UAD: 18in gun Agincourt & Other Ideas

The opening inspection establishes a British maximum design with 16.5-inch main guns and rapid-firing 4.5-inch secondaries.

The opposing German design is rebuilt around plausible guns, armour, speed, and the physical limits imposed by the Kiel Canal.

The autogenerated opponent is stripped of deck torpedoes and an anachronistic mixed battery in favor of German underwater tubes and a rational dreadnought armament.

An extra gun had been placed on the port side; identifying and correcting it restored the design's balance.

Advanced German rangefinding is retained, but a narrow canal-limited hull and roughly 24-knot target constrain the design.

The British design balances a 28- to 29-knot target with battleship-grade protection scaled for 16.5-inch guns.

British global commitments and German North Sea priorities produce different trade-offs in speed, armour, and naval spending.

The first battle shows how a lost turret, depleted ammunition, flooding, and exposed casemates can overturn an otherwise tough battleship design.

The failed battle drives a redesign of barbette protection, secondary armament, anti-aircraft guns, speed, and the German opponent's survivability.

The revised British ship uses six-inch secondaries against torpedo threats and adds the three-inch anti-aircraft weapons common to the period.

The stream uses UAD as a design experiment while separating historical plausibility from campaign-optimal choices.

The revised secondary battery is checked against the heavy turrets' fields of fire before the layout is accepted.

A background image prompts a brief lesson on how Georgios Averof's speed let the Greek flagship leave its slower fleet and operate independently against the Ottomans.

A twelve-gun German ship requires access to Skoda triple turrets that institutional pride made unlikely to be adopted historically.

A 16.5-inch battery may be more attractive than an 18-inch battery when rate of fire and firepower are weighed together.

Repeated 3.4-inch hits damage fire control and prompt a wider redesign of towers, beam, and secondary armament.

HMS Furious proves that Britain's 18-inch gun already existed even though UAD's 1920 technology tree withholds it from the design test.

Not within this 1920 game setup: it caps the design at 20 inches, even though British and German navies historically used 24-inch torpedoes.

Possibly, but this test avoids them so it remains standardized and repeatable with the same game setup.

Adding a strong six-inch secondary battery solves a game problem created by UAD's close-range AI, which differs from real dreadnought tactics.

An imagined modernized Agincourt receives 18-inch guns and a protection scheme derived from British Queen Elizabeth-era ratios.

Probably not. The extensive refit removes the torpedoes in favor of the revised secondary arrangement.

After removing torpedoes, the hypothetical refit adopts a Warspite-style 4.5-inch secondary battery and redistributes protection and weight.

The opposing Bismarck-like design is constrained by German infrastructure, industrial capacity, and historically plausible armament choices.

Trial speed, realistic cruising range, and Kiel Canal dimensions keep the enhanced Bismarck within German operating constraints.

The Bismarck-like opponent has a small range band in which its 15-inch guns can engage before Agincourt's 18-inch battery can answer.

A close-range attack that suits pre-dreadnought combat becomes self-defeating when the same AI applies it to long-range dreadnoughts.

Lighter shells extend the hypothetical 18-inch battery's range while protection remains heavy, echoing Nelson and Rodney's long-range priorities.

Yes. Selectable strategy would help because manually coordinating the ship, watching the enemy, and managing the action is difficult to do all at once.

The matchup illustrates the destructive potential of an 18-inch battery, while emphasizing the need to maintain range.

Even a single Royal Navy ship with eight 18-inch guns before the First World War would force other navies to reconsider their own capital-ship plans.

Yamato is recreated as a modern battleship with historically informed speed, 18.1-inch guns, armour, and secondary armament.

The Agincourt-Yamato test compares four twin 18-inch turrets with three triples while acknowledging major differences in mass, speed, and range.

The final trials show why a long-range advantage still depends on avoiding close action and surviving magazine hits.