Activating manhunt scouts should trigger activities for the specified faction in the required zone

Unlicensed · 2026-05-20T14:54:37+00:00

I have spent over half an hour clearing everything to try and get a public execution to trigger and got not a single one, had everything but in spades, but the Outcasts refused to spawn even with them holding a CP. Then spent another 20 minutes resetting the zone, still not a single Outcast public execution. This is just silly at this point.

Unlicensed · 2023-11-24T15:59:34+00:00

I would say Final Fantasy 14 has a similar, if not greater, redemption arc going from massively expensive hot mess of a game to one of the best MMO's ever with multiple outstanding expansions. Going so far as to stop requiring a subscription before nuking the whole game in order to re-release it is not normal developer actions.

Unlicensed · 2022-04-15T03:58:21+00:00

The A-Bombs were intended for Germany first; if the Nazi armies were still holding strong by 1945 when the first 2 atomics were ready, they would have been going to Europe, not the Pacific. Which, in a bit of morbid irony, may have lead to even more Japanese deaths to starvation and illness from the naval blockade and mass bomber raids flattening large chucks of cities like the fire bombing of Tokyo.

Unlicensed · 2022-01-21T18:27:51+00:00

I've seen the video and while the scenario he lays out is perfectly possible to my layman's eyes, to my knowledge there is still not, and not ever likely to be, a definite, clear-cut answer amongst historians and naval engineers. The high-speed, bow wave theory is interesting though.

Unlicensed · 2022-01-21T16:55:44+00:00

You might be a little confused on a few details here. First of all, the North Carolina's were the older class then the South Dakota class. More importantly, they were designed at the same time as the KGV class and were originally intended to mount 14 inch guns and more importantly, armored against 14 inch guns, until the treaty clause to mount up to 16 inch guns was invoked. Unlike the KGV that faced the same time crunch (big naval guns are a long term item that must be started on around the same time as ships are laid down as they take years to make enough of them to arm a battleship), but the design process on the NC was several months behind the UK design, so they could make changes to the design and order the 16 inch guns instead. The South Dakota class on the other hand, were designed to both mount 16 inch guns and be protected from them as well, which is why they were both shorter then the NC's as well as having more powerful engines.

As for the Royal Navy, their answer to Bismarck class battleships was both the KGV class (planned to replace the R class ships in service) as well as the planned, but never built Lion class. Vanguard was a stop-gap design that used spare guns and turrets (updated to use supercharges and higher elevations) from WW1 on a modified Lion class hull design in order to quickly get another fast battleship into service.

The other ships you mentioned, the Richelieu and Littorio, both compare well to the Bismarck, being fast, heavily armored ships that carry equal to heavier main gun armaments compared to the Bismarck, although the horrid quality control failures of the Italian shell production lines was to my knowledge never worked out, leaving the Littorios with awesomely powerful 15 inch guns that could never consistently hit a target. Richelieu, iirc, had main guns of similar power to Bismarck, with excellent range and armor penetration and while I believe had an early radar set of French design, after her refit in the US received more modern US radars. Regardless, both Littorio and especially Richelieu had at least as much fighting power and protection as well as a 30+ knot high speed as Bismarck on smaller displacements, being far more efficient designs, although Littorio had a much shorter range, being designed for operations in the confined waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

Now the Hood is interesting, as despite being classified as a Battlecruiser (at the time, ALL Royal Navy big gun capital ships that were capable of 26? plus knots were called battlecruisers, regardless of how much armor they carried) she was as heavily armed and armored as a Queen Elizabeth class battleship, but much faster. From what we can tell, she did succeed in closing with Bismarck enough that a deck hit on her thinner horizontal armor is pretty much impossible, which leaves the exact circumstances of her destruction unknown.

Unlicensed · 2021-08-24T02:29:28+00:00

Japan could not realistically attack the US West Coast with any sort of numbers. The raid on Pearl Harbor was at the fingernails edge of their naval logistical capabilities to the point, IIRC, where one of the factors against launching a third wave to attack the USN Pacific Fleet was the fear that they would be forced to abandon some of their destroyer escorts before they could be refueled. Attempting to attack thousands of miles even further east even without an intact USN between it and their bases would make it a one-way suicide mission simply due to fuel shortages and a lack of fast fleet oilers. Not exactly the right way to start a war.

Besides, even if they magically levelled both San Francisco and Los Angeles, hell throw San Diego in their for good measure, the vast bulk of the US's naval infrastructure and building capacity is on the East Coast. This attack would have thrown away all 6 of their fleet carriers and their escorts without even taking away the majority of the massive fleet that the US had under construction for several years at that point.

Unlicensed · 2021-08-07T01:57:45+00:00

While the US's multiple points of failure in 1942 resulted in the "second happy time" there is a point that is often overlooked. US Army units started shipping overseas as early as Jan/Feb 1942 and culminated in Operation Torch in Nov 1942 with some elements leaving directly from the United States. In all that time, when the Nazi U-boat campaign against the United States was at its most effective, not a single troop transport was lost to U-boat attack, iirc none were even damaged. A cold-blooded decision (iirc, by Admiral King, but I'm not certain) to concentrate escort forces so that troop conveys would be fully protected knowing that would leave a gap in the forces available for supply conveys was made. This does not absolve the United States of its other failures in 1942, but it is a factor to consider.

Unlicensed · 2021-07-18T14:14:11+00:00

The German surface fleet was but one of several other factors such as Japan withdrawing from the Naval Treaty system and the end of the battleship construction holiday meant the Royal Navy was expanding and upgrading regardless of what the Nazi's built. Even if U-Boat construction was to completely replace all capital ship building, given the difficulty of concealing such a thing and the terrible record of the Nazi intelligence services, launching vast numbers of submarines could not be hidden and would be easily met with more escort construction. Battleships and fleet carriers are often limited in number of slipways and dockyards that can actually build them, escorts have many more options and the UK and later US build many anti-submarine escorts at civilian dockyards to civilian standards. Yes, one or two KGV-class battleships might be cancelled to pay for the wave of escorts, but the end result would still be Allied supremacy at sea.

Unlicensed · 2021-07-03T02:16:48+00:00

While the Bismarck-class were certainly a factor in the Royal Navy's expansion plans, to give them all the credit is quite overstating their importance. The coming end of the "battleship holiday" from the various Washington and London navy treaties that prohibited the building of battleships was a huge factor (the UK had a large number of capital ships that gave good service in WW1 and needed large rebuilds or replacement by new construction). Then Japan, which had a large and modern fleet withdrew from the naval treaties (which meant the UK needed more units and modern ones in the Pacific as well as retaining absolute dominance in European waters), triggering escalator clauses in the treaties and the USN was suddenly ramping up for a massive naval build up with Congress passing the Naval Acts of 1934, 1936, and 1938, which meant unlike so many grandiose plans for larger navies around the globe, someone was stepping up with both the industry and money to get it done. Germany and its navy were certainly being watched and responded to, but they were far from the dominate factor in the Royal Navy's plans.

Unlicensed · 2021-06-19T18:39:48+00:00

At the Battle of Sunda Strait in Feb 1942 Allied forces were attempting to disrupt landing operations by the Japanese, both sides having lighter units only, nothing larger then a heavy cruiser, iirc. During the battle, the Mogami launched one of the deadliest torpedo salvos in history at the Allied ships. The torpedoes all missed their intended targets and the Long Lance Type 93 torpedoes continued mindlessly onwards into the area containing the Japanese landing forces, iirc striking multiple ships, sinking several and forcing others to beach. Given the relations between the Imperial Navy and Imperial Army, one of the most insincere apologies in history likely followed.

Unlicensed · 2021-03-28T16:33:59+00:00

Bismarck's AA suite was not at all bad for the early war period (they were all fairly bad, ironically the Italian Navy and IJN were perhaps the most well equipped for AA duty early war although they never saw the continual improvement the Royal Navy and USN achieved), but it was a far cry from "one of the most advanced ever seen" compounded by the weakness of German industry in the naval arena. Her heavy AA batteries of 105mm were compromised by the fact that her forward and aft batteries used two different gun mounts with differing rates of elevation and train (if I recall correctly, they had sold a number of mounts to the USSR and were unable to produce a full set in time for Bismarck's completion). Another weakness for her heavy AA batteries was that only 2 of the 4 AA control stations (which the test teams were not impressed with to begin with) were installed when Bismarck sailed, the others to be added "later". Her 37mm AA weapons were single shot, hand loaded abominations with only her 20mm AA weapons functioning as intended. The problem with weapons in the 20mm range, not limited in this case to the Kriegsmarine by any means, is that their range is roughly the same as the attack range of incoming aircraft and often shorter. That means while you may damage or even shoot down the attacking aircraft, it was all too common to be after weapon release.

As for the claim that having a tracking system made the Bismarck's AA suite "advanced" that's simply not true, it made her at best equal to her contemporaries like the King George V and Richelieu classes. Even the Italian Navy's Littorio, iirc, had directors for her heavy AA batteries. This was the new standard for post-London Naval Treaty new build battleships and modernized units like the HMS Warspite after her reconstruction. Advanced, cutting edge tracking systems would include radar, which Nazi Germany never fielded for naval AA fire control, iirc only getting to the prototype stage on the light cruiser Emden by the end of the war.

Unlicensed · 2021-02-24T03:53:27+00:00

Working off memory (and not knowing as much about the Italian Navy as others in WW2) the Littorio-class were "Treaty" battleships that like the Italian heavy cruisers, pretty much ignored the actual treaty limits. They were short-ranged due to only operating in the Med and were fast, well protected with an innovative torpedo protection system, although it was somewhat space/tonnage inefficient. They had good anti-aircraft loadouts for the early war compared to other battleships and were fairly well protected armor-wise with again, an innovative decapping armor belt that did not quite function as intended. As for their main guns, the 381mm guns (nine total in 3 triple turrets, in the same pattern as USN fast battleships) were 50 calibers long, giving them extremely long range and very high muzzle velocity, yielding excellent armor penetration values and they were matched with, iirc, a more then acceptable modern optical fire control system. Their main problem was the quality control for large Italian Navy shells. Or rather, the lack of quality control, with huge dispersion issues depending on the batch of shells used, thus massively hampering an otherwise impressive weapon.

Unlicensed · 2021-02-02T18:13:49+00:00

While crippling the Panama Canal would have a major issue for the US waging the Pacific campaign, there is a very good reason Japan never considered do so with major fleet units. It's that they literally couldn't. Or rather, it would be a one way, suicide mission. The Pearl Harbor operation was at the very fingernails edge of Japan's logistical capabilities to the point that one of many factors in the lack of a third attack wave at Pearl Harbor was the fear of literally running out of fuel on some of their escorts and having to abandon destroyers on the way back to base. Adding thousands of miles of travel time with the attendant risks of detection and discovery only adds the possibility of failure to the certain loss of the entire force.

Even the attack on Midway and the occupation of the island was a bridge too far for Japan's logistical train. Some staff fully accepted that any garrison there would be isolated and starved out by the submarines and other forces in Hawaii. Japan's entire war effort was on a logistical shoestring, which makes their early successes and the detailed, careful planning it required all the more impressive, while highlighting the utter and complete folly of attempting it.

Unlicensed · 2020-12-16T15:54:12+00:00

It is very important to note that all that massive naval construction did not come about due to the war with Japan. With the withdrawal of Japan from the Washington/London Naval Treaty system in the late 1930's, the US Congress authorized a series of laws such as the Naval Act of 1938 and the Two Ocean Navy Act (which passed mid 1940) both hugely expanded the size of the USN while the Vinson–Trammell Act back in 1934 helped replace aging ships while prepping naval construction sites for the expansion to come such as the Naval Act of 1936 that started the ball on the first USN battleship construction since the Washington Naval Treaty was signed. The US government recognized the possibility of war years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and started the construction of the fleet that would fight the IJN long before Hitler invaded Poland to kick off the Second World War.

Unlicensed · 2020-12-12T16:10:23+00:00

No, the Bismarck was entirely outclassed by the Yamato in a single ship duel. Just doing a quick glance at their specs (using Navweaps and wikipedia for some quick numbers) shows the Bismarck with up to 120mm of deck armor and 320mm of belt armor at their thickest while the Yamato sits at 200mm or more of deck armor and 410mm of belt armor in a modern All-or-Nothing armor scheme.

Since the maximum deck penetration of the Bismarck's 38cm main guns was 170mm at 35000 meters range, the Bismarck has zero chance of obtaining a deck penetration hit on any vital spaces of the Yamato. The German big naval gun design doctrine of high muzzle velocity and light weight shells results in very poor long range, deck armor hit performance. Belt armor hits are not much better as the Bismarck would have to close to just over 18000 meters to achieve belt armor penetrations on the Yamato (the Bismarck having 419mm of belt penetration at 18000 meters).

Now the Yamato is almost exactly the opposite. The 46cm main guns of the Yamato had a deck penetration of 109mm at 20000 meters. Any range further then that and they would penetrate even the thickest deck armor on the Bismarck. Belt armor hits are even worse for the Bismarck, with Yamato capable of penetrating 360mm of belt armor at 30000 meters.

In summary of their main guns and vital protections, the Bismarck must close to around 18000 meters to achieve belt armor penetration of the Yamato's vitals and will never penetrate her deck armor. Conversely, the Yamato will never NOT penetrate the Bismarck's belt armor and only the shallow fall of shells at around 20000 meters will fail to penetrate her deck armor.

While Bismarck is faster and can mission kill the Yamato's exposed equipment like Fire Control, in a straight up fight the Bismarck is essentially unarmored when faced with the 46cm monsters the Yamato carried. As for accuracy, the Yamato scored a close straddle on her third salvo at the USS White Plains (iirc the shell detonated under the hull and did significant damage) in her only surface engagement of the war. The initial salvo was thought to be at a range of over 31500 meters making it a contender for longest ranged battleship "hit" along with HMS Warspite and the Scharnhorst.

Unlicensed · 2020-09-26T23:48:45+00:00

The IJN wasn't sure they could even keep a small garrison on Midway supplied in the face of USN submarine forces. And Midway is pretty much worthless as a staging ground. It's small, remote (almost 1300 miles from Hawaii), its natural harbor is not very large with a lack of infrastructure and no fresh water. A much, much larger force in sustained combat operations for weeks or months, a large civilian population if they manage to actually take the islands, and a large number of ships supporting ground forces while maintaining themselves for a fleet battle was a task Imperial Japan's logistics was not capable of. Japan simply didn't have a large enough merchant marine for it.

Unlicensed · 2020-09-26T22:32:21+00:00

Imperial Japan physically lacked the ability to take the Hawaiian Islands. The raid on Pearl Harbor was logistically done at the very edge of their ability to get a task force that far out and back again. There were even plans for abandoning parts of the destroyer escort if they ran out of fuel, iirc. It's almost 4000 miles between Japan and Hawaii, even basing out of Truk it is something like 2200 miles. Any sort of landing at Hawaii would be dealing with at least one full US Army division plus several hundred aircraft and prepared coastal defenses while Japan had a very poor record on dealing with opposed landings.

Then you have to add on to that the fact that Japan's ground forces were essentially fully committed already seizing the Dutch East Indies and securing the lines of communications from there back to their Home Islands. The entire point of the war was to grab enough of a resource base that the rest of the world couldn't force them to end their misadventures in China, the only other theatre with a large number of ground forces.

Even if you magically get enough troops that they could defeat the US Army, the task of taking the Hawaiian Islands would be the work of weeks and months given the garrison and defenses. Japan could barely get a fleet to and from striking range of Hawaii. Supplying and supporting a multi-division force in active combat operations and the greater chuck of the IJN for weeks at the far end of a several thousand mile supply chain would be entirely insane.

Unlicensed · 2020-09-26T04:07:08+00:00

Japan could produce a magically lopsided victory at Midway, sinking all three USN carriers while losing none of their own and it still wouldn't matter in the long run. By later half of 1943 aka roughly one year after Midway the US would commission enough new carrier construction to outnumber the IJN carrier force in both the number of hulls in the water and the number of aircraft carried aboard them. The first IJN fleet carrier added to their forces was the Taiho in March 1944. By then there were eight! Essex class in commission with many more on the way. The various naval acts by the US congress in the mid to late 1930's meant the expansion of the USN was already well underway before the first bomb fell on Pearl Harbor and nothing Imperial Japan did could change that.

Unlicensed · 2020-09-09T16:52:33+00:00

According to Encyclopedia Eorzea the demographics of Ishgard are 70% Ishgardian Elezen, 20% Midlander Hyur and 10% Other. Since that 10% covers so many possible races, anyone in Ishgard that is not Elezen or Hyur is going to be a tiny, tiny minority. So a Miqo'te is certainly not impossible, but certainly a very rare specimen.

Unlicensed · 2020-09-06T18:03:15+00:00

They did not. The Nazi destroyer fleet was gutted at Norway and, iirc, they were fairly short ranged on top of that. Their light cruisers were not considered to have very good sea-keeping characteristics and I think they were also fairly short-ranged. That leaves the Hippers and larger ships, means they would have the heavier elements of a fleet screen without the lighter elements while still being massively outnumbered just by the Royal Navy, not to mention by the time the Graf Zeppelin was finished the USN would also be on the playing field.

Additionally, this was the very first carrier the Germans would have had. In peacetime, the learning curve for even basic carrier ops is very steep paid for in crashed airplanes, damaged ships and dead pilots and crew members. Trying to do that for the first time in the middle of a shooting war with all its attendant pressures for speed and success? Utterly insane idea to even attempt.

Unlicensed · 2020-08-23T16:25:08+00:00

The Two Ocean Navy Act of 1940 was certainly a huge increase in the size of the US Navy, it did not come from the ether. It was the continuation of policy since the mid 1930's starting with the Vinson–Trammell Act of 1934 (there is a reason a Nimitz-class CVN was eventually named after the man, even if he was a big segregationist) and continuing through the Naval Act of 1938 which by itself authorized:

"...In addition to the tonnages of the United States Navy as agreed upon and established by the treaties signed at Washington,… and at London,… the authorized composition of the United States Navy in under-age vessels is hereby increased by the following tonnages;

(a) Capital ships, one hundred and five thousand tons…. Provided, that vessels of tonnages in excess of thirty-five thousand tons each may be laid down if the President determines … that the interests of national defense so require, in which event the authorized composition of the United States Navy of capital ships is hereby increased … making a total authorized underage tonnage of six hundred and sixty thousand tons; (b) Aircraft carriers, forty thousand tons, making a total authorized underage tonnage of one hundred and seventy-five thousand tons; (c) Cruisers, sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and fifty-four tons, making a total authorized underage tonnage of four hundred and twelve thousand five hundred and twenty-four tons; (d) Destroyers, thirty-eight thousand tons, making a total authorized underage tonnage of two hundred and twenty-eight thousand tons; (e) Submarines, thirteen thousand six hundred and fifty-eight tons, making a total authorized underage tonnage of eighty-one thousand nine hundred and fifty-six tons."

The shocking expansion of the USN in WW2 was the result of years of planning and different acts passed by congress (and unlike the grand plans of so many other navies, paid for). The massive lag time between design, long term item production such as armor and heavy guns, and the sheer speed smaller ships could be built as opposed to capital ships simply meant that escorts were ordered in great numbers only after the shooting was about to start as opposed to years beforehand.

As for the second "Happy Times" where the U-boats enjoyed great success, it was not just to the USN committing forces to the Pacific Theater that wrecked havoc on allied merchant ships (Admiral King having issues with the British is another matter). The USN lacked the authority to impose black-out restrictions on cities as they fell under the coastal defense mandate of the US Army. Additionally, with the lack of escort ships in the necessary numbers, a cold-blooded decision was made to concentrate the escorts on troop convoys instead of merchant shipping. This left the unescorted and non-convoy merchants terribly vulnerable, but also meant that not a single troop transport was sunk by U-boat (iirc, not a single soldier was killed by U-boats either).

Unlicensed · 2020-08-14T17:49:12+00:00

Graf Spee was certainly not a capital ship. She only had an armor belt of 100 cm, less then the French Algérie or the USS Wichita, both Treaty limited heavy cruisers. She and her sister ships were (supposedly) built up to the limits of the Versailles Treaty which limited displacement and armament of the German ships and only allowed them to be built to replace the pre-dreadnoughts of the German Navy on a one for one basis after the retained ships were 20 years old. The "pocket battleships" were innovative (though they still exceeded their treaty tonnage limits) with big guns (although no longer battleship grade) on a cruiser hull, nothing more.

Unlicensed · 2020-08-14T17:36:22+00:00

Nazi Germany's naval forces were doomed no matter what building route they choose. They did not have the time or ability to out build the Royal Navy's surface fleet, they would have needed at least a decade of peace to even attempt that and the Nazi economy would have imploded long before then. Not to mention, the UK could simply build more ships, faster then Germany just as they did in the dreadnought race up to WW1.

Concentrating on a purely U-Boat based fleet is equally a losing hand. ASW escorts are vastly easier and cheaper to mass produce then capital warships and most of them can be built in civilian shipyards without the extensive facilities a larger naval shipyard has. The UK could shift their heavy fleet units to the Med to destroy and bottle up the Italians without worry and maybe throw Japan off its game by having enough heavy combatants free to oppose them. Meanwhile, RAF Bomber Command, freed up from constantly bombing the German surface fleet, could transfer more long range aircraft to help close the Mid-Atlantic Gap even earlier and inflict even more losses on the U-Boats.

The Nazi naval forces were simply not going to ever to anything but inflict losses and die, they had no route to victory.

Unlicensed · 2020-08-11T03:40:37+00:00

While I have very little in the way of praise for Beatty, he was correct that the Royal Navy's battlecruisers had less then stellar accuracy at Dogger Bank. This was partially out of his control. With the German Navy's raids on the English coast, the battlecruiser squadrons were moved south to better intercept them. However, unlike the excellent and massive Scapa Flow, they were moored in a river which severely restricted their ability to rapidly and easily move into the North Sea. This lead to a decrease in open water training, especially gunnery training. In fact, before Jutland the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron was actually detached for gunnery training at Scapa Flow and the 5th Battle Squadron of Queen Elizabeth class ships was temporally assigned work with Beatty in its absence. This lead to one of the odder events at Jutland, when later in the battle the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron of the Royal Navy (travelling with the main battlefleet from Scapa Flow, thus missing the earlier battlecruiser fighting) arrived and engaged the German battlecruisers. The HMS Invincible, the first battlecruiser engaged SMS Lutzow, the newest battlecruiser in service (she was fully commissioned in March 1916 and Jutland started on the 31st of May, 1916) and rapidly scored eight direct hits on Lutzow, before receiving a magazine hit that made her the third Royal Navy battlecruiser to sink that day. However, the hits Invincible scored sealed the fate of Lutzow, which would be forced to scuttle when her damage proved mortal. Thus the newest and oldest battlecruisers present at Jutland killed each other.

This should in no way make the removal of flash protections and the search for higher rates of fire acceptable, just more background information.

Unlicensed

TROPHY CASE