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On Sat, 6/21/14, Rupert Boleyn <rupert.boleyn@gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] Ship Design & the 'Plankwells'
 To: tml@simplelists.com
 Date: Saturday, June 21, 2014, 6:15 PM

 On 21/06/2014 02:37, Phil Pugliese
 (via tml list) wrote:

 > As I recall 'director control and automated firing'
 were a new
 > 'secret weapon' that only the RN had.

 The USN was developing it too.

 > It was so new that I don't believe that the RN BC's
 that fought
 > against the german ships at the Falklands had had it
 installed yet.

 They may not have, but most did by Jutland.
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The article mentioned below did say that the BC's at the Falklands did not but, by Jutland, all major UK warships had been upgraded.
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 > I read an article once that compared the RN firing
 procedures to the
 > german ones in WWI & it seemed surprising to me
 that the germans were
 > generally more accurate, altho the article did state
 that the
 > 'old-fashioned' method they used *did* allow for a
 somewhat tighter
 > 'pattern' of shell-fall.

 The Germans used a more accurate type of rangefinder (though
 it was one that was less suited to extreme ranges), and
 emphasised accuracy over other less easily measured metrics.
 However, they also only designed to fight in the North Sea,
 which made things much easier - they could assume a
 relatively limited visibility range (and pray things didn't
 go down on an unusually clear day), a certain frequency of
 swell, and so on. The RN had to be able to fight anywhere in
 the world, so they had to allow for a much wider range of
 ranges, weather conditions, and temperatures.

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The article also stated that the over-all accuracy of the UK ships at the Falklands was pretty poor but that when directors were later added the accuracy did improve greatly.

As a side-note, I once played a computer wargame that was supposed to have used actual historical for surface engagements. I was surprised to see that, in the simulation, those particular UK BC's only had 90 rounds/maingun!

Anyway, when I tried to simulate the Falklands battle historically (germans run away rather than closing in to attack while the UK ships were still at anchor), I discovered that, if I opened fire with the UK ships at max range, it was possible for them to run out of ammo w/o scoring a single hit!
Turned out the trick was to hold fire until a certain range while making sure that the german main guns were still out of range.

Made me wonder about the accuracy of the program.

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