, so I can have radar and smoke mino.
  5. I've had one match this ranked season where my team had more radar. We had a Stalingrad and they had no radar. Not sure our radar was ever used in the match as the Stalingrad stayed in spawn. I've had more than a dozen matches where the other team had radar advantage, and half a dozen where it's 2 or more radar to none. Not saying those matches can't EVER be won, but you are starting in a huge hole, and it's hard to climb your way out.
  6. Protected MM is pretty useless in keeping the player base growing. At some point, players leave protected MM and are thrown to the wolves, and the worst wolves are CVs. A double CV game is unfun for other low tier ships when captained by experienced players and 19 points. For new players, it's like getting slapped in the face over and over with little to no counter play. Oddly, fewer people continue in games where they feel like they are getting slapped over and over.
  7. You seem confused. Third party mods work without WG doing any additional coding. To prevent them from working WG would have to change how the code works. WG adding internal mods inside the game is different than banning all third party mods.
  8. That would literally require a complete rewrite of the game code, and suck up resources beyond belief, and provide nothing positive. For example, I was an ultra wide 34" monitor, and I'm thinking about getting an ultra wide 49" monitor. The default layout on such monitors simply does not work well, because the compass is way too far to the left to easily scan. I move the location of the compass in BattleLayout.XML to be in the middle of the screen, so I can see it. I also move the Speed Indicator to just the left of the screen, again so I can see it. All those xml would have to be locked or moved to prevent people like me from tinkering with them, and what gain would there be? That you don't like mods, which WG explicitly allows? Mods let people test features and don't cost WG any money. If enough people like them, then WG can add them to the game and not spend a fortune on programmers just for UI changes.
  9. Calculators did ruin math for most of generations. The reliance on calculators has dulled people's ability to do basic math to the point where people cannot spot OBVIOUS errors. They set up a calculation in a spreadsheet, make and error in the formula, or it's referencing the wrong field, and I get a spreadsheet that says a payroll for the month is $2,645,254,412 when it's less than $100,000. They literally can't see there is an error. Even calculators and computers sometimes have math errors. Remember the Intel CPU bug in the early 1990s? Having a basic foundation in being able to do math, allows a person to have a rough idea if math is calculated correctly, and it's gotten so bad that I can't trust work from most anyone under the age of 50. Everything has to be double checked.
  10. Xanthro

    How well do you really know LWM?

    Did anyone else play the original Monkey Island and see the hint about the delay for Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe?
  11. Xanthro

    How well do you really know LWM?

    I still have Red Baron in the original box. My favorite was "Their Finest Hour" or Battle of Britain by LucasArts. For those unfamiliar with the game, you flew planes for either Germany or the UK, and you planned the attacks and defenses. You flew as part of the offense and defense and how well you did reflected as well your nation did. It's was super easy to win as the Brits, but really hard as the Germans. If you flew a German bomber, your other bombers would get torn up by UK fighters and you'd run out of bombers and lose the campaign. If you flew as German fighter, your bombers would be safe, but they would hardly ever actually hit the targets so you didn't do enough damage to win. The only way to win as the Germans was to build up a fleet of decent German bomber pilots. Both sides got to name NPC pilots and as they gained in experienced, they did better and better. So a big part of the game was keeping them alive to get experience. I had built up a Stuka pilot, Hans Rudel, who would ALWAYS destroy his target. He was my main damage dealer. In one raid, our flight got jumped by scores of UK fighters, way too many for me to shoot them all down while incoming. I was diving, twisting and turning and shooting down hurricanes and spitfires left and right, only a few of my bombers were damaged, but they had all missed the target. Except for Hans, his Stuka was damaged and trailing smoke, often planes that damaged would abort, but not Hans. He flew toward the target. I was screaming IRL turn around turn around, he lined up his bombing run, started his steep dive. Perfectly aligned, he's a few hundred feet above the target, I'm flying in a circle just watching him. Nothing else matters now. His dive is textbox perfect, the bomb swings out from underneath on its carriage and is released, straight into the heart of the target, the Stuka starts to pull up, but the forces are too strong and as the Stuka is just managing to gain altitude it disintegrates. They bomb obliterates the target, and I've never screamed NOOOOOOO more loudly in my life.
  12. The ships can be very VERY far away. You simply scroll out as far as you can, lock on any ship, and get the dispersion bonus, then line up your shot and fire.
  13. Xanthro

    Help with aiming

    I tried watching the video, but it wouldn't load. That said, you do not have a problem with aiming. I looked at a bunch of your ship stats. You are between 20% and 40% main battery hit rate. That's more than acceptable. Where you are struggling is with new ships, because you haven't mastered the shells and how they behave yet, and moving up to Tier IX and X opponents. What you are now experiencing is playing against players who have more matches in that ship, than you have total matches played. Above Tier VIII you encounter many more people who know how to throw your aim off, because players are now moving and changing speed, and presenting angles that are harder to read. All that comes with experience. At higher tiers it is not just about aiming correctly, it's mostly about guessing where the ship will be when your shells land. Remember, at higher tiers, you may have more shell velocity, but time of flight can be MUCH longer. This means ships have more time to make changes to speed and direction while your shells are in the air. You need to start thinking about WHAT the player is going to do while your shells are travelling toward their ship, and then take that into account when you initially aim. This becomes much easier with experience.
  14. Exactly, and number one would be easily detected, and if a programmer could do number 2, they would be too rich to bother. It's not that WG server can't be hacked, but why bother? The amount of effort, compared to the payout, would be ridiculous. There are far softer targets with a much greater payout. If someone could predict with near certain accuracy, the movements of players in WoWS, then that someone could predict actions is places like the stock or commodity market and make billions.