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31st May is the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, one of the largest naval battles in history.

For anyone who is interested, I am going to do "real time" reporting of the action on Twitter. I am Tweeting background info scenario set now. The main battle starts on Tuesday.

Follow @BattleOfJutland

There is also a documentary with Dan snow at 9pm g.m.t on bbc2 uk terrestrial tv

I'm definitely watching that.

My Tweets will describe the action minute by minute at the same time the real battle happened 100 years ago.

I will check this out.

Twitter is not my thing, but good on you for doing this!

You should theme the tweets as per the respective Gunnery; so German tweets should hit the point sharply. Rate of tweet should be preferred to quality for the British; generally sailing a bit closer to disaster than thought prudent.

Good luck Kk, may history judge you kinder than Jellicoe!

Just been watching the Dan Snow documentary on BBC2. I had high hopes (there are some spoilers, if you don't know the battle) but to be frank there are so many errors in the points they are making it's a load of BS and I've switched off.

I believe we have some of the casualties buried at the municipal graveyard where I live, in Arendal Norway, which is on the Skagerrak coast. I've been told people in Arendal could even hear the battle happening far away in the North Sea. Casualties floated ashore all over the North Sea.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Just been watching the Dan Snow documentary on BBC2. I had high hopes (there are some spoilers, if you don't know the battle) but to be frank there are so many errors in the points they are making it's a load of BS and I've switched off.

That sounds unfortunate but about right for any documentary featuring dan snow.

Dan Snow spent a lot of effort to show it was difficult to read flag signals.

While the Royal Navy of the Great War were better at it than Snow, there was a problem with signalling however it was caused by Beatty's mistake in positioning the 5th Battle Squadron too far away, and a battle cruiser's failure to relay the signals by signalling lamp, which he had assigned them to do.

So Snow's point though in some sense not wrong is actually irrelevant to explaining the course of the battle.

Similarly a lot of effort was put into discovering if Queen Mary was as resistant to flooding as German battle cruisers. It turned out she was, and this made the point that British naval architecture as good as German.

However, Queen Mary blew up and sank from a magazine explosion, not from flooding, so this "discovery" was again irrelevant to understanding the battle. Also, German battle cruisers were actually more resistant to damage than British because they had heavier armour and better anti-torpedo defences.

Overall it was a great disappointment. It seemed to me that they invented a couple of shibboleths to investigate and dismiss them while ignoring many very interesting things.

The battle of Jutland, otherwise known as the event both sides failed to exploit, that was indecisive compared to Kaiser Wilhelm's unwillingness to utilize his navy, ended up losing it anyway at the end of the conflict when most of the ships were forcibly sunk by the Entente ingloriously outside of battle.

There would have been a half dozen battles of Jutland if not for German skittishness. Might have changed the outcome of the war.

It's always struck me as a historical irony that, out of nowhere, the German empire challenges the British navy's ratio of 2-1 naval superiority, a massive undertaking, and then it fails to even register an effect in the conflict, lol.

That's the real legacy of the Battle of Jutland IMO.

Sounds like a neat project! There have been a lot of Jutland commemoration games going on or that are planned. A friend of mine attended one that was held at the US Naval War College, and was nice enough to write up an AAR for the MBS Blog:

http://www.manbattlestations.com/blog/2016/05/14/re-fighting-jutland/

 Ruckdog wrote:
Sounds like a neat project! There have been a lot of Jutland commemoration games going on or that are planned. A friend of mine attended one that was held at the US Naval War College, and was nice enough to write up an AAR for the MBS Blog:

http://www.manbattlestations.com/blog/2016/05/14/re-fighting-jutland/

Really fascinating article. Thanks.

linked article wrote:Kamikazes aside, wargaming, along with fleet exercises and debate in professional journals such as Proceedings, interacted to provide a fecund environment for testing tactics during the 1920s and 1930s. Floor wargames, especially, were a cost-effective way to explore fleet maneuvers during the lean Depression years. As the only fleet action involving Dreadnoughts, the Battle of Jutland was extensively dissected by professionals and amateurs alike. Compared to air and land fighting, naval battles are exceedingly rare, so war games provide the only available laboratory for tactics."

Edit: after having watched a documentary on the historical battle of Jutland, I'm somewhat less impressed by the wargaming results specified in that article. The author mentions the absence of certain effects like critical effects - which in the documentary was huge - literally 3 British battlecruisers were destroyed by their magazine chambers being hit, a flash going up which ignited the loaded cordite charges, sending a blast down the loading tube and igniting the stored cordite housing which had the blast door open for convenience's sake (a mistake). He also mentions the fact that the British battlecruisers were rated as having better guns (higher caliber), whereas they did not represent that the German battlecruisers had armor more in line with a dreadnought. They also did not take into account atmospheric distortion from the ranges (over 10 miles for shells), smoke or water, and instantaneous communication; both communication and visibility were cited as crucial factors in the documentary. In the historical battle, the British ships were silhouetted by the sun, and Beatty's attempt to communicate with his super dreadnoughts to follow him was improperly received by the super dreadnought crew in the historical battle.

I also in general disagree with a strictly deterministic hit point system in a simulation. Shots either penetrate or they don't. They either cause functional damage or they don't. While cumulative damage may affect the structural integrity of the vessel, that isn't the only effect. Considering that locational damage was one of the most significant parts of the battle of Jutland - ships blowing up from ignited cordite in the ammunition magazine - you might as well just write that off as a statistical anomaly and ignore the historical outcome in the simulation, which it might well have been.

The "real time" reporting is in full swing.

I'm actually getting rather excited myself despite having spent the past week researching and typing up all the bulletins!

Really enjoying this Killkrazy! Thanks for doing it.

Glad you like it!

The fighting goes on through the night with many surprising incidents.

 TedNugent wrote:

 Ruckdog wrote:
Sounds like a neat project! There have been a lot of Jutland commemoration games going on or that are planned. A friend of mine attended one that was held at the US Naval War College, and was nice enough to write up an AAR for the MBS Blog:

http://www.manbattlestations.com/blog/2016/05/14/re-fighting-jutland/

Really fascinating article. Thanks.

linked article wrote:Kamikazes aside, wargaming, along with fleet exercises and debate in professional journals such as Proceedings, interacted to provide a fecund environment for testing tactics during the 1920s and 1930s. Floor wargames, especially, were a cost-effective way to explore fleet maneuvers during the lean Depression years. As the only fleet action involving Dreadnoughts, the Battle of Jutland was extensively dissected by professionals and amateurs alike. Compared to air and land fighting, naval battles are exceedingly rare, so war games provide the only available laboratory for tactics."

Edit: after having watched a documentary on the historical battle of Jutland, I'm somewhat less impressed by the wargaming results specified in that article. The author mentions the absence of certain effects like critical effects - which in the documentary was huge - literally 3 British battlecruisers were destroyed by their magazine chambers being hit, a flash going up which ignited the loaded cordite charges, sending a blast down the loading tube and igniting the stored cordite housing which had the blast door open for convenience's sake (a mistake). He also mentions the fact that the British battlecruisers were rated as having better guns (higher caliber), whereas they did not represent that the German battlecruisers had armor more in line with a dreadnought. They also did not take into account atmospheric distortion from the ranges (over 10 miles for shells), smoke or water, and instantaneous communication; both communication and visibility were cited as crucial factors in the documentary. In the historical battle, the British ships were silhouetted by the sun, and Beatty's attempt to communicate with his super dreadnoughts to follow him was improperly received by the super dreadnought crew in the historical battle.

I also in general disagree with a strictly deterministic hit point system in a simulation. Shots