I Do Not Understand Pitch and Roll Mechanics Now

[C4Warr10r]

These mechanics used to be understandable. Thanos could explain them despite being an idiot. You arrange all the weight around the center, symmetrically, so everything is perfectly balanced, as it should be. That's easy. Engines in the back, armor on the front, guns in the front, towers slightly aft. If it rolls add some beam.

Currently, though, I have no idea what's going on. It seems impossible to design certain ships without having them just start out with wild pitch and roll modifiers. Fore and aft balance can be at near-zero, but pitch is like 60% on a late-model dreadnought, for instance. What happened and how do I fix it?

[6000 Chipmunks]

As far as I can tell, adding armor to the main deck is the biggest game changer, but cost a lot in added weight.
Some ships such as early destroyers/Gun boats will not allow much in the way of armor changes so your pretty screwed there.
But hey, we bought this game so we're pretty screwed anyway. :)

[cyan027]

Anti-Torp protection, Anti-Flood and Reinforced bulkheads WERE contributed to ship stablisation. But now they are all ethereal. No matter how much you deployed they never help stablising your ship.

The only way to stablise your ship is engine and boiler. Tons of Engines and Boilers. That means if your ship is not fast ship you won't get low pitch/roll. If you using Gas Turbine (which is very light weight) your ship will be very unstable. Armor seems also help a little bit but too little to be useful.

[vanDyck]

Hulls come with pitch and roll coming from their characateristics (i hope). You cant balance them out all. Mostly older hulls (reflecting less knowlegde about hydrodynamics etc.) are worse then more modern. And on (mostly) pre dreadnought era hulls you get limited freedom to place things so you cant correct it, or even make it worse. So you have to live with a certain amout of instability on most older hulls.

For real life I would give the advice to keep your ship low and keep away from to much top weight (i even thing the game is very forgiving about top weights). If you look at (pre-) WWII designs there were still a lot of ships with stability problems through all nations that had to be fixed.

Dont mount to much weight to the sides and far front and aft, keep the citadell short, try to mount your engines in the center of gravity, keep the numbers of superfiring guns and raised barbettes small, as heavy armor high up, dont use main gun side turrets and mount as much centerlined as possible.
The game probarbly wont react 100% realistic on that i think.

[hurepoix]

Usually is called the warship citadel, the area defined by main belt and main deck section. Shortly the most armored part of the ship. In game it seems to be included between the frontest and the rearest main gun turret. In case of an all ahead configuration, like Nelson class or Dunkerque class, it seems to be between the frontest main gun turret and the rearest funel.

[6000 Chipmunks]

"Hulls come with pitch and roll coming from their characateristics (i hope). You cant balance them out all. Mostly older hulls (reflecting less knowlegde about hydrodynamics etc.) are worse then more modern."

This is certainly a failure in game design (As you, and others, have noted).

I hope, that this is not the case IRL, because if it is, I'll have a hard time understanding huge wooden ships fleets that managed to sail well, and fight well, without rolling over and sinking, for thousands of years. :) *The odd one-off notwithstanding.

Evidence of Ballast (for example) being added to ALL ships to improve their stability, and being included in the original design plans, goes as far back as we can go in history.

Characteristics such as Top-heavy, Too heavy, and Lopsided, are concepts humans understand, by the time they have mastered walking.

TL/DR
The stability mechanic in this current version of the game is Borkied!
The common-sense approaches most of us are attempting to undertake do NOT have the desired effect they should, and render most hulls unsuitable for use, in this current version of the game.

[6000 Chipmunks]

Originally posted by Oggmeista:

Tech, otherwise what would be the real point of researching new hulls? it's because they have better statistical parameters on those criteria ie pitch and roll etc, therefore older less technically advanced hulls have greater limitations on how close you can build a ship to have optimal pitch and roll, or closer to this optimum, you might not agree but on this small single point i think the game is more realistic now with the updated mechanics, small blessings though..p

One COULD argue, that newer more advanced hulls were/should only be necessary for the additional weights, armors involved, and to compensate for space needed for more, newer and/or larger guns, engines, etc...

Any hull laid down that was so unstable as to not be able to FLOAT UPRIGHT is not a hull at all, it's a hunk of metal.

Tech should have little to nothing to do with hull stability.
What is ADDED to the hull COULD, but that is an argument about ship design, not hull stability.

