Design the ships | Naval Estimates - Free Naval Grand Strategy Wargame

Most strategy games treat a warship as a unit. Here, a ship is the sum of decisions you made years earlier - made in three workshops, each feeding the next.

Forge the guns

Design starts with the gun: calibre, barrel length, construction, propellant, shell and charge, each choice feeding a ballistics model that produces real muzzle velocities, barrel life, and armour penetration by range. A finished gun becomes a saved design - a 12"/45 Mark X your navy can manufacture, improve, and build into mountings.

Gun summary card for the 12-inch/40 BL Mark IX of 1898: a 389.9 kg shell at 789 m/s, 1.4 rounds per minute, 52.8 tonnes. — The same shell, five more calibres of barrel: the Mark X throws it 41 m/s faster than the Mark IX - for ten and a half more tonnes of gun and a steeper bill.

Gun summary card for the 12-inch/45 BL Mark X of 1903: the same shell at 830 m/s, 1.5 rounds per minute, 63.4 tonnes. — The same shell, five more calibres of barrel: the Mark X throws it 41 m/s faster than the Mark IX - for ten and a half more tonnes of gun and a steeper bill.

Armour penetration chart for the 12-inch/45: belt penetration falling with range, deck penetration rising, with a cap-shatter discontinuity near 17 km. — The Mark X against Krupp armour: belt penetration falling with range, deck penetration rising to meet it - with the cap-shatter limit drawn where the model says the shell starts failing.

Want the full story of a single gun, from forge to fleet? Read the gun-designer devlog, This Is My Naval Rifle.

Assemble the turrets

Guns then need mounting. The turret designer wraps them in armour and machinery: mount type, drive, loading system and angle, magazines and ready racks, every choice playing out in traverse and elevation rates, rate of fire, crew, and weight. A turret is an engineered object in its own right - and its weight, cost, and barbette diameter are inherited by every ship that carries it.

Design summary for a twin 12-inch turret: 526.6 tonnes total, a 6.28 m roller path, weight breakdown, dimensions, slew rates, and rate of fire. — A twin mounting for the Mark X: 527 tonnes turning on a 6.3-metre roller path - and the armour weighs more than the guns.

Draft the hulls

Last comes the ship itself, drawn as a real object: hull form and freeboard, machinery and boiler rooms, subdivision, superstructure, armament layout and firing arcs, armour scheme - all balanced against displacement, stability, and the budget. The designer works in real hydrostatics, so a fast, well-armed, well-protected ship on a small displacement is just as impossible as it was for the real design boards.

Deck plan of a 158.9-metre dreadnought: five twin turrets with their overlapping firing arcs drawn. — Five twin Mark X turrets on the deck plan, every arc drawn; below the waterline, the boilers, engines, and barbettes that carry them.

Waterline plan of the same hull: boiler rooms with uptakes, the engine room, and barbette positions below decks. — Five twin Mark X turrets on the deck plan, every arc drawn; below the waterline, the boilers, engines, and barbettes that carry them.

Improve the gun, and the improvement cascades up through every mounting and ship that uses it. The result is a navy with a paper trail: every class in your fleet can be traced back through the decisions - and compromises - that produced it.

These three workshops - gun, turret, hull - are the whole of the first free public build: the foundation, playable first.

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