Damage mechanics test
So I have done a few damage tests with the new 280mm gun, and it made me realize a few mechanics.
I had a target ship with 400mm armor shown above. It took 9 shots of Yamato 18inch gun to take it to half HP,14 shots from 406mm mk6, 33 shots of the new 28 cm gun. (I can't post video here unfortunately, but this is a repeatable experiment you can try it if you want)
Now, from paper that makes no sense:
9*2500= 22,500
14*2144.3=30,020.2
33*1567.9 = 51,740.7
However if we subtract the armor:
9*1500 = 13,500
14*1144.3 = 16,020.2
33*567.9 = 18,740.7
Makes a bit more sense, though still a big difference. My understanding is that the Yamato gun has a better explosion radius so it hit more block, however I cannot confirm that. Overall, from this we know that for armored targets, Firepower > DPS. For unarmored targets, it really doesn't matter as you will sink them easily regardless.
So, hitting unarmored parts of the ship will do more damage. Now I assume many of you already know this, however this is the proof for it
I had a large structure like this, with 400mm plates shielding the ship. When hitting the 400mm plates with guns that do less than 1000 Firepower, it will not do damage. When I'm using the Mk 45, which has 1017 Firepower, it did little damage:
However, hitting the unarmored parts from the back it did a lot more damage in just 3 salvos.
I did another experiment on ship armour value. It seemed to have damage reduction properties. This too many people probably already know this, but this was to prove the theory
First one has 867 armor, second one has 82 armor. Basically armor takes the average of all blocks, so I just used small blocks and changed the average. The entire ship is the same (except for a few small block gaps when I'm building it, there's 0.2 GJ difference by accident)
Both of these took 20 salvos from my ship, as you can see, the first one with higher armor had more HP remaining.
So both the armor value of the block and the armor value of the entire ship will have a impact on damage calculation.
Posted Oct 3, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC