Introducing TASK FORCE ADMIRAL Vol.1: American Carrier Battles

[IICptMillerII]

Just wanted to say that I am extremely excited for this title. I think that in general there is a lack of 3D wargames covering naval surface warfare, and this will certainly go a long way to filling that void. Everything about it looks fantastic! The attention to detail and historical accuracy, the realism, the operational layer... It checks all of my boxes. Its also great getting all of these sneak peaks into the development and progress of the game. Great stuff, can't wait for the release!

[Toonces]

This game checks every box I have, and even some boxes I didn't know I had.  Easily my most anticipated game since Falcon 4.0.

[The_Admiral]

Thanks guys. These kind words are the fire that keeps our boilers going  :arr:

Here are a few more updates of what we've been doing as of late.

- The ANZAC squadron is shaping up. After the Kiwi Leanders, welcome the Kent-class cruisers, as the base for HMAS Australia & Canberra. Right now it is just the basic WW2 British Kent variant, but we will customize it along the lines of what was done later on, one step at a time.













- Mogami-chan is around too, say hi to this beauty! A worthy adversary for your own cruisers.







- Here is the follow-up to our work on the flotation damage. Our Dev is currently going through the excruciating experience of slicing the internals of a Yorktown-class carrier in order to isolate individual zones of flotation (roughly the watertight compartments) so that water from a leak will distribute itself realistically - and ultimately end up creating a list that will need to be leveled through pumps or counter-flooding on the opposite point. Still work in progress of course, and 2 decks remain to be divided up, but there's progress everyday! Next stage: the modules themselves (that is, the things you damage/destroy within a ship)







Here you can see water slowly entering the ship through points punctured throughout the compartments under the waterline. It is probably clearer in the second shot, where you see one compartment actually flooded.





There there. Enough until next week I guess. In the meantime, enjoy the show ;)

[FlickJax]

Wow.... what a project

[besilarius]

Admiral, this is really impressive.  I don't believe any game has ever tried to really represent internal spaces and flooding before.  Certainly not in such detail.  So many ships were lost due to progressive flooding, and this representation would add a lot of tension for the player.  One of the IJN Kongo class was torpedoed and the flooding was beyond control.  To atone for this failure, the DCA (Damage Control Assistant) committed seppuko at that moment.  I'm sure it was a real morale boost for the Hull Technicians.

At one point, and I think it was late 1943, to handle hangar deck fires, a flooding button was set up.  This would immediately douse the hangars and smother fires. 
The downside of it, was that all the planes in the hangar had to be dried out and were inop until they were repaired.

My family knew the Damage Control Assistant on Yorktown, CV10, and he would have been fascinated by this.  May have had some useful information, but it's eleven years too late to pick his brains.

[Gusington]

We should all take your forum name 'The Admiral' much more seriously now.

[The_Admiral]

Admiral, this is really impressive. 

Thank you  O0

I don't believe any game has ever tried to really represent internal spaces and flooding before.

Oh a few examples still come to mind though. Early great attempts of note are the Silent Hunter Games (starting with 3). Then you have Atlantic Fleet, and - on a more complex scale - more recently Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnought & War Thunder, naturally. We're using techniques that are well-known, but it's true that at our scale and on our topic, all things considered, it's more or less a first.

Certainly not in such detail. 

Detail comes specifically from our wish to make that sort of advanced handcrafted effort to recreate compartments & systems for carriers and, to a lesser extent, capital ships. Others might have to wait for vol.3 when (if, give us strength  :dreamer:) we end up focusing on surface combat. We have to stay alert and not fall prey to feature-creeping - and oh man, you can believe me that them temptations are aplenty.

So many ships were lost due to progressive flooding, and this representation would add a lot of tension for the player.  One of the IJN Kongo class was torpedoed and the flooding was beyond control.  To atone for this failure, the DCA (Damage Control Assistant) committed seppuko at that moment.  I'm sure it was a real morale boost for the Hull Technicians.

Yes exactly! The fight of the DC parties is a part of Carrier Combat that has often been dismissed from the gameplay representation (mostly by lack of means to make it matter at all) and, nevertheless, was prevalent in every account I've read over the years. It's not super glamour but it is a large part of the decision process of retiring from battle/abandoning the ship/towing the ship/scuttling the ship - and the unavoidable conundrums that result from it. Flag Officers commanding Lexington at Coral Sea, Yorktown at Midway & Hornet at Santa Cruz all went through this ordeal, not to mention everything happening in-between (Wasp & Saratoga).

And the story about Kirishima is a good example. It shows very well why it's important to pay attention to the actual compartmentalization of the ship in order to recreate that sort of improbable outcomes. If I remember well about what I have read (must have been on Combinedfleet I guess) the existence of a very large, non-watertight platform is one of the reasons why the whole DC effort spiraled quickly out of control following just one or a couple unlucky hits. You have that sort of areas aboard a CV too (the crew spaces on the third deck on the Yorktowns for instance) and if water ever gets there and can flood it, it is clearly the end. The free surface effect has that snowball tendency (that is flooding -> displacement of center of gravity -> more flooding -> more displacement of center of gravity -> etc) that makes buoyancy/balance a lost cause and a guaranteed capsizing (or death by gloup gloup) if water is not contained and confined.

My family knew the Damage Control Assistant on Yorktown, CV10, and he would have been fascinated by this.  May have had some useful information, but it's eleven years too late to pick his brains.

Aye, too bad - my sincere thoughts & condolences :(
But we're making this game for their children & grand children - like you - who might want to get a humble, respectful pixel slice what the Greatest Generation achieved and went through when manning these ships and fighting these battles. We're actually exchanging routinely with people who think very much alike (some of them making their own games along these lines) and I know there's a lot of potential for future projects, including aboard the ships proper (and, among other things, repair the infamy of not having CV-6 around somewhere as a museum...).

But first, our small team has to prove itself by delivering a proper, well-rounded first game. We will see where we're headed from there, but the sky's the limit here - there is so much more to simulate and tackle at every scale (ships, stations, planes, operational...) and in every navy, that if the first game is not too much of a dud, I am pretty sure that we'll have the opportunity to pay CV-10 and all her sisters the proper respect in no time

Cheers!

[The_Admiral]

Hello there Ladies & Gentlemen!

A small update on our devblog for January. There is little stuff you woudln't know already (being on the front-lines yourself by following us in here!) but there's some more context some of you might find useful, or to the very least entertaining. Enjoy :)

https://drydockdreams.games/2020/01/28/wallabies-in-the-year-of-the-rat/

[hellfish6]

Great update, thank you.

[The_Admiral]

Thank you Hellfish 

[Destraex]

I really appreciate that Australian (&NZ) ships will be in this game and that you guys even remembered Australia Day. Interesting camo pattern on the Northhampton as well. I guess at a glance subs think they are going faster?

[The_Admiral]

Thanks Destraex! :arr:
Well I forgot to say in the update that the photo was taken at Brisbane, so it was actually a Aussie-day thing all the way  8)
It happens that a "disproportionate" part of our audience is actually ANZAC, this is sort of surprising - also, a lot of them Simulation youtubers are too.

Regarding the Measure 5 wave gimmick, wasn't probably very successful at doing anything. In port it just doesn't work, and being underway just defeats its purpose. By 1941 German & Japanese subs were using other means of calculating speed using their scopes anyway (anyone who has played Silent Hunter 4 knows how this works, right, so you can imagine the effect of the trick...). It was quickly abandoned after 1941. Nevada & Oklahoma, which were the most visible bearers of the scheme were nowhere to be seen after December anyway, for obvious dire reasons... A lot of PacFleet cruisers were using the scheme in 1941 too, but in their case everybody had gone Measure 21 by mid-1942.

[FlickJax]

On a side note I watched the new Midway movie last night and must say I really enjoyed it even if a bit hollywood :)

[The_Admiral]

Well, I have to say they had quite the material to work with. I am a bit sad with the way Emmerich picked, we need no over dramatization - but still, better than nothing, and better than 1976 for sure, right?

[The_Admiral]

Hello there Grognards.
Well, the moment I see this topic slip silently to the second page I feel like I might need to intervene to stay visible in this world of merciless competition for attention. It's all for the best reasons - you get new sweets when that happens, and I get to pull my fingers from where they were and do a bit of work. Here are a few screenshots, for those among you who might still be around?  :dreamer:

Sorry, the whole thing is a bit canned, I made a pretty long "mini" update, so it won't be super custom-made for groggies - but you will still find interesting nuggets of info, and see - in all humility - that technology has made us come a long way since the kind days of Carriers at War & CARRIER.

First of all, our new weather model, which allows for localized rain squalls, the likes of which saved Zuikaku from a pounding at Coral Sea, or Enterprise from extermination at Santa Cruz. You will be allowed to use them too, but it works both ways...

Here, you can see them in action on the larger map. Blue areas are the ones where a set of conditions make rain happen - of course it changes dynamically, and the weather can be radically different 100 miles away. It's your job to make sure that the weather Gods will favor you more than they harm you...





And here's a view of how it looks like from under it:









Cloud cover will have an actual role in gameplay - as you can see here, it can very efficiently hide ships away from the sky. Your planes might very well miss the enemy - but in absence of a working radar, if communications are down or not an option, and if the Z/B system is non-operational for a reason or another, then your planes could very well miss you too...! They might have to pray for a little opening at the right spot in the cloud cover, just like here:



Of course, the same rules apply whenever you'll be trying to get something done at night. Night ops are not impossible, nor forbidden, but try your luck at your own risk. Taking off in the darkness is already a difficult, yet necessary exercise when a dawn strike requires it - but bombing by moonlight in on a whole different level! Yet, it did happen...









Flightsimmers will see all of this as business like usual - but I hope that these few visual improvements won't go unnoticed by the Wargaming crowd 
Finally, a sneak peek at something that comes a bit closer to actual wargamesque gameplay, for a change.



This one prototype shows how the game dimensions interact with each other. It is our early experiment at an interactive Command Post/Map/3D world integration. It is certainly no Radio Commander just yet of course, but it is a first step! It is very Work in Progress, so please be nice in the comments  :hide:

At any rate, as you can see, the transition is smooth. Switching from a mode to another one doesn't seem to impact performance in any way. As these instances already exist in-game permanently, they don't need to be generated along the way, making the whole process feel rather natural and self-explanatory (well, that's the feeling I have of course, but I am a bit biased - don't hesitate to tell me if I am wrong!).

Of course, static 2D & full 3D visualization modes will be available too - you will just have to click the relevant button on the toolbar to activate them (more on that later...).

There we go - hope your eyes had some fun. See you around for the next update - and in the meantime, take good care, Vieille Garde!