ShipBlog

A new researchable branch of German hybrid battleships will be added to the game in the upcoming test session. Each of these ships has main battery guns concentrated at the front of the vessel, with good firing range, but damage per minute, as well as two separate squadrons of tactical aircraft: The first is a squadron of attack aircraft armed with AP-rockets. These will be available right at the start of the match and have a comparatively short reload time, but are few in numbers and offer only limited damage potential. The other squadron are dive bombers equipped with AP bombs. These aircraft are not available to activate at the beginning of a battle and are subject to a significant preparation time. The large number of planes per squadron allows for good damage to be dealt with these aircraft. In both cases, the planes do not return to the ship after use. Instead, in typical hybrid fashion, a full squadron is restored on your ship at once after a specific cooldown.

A battleship of the never built South Dakota class of 1921. The ship is represented with an extensive modernization similar to those found on other standard battleships of the US Navy during the Second World War. In terms of gameplay, Connecticut offers a variation of the playstyle found on the American slow battleship tree. While her main battery is not as impressive as Vermont's, she offers higher accuracy and a standard reload time. In terms of survivability, Connecticut falls quite short compared to her tech tree variant in terms of HP, but makes up for it with good armor and best in class base plating. Acceleration and maneuverability will be vastly improved over her same class counterparts, and the ship will also slow down much faster compared to similar ships like Minnesota and Vermont.

Formerly known as HMS Vengeance, NAeL (Navio-Aeródromo Ligeiro) Minas Gerais was a Colossus class aircraft carrier that was built for the Royal Navy in 1942. Her service life spanned over fifty years across three navies; seven years with the Royal Navy, three years with the Royal Australian Navy, and forty-one years with the Brazilian Navy. In Brazilian service, she served as the flagship of the fleet as a helicopter carrier for the majority of the time and underwent multiple refits in the 60's, 80's and 90's. After a long service with the Brazilian Navy, NAeL Minas Gerais was scrapped in 2004, but not before reaching internet headlines that would baffle some readers today.

The British light cruiser Nox is named after the goddess of night. At the end of World War I, the British Navy responded to rumors that the German Navy was building high-speed cruisers by redesigning D-class cruisers and submitting numerous proposals. The Nox level represents the design proposal for installing a small caliber rapid fire naval gun. This plan uses a dual mounted 113 mm/45 QF Mk.I (Mk.III UD gun base) gun as a dual purpose high altitude gun. This type of artillery uses fixed ammunition with a firing rate of up to 12 rounds per minute, commonly found on aircraft carriers such as the HMS Royal Ark and the HMS Glory.

Admiral Zenker is based on a German battlecruiser design from 1928. This design was intended as a treaty cruiser killer, armed with eight 305 mm guns in four twin turrets as well as a heavy secondary battery with 150 mm guns in triple turrets. For such ships to ever come to be, a nullification of the Treaty of Versailles was necessary as it was limiting Germany to build ships with a maximum displacement of 10 000 tons. However, Vice-Admiral Hans Zenker, the one in charge of this battlecruiser design as well as the “father” of the Panzerschiffe design, annoyed the Reichstag a bit too much, constantly pushing them to negotiate the nullification of the treaty.

In an era defined by the Washington Naval Treaty, the 8-inch gun cruiser was by far the most favoured intermediate ship in the US Navy (USN). All that had to change when the London Naval Treaty restricted the construction of 8-inch gun cruiser by numbers. If the USN wanted to build more cruisers in the future, the majority of them had to be light cruisers. The pursuit for a light cruiser that would rival the heavy cruiser began, leading to a series of design studies that proposed various solutions to implement effective protection and armament, some of which are considered by many today as unconventional or even outrageous.

The new Pan-Asian branch features ships from China, Thailand and Indonesia. At low and mid-tiers, these ships will be fast and nimble battlecruisers armed with 152mm guns, and beginning at Tier VIII, they will turn into heavier armored battleships. Their main battery will be capable of dishing out a good amount of damage per minute, but in return will have somewhat poor salvo weight and range.

In the early 1960s, Admiral Gorshkov took office as the commander-in-chief of the Navy and began to revise the naval policy of the Red Fleet. Shortly after, the Nevsky Design Bureau planned an aircraft carrier design under the name of Project 1143.4 and was designed according to Gorshkov’s recommendation of a “strike formation centered on aircraft carriers as an umbrella for the surface fleet”.

From the spring of 1942, the General Board of the US Navy brought up a new fleet destroyer design for consideration. The design was expected to improve on the existing 2,200-ton Sumner class by raising the top speed from 36.5 to 38 knots with a moderate increase of 300 tons in displacement. This began a series of design studies that evaluated the potential characteristics of an improved Sumner/Gearing class.