Jack Polonka posted this question on Consimworld:
I just got Supermarina I and I noticed one thing. The Italian gunnery has no negative modifiers to their to hit die roll. Historically, the Italian gunnery suffered from large salvo spread (at least for guns bigger than 8" which did not use cased ammo), poor optical range finders (I believe they got some replacements from the Germans)and had “issues" with their gun directors. I could understand that you want to keep it simple, but then I noticed there were modifiers for Japanese “quirks" ((unstable directors during sharp turns, more than 45°, and visual detection during night engagements). Some sort of modifiers should be included for these guys.
I think you should include more rules/modifiers/info on gunnery aspects in CaS such as gunnery/salvo doctrines and range limits on optical range finders/directors that do not have radar. FG&DN and DoRS shows some of this. You spent time on “cute" things like national depth charge patterns. Show guns the same type of love.
Chris Carlson’s reply:
It is extremely difficult to get one ’s hands around a problem where the only data is a scant few reports from British observers which stated that Italian salvos had excessive longitudinal dispersion. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any numerical data to tell me the magnitude of the problem. The Italians knew they had problems with large salvo sizes as early as 1939, and they also had an inkling that the main driver was likely the high muzzle velocity of their guns. The extent of the deviation between salvos was unpredictable and highly variable, and the Italians did reduce the muzzle velocity of some of their guns to mitigate the problem. Again, there is no hard data to say what effect this had on salvo dispersion, but engineering considerations suggest a reduced muzzle velocity should have been beneficial.
Unlike the Japanese quirks and the “cute" national depth charge patterns, where we had excellent hard data from multiple sources, I didn ’t look seriously at a national penalty for the Italians as I had almost nothing to go on. I have a tendency to shy away from making hard rule statements without good evidence to back it up. The problem is also exacerbated by post-WW II secondary sources which have nothing good to say about the Italian Navy.
Such obvious bias on the authors part leaves me reluctant to accept their conclusions as to the status of Italian gunnery. Given the very few engagements where the Italians were noted to have large salvo sizes, you could assign a penalty of perhaps -5%for the Extreme Range band and possibly the Long Range band. Although, the available data is only good for about two or three engagements at ranges of 25, 000 yards or more.
As for poor range finders or fire control systems, there are adequate sources to conclude that this claim is pure post-war fabrication. The Italians used an interesting duplex range finder system that employed both coincidence and stereoscopic range finders, and they used good analog computers to determine firing orders.
Historically, they had a nasty habit of straddling their targets very early on and at long range. During the engagements of Calabria, Matapan, Pantelleria, and Sirte the Italians were noted as shooting very accurately. Indeed, during the Battle of Sirte, the environmental conditions were so bad that many of the RN ships had trouble seeing the Italians, and yet Littorio straddled a light cruiser with its first salvo at a range in excess of 25,000 yards. This particular example, and numerous others, make it very difficult to accept the post-war claims of poor range finders and fire control systems. The only instance I have of German assistance in the gunnery area is their provision of some fire control radars, and this was only due to the fact that the Italian production of their indigenous EC-3 Gufo radar was incredibly slow.
As to salvo firing doctrine, since we use three minutes of fire, the actual firing doctrine has little impact on our gun fire resolution. While there is numerous anecdotal observations that one form of salvo firing is better than another, there is very little hard data to support this claim. Analysis of gunnery exercises shows that the number of hits per minute -- the standard metric of gun fire accuracy -- remains about the same regardless of the number of guns in the salvo. Mr. Bill Jurens, probably the best expert on gunnery accuracy today, has found no correlation between the number of guns fired to the number of hits scored. Thus, for these two reasons we do not differentiate between firing doctrines.
BT
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