In real life, bb's were the premier aa platform in the us navy... even purpose built cla's were not able to match their aa capability. A South Dakota had 10 double 5 inch turrets, 70+ 40mm quad mounts, 20+ 20mm double mounts, and 50+ 20mm single mounts... nothing else in history except Iowas and North Carolinas even came CLOSE
Which is what drives me nuts about how a SINGLE 128mm aa gun in this game has almost as much anti-air capability as the entire BB which had 20 of them and had about 150 extra aa mounts in addition.
This is very poor balance, in my opinion... even if the aa unit represents a whole battery of ground aa, it would max out at 6-8, still FAR less than the 10 dual mounts.

Cruisers with more aa than BB's? Utter poppycock. The best aa cruisers of the war were the Juneau class, which only had 6 dual 5" mounts and about 15-18 each of quad 40's and dual 20's. doing the math, this is only 80% of the main aa gun and ONE QUARTER of the secondaries.

SO.. to balance ships, you should have made BB's more expensive to build and maintain rather than make them useless.

-C

p.s. - On a side note, why are bb's less capable than railroad guns against ground targets in both range and damage, when railroad guns were made of surplus ww1 BB guns, usually 12" guns or less compared to the 15"-18" guns of ww2.. and there was only ONE of them, while a BB carried AT LEAST EIGHT! again, balance should have been a more expensive ship to build and maintain that actually does what a BB did irl... but is far more painful to lose.

Tankbuster, perhaps I should have said "...useless in the anti-aircraft role".

I hate how the concept of game balance being more important than history in historical wargames has become the norm in recent years; this is just another case in point.

Yes, battleships were obsolete compared to carriers, but with the exception of the Bismarck, the Roma, the Taranto raid, and Pearl Harbor, it took multiple attacks by multiple squadrons to sink one.

In the case of the Bismarck, she was not SUNK by a bomber, she was CRIPPLED by one... and records from both sides of the war say that her AA guns were not calibrated for such slow targets as swordfish biplanes. Just look at what it took to sink the Tirpitz, (one midget sub attack and 6 MAJOR air operations)and how the ships involved in the channel dash basically ignored significant air attacks if you think german battleships were rollovers to aircraft.

Taranto and Pearl, both were cases where ships were not on alert because they thought no attack was possible.. and in both cases, aircraft were shot down in the second wave of attacks, when aa guns were partially manned and not properly directed.

if you think the SoDak armament was so far from the norm that it is unrealistic, the Yamato class had as an armament the following:
as built: 12 x 155mm in 4 triple turrets, not primarily for aa use, but capable of it
12 x 127mm in 6 twin turrets, DP,
24 x 25mm in 6 twin mounts aa
4 x 13.2 single mounts, aa

1945: 6 x 155mm
24 x 127mm DP
162 x 25mm
4 x 13.2mm

and Bismarck/Tirpitz:
as built: 12 x 150mm DP in 6 twin turrets
16 x 105mm DP in 8 twin turrets
16 x 37mm aa in 8 twin turrets
12 x 20mm aa single mounts

late war Tirpitz:
same as above +58 x 20mm in single and double mounts
+8 x 380mm with flak ammo, the only main guns ever used for aa on a battleship, and the largest caliber ever used as anti aircraft artillery

Italian, British, and French(such as they were) battleships were similarly armed, although not quite as heavily.

Yamato was attacked by multiple waves of 40-50 strike aircraft of multiple types at once for several HOURS comprising almost 550 sorties before one squadron slipped through and delivered the multiple torpedoes necessary to sink her, if you don't believe me, believe the officers involved:

ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/IJO/IJO-32.html

for the debrief of the highest ranking survivor of the yamato, her gunnery officer

and

^ "Yamato (Battleship, 1941–1945) — in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, 22–26 October 1944". Japanese Navy Ships. Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy. 13 May 2000. Retrieved 7 March 2009.

for the us perspective

Musashi took a similar effort in the battle of the Sibuyan Sea, 259 sorties and a total of 17 bombs and 19 torpedoes to sink.

Japanese planes sank the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse at the beginning of the war, it took 88 planes to do so, and that would have been like lvl2 navy bombers hitting a lvl1 bb... by late 1942, radar direction for aa guns became prevalent, by 1943 radar fused proximity shells were in use; by the end of the war, say lvl5 bb, American battleships were shooting down dozens of planes at a time with no real effort.

The only time a battleship was sunk by fewer than those 88 aircraft in the battle of the Singapore Straits in a stand up fight was the destruction of the ROMA (ex Littorio) by the Germans... and they used radio controlled standoff glide bombs to do it.

So in my opinion, this game's BB's are WOEFULLY nerfed in aa armament.

EnmaDai-O, as for your comment that equates "surplus" to "scrap" nothing could be further from the truth. As far as I know, there was never a railgun (except for one siege mortar, which would not have had the range) which did not have a surplus naval barrel as it's gun. By the way, a "surplus" naval gun of that caliber was an extra gun made for a battleship class when the class was built in order to have spares available to replace worn/damaged guns; a naval gun took over a year and enough resources to build a battalion of tanks to build, so spares were necessary to prevent a ship being out of action for that long if damaged. thy were NOT a castoff piece of used equipment.

As battleship design and manufacturing capabilities improved, so did gun caliber, and 12-14" gun spares were no-longer needed to re-gun damaged barrels aboard ship. They were still very high end examples of engineering and development however, the only guns more advanced would be the ones aboard ship; ground armies just did not have the resources necessary to design anything better than the navies had already come up with as their primary research article.

-C

edit: radar direction