[vanDyck]

Sorry but i think you underestimate the complex desing of a warships hull... if you think top weight isnt a problem, well have you ever heared of the Vasa, Tomozuru or Tyhpoon Cobra?
Research a bit about US and IJN cruisers refits before and during WWII due to stability problems. A lot of hulls were made wider to increase stability. The atlantas got even main gun turrets removed if i remember right. I always remember it when people here ask for a third, higher, superfiring barbette type. German later Z-class DDs had a tendency to "sink themselves" due to the heavy frontal 6" twin turret, the K-class Cls were build so light they had fuel use restrictions so the ship wont break apart in bad weather. The deutschland class pocket BB scheer got a new main tower as the old one was to top heavy. Sure its always a combination of the hull and the weight you put in and on it. But militaries like to put in as much as possible on a hull especially during times of restrictions as during the washington/london treaties, and add more in later refits...

There was a time ship designers thought tumblehome hulls or longinal (from front to aft going) bulkheads were a good idea, but wtih flooding this things just make ships very unstable. And without computers you just cant run some simulations back these days...

So you think a short and wide hull should have the same pitch/roll characteristics then a narrow and long? A 19. century costal defence ship the same as a 1920s CL of same tonnage? Longness, shape, wideness, height, the lines... all has impact on how a hull moves in, over and through the waves... which causes actual roll and pitch movement of it...

[6000 Chipmunks]

Again, this is a result of stuff ADDED to the hull, and NOT the result of poor hull design.

Designing hulls for more, larger, or taller "attachments" as you've noted, is not particularly difficult once you understand the concept of what a HULL is.
Dealing with many dozens of administrations or committees, ADDING bigger guns or adjusting the layouts of everything from engine room, storage, etc... to a finished and perfectly good hull design, led to most, if not all the problems mentioned.

TL/DR
You cannot turn a DD into a BB without changing the hull, and vice-versa.
It is not poor hull design, it's all the stuff that is added that causes stability issues.

A hull should float on it's own...not roll over and sink before anything has been added. (As is the case with this game atm.)

[o1dVersion]

To put it simply - its bugged. large citadel stabilizes the hull somehow. Adding inner weight destabilizes it... somehow. Adding 2 inch on very end of the ship makes pitch sometimes go nuts, but adding 13 inch BB turrets doesnt add much to roll. Its a mess.

[6000 Chipmunks]

Originally posted by o1dVersion:

To put it simply - its bugged. large citadel stabilizes the hull somehow. Adding inner weight destabilizes it... somehow. Adding 2 inch on very end of the ship makes pitch sometimes go nuts, but adding 13 inch BB turrets doesnt add much to roll. Its a mess.

+1

['Rax]

Still having a hard time with this. Modern US BB hulls especially. Seeing 40%+ pitching moments on just about anything I try to do.

[apdsmith]

Originally posted by vanDyck:

Sorry but i think you underestimate the complex desing of a warships hull... if you think top weight isnt a problem, well have you ever heared of the Vasa, Tomozuru or Tyhpoon Cobra?
Research a bit about US and IJN cruisers refits before and during WWII due to stability problems. A lot of hulls were made wider to increase stability. The atlantas got even main gun turrets removed if i remember right. I always remember it when people here ask for a third, higher, superfiring barbette type. German later Z-class DDs had a tendency to "sink themselves" due to the heavy frontal 6" twin turret, the K-class Cls were build so light they had fuel use restrictions so the ship wont break apart in bad weather. The deutschland class pocket BB scheer got a new main tower as the old one was to top heavy. Sure its always a combination of the hull and the weight you put in and on it. But militaries like to put in as much as possible on a hull especially during times of restrictions as during the washington/london treaties, and add more in later refits...

There was a time ship designers thought tumblehome hulls or longinal (from front to aft going) bulkheads were a good idea, but wtih flooding this things just make ships very unstable. And without computers you just cant run some simulations back these days...

So you think a short and wide hull should have the same pitch/roll characteristics then a narrow and long? A 19. century costal defence ship the same as a 1920s CL of same tonnage? Longness, shape, wideness, height, the lines... all has impact on how a hull moves in, over and through the waves... which causes actual roll and pitch movement of it...

Yup, one of the main factors determining just how much AAA American warships carried around during WWII was top weight. When the equipment is that high up is has a disproportionate effect on stability...