Balancing a destroyer’s weight, shells, speed, and stability

The design begins with a modern destroyer-leader hull and adds guns, torpedoes, explosives, mines, depth charges, and auxiliary machinery before the displacement budget starts to collapse. Comparing lighter and heavier shells for range and rate of fire finds that light shells provide the best combination for this design. Ammunition is only one part of the weight problem: machinery, hull depth, beam, armour, speed, and auxiliary systems repeatedly alter pitch and roll. Moving weight lower in the hull helps stability, but does not solve every conflict between speed, weapons, range, and seakeeping. The attempted configuration is not far from real designs that worked, so the game's stability result should not be treated as a verdict on every comparable historical ship. Abandoning the design rather than accepting a ship below the required standard shows why individually attractive features can still form an overweight or unstable whole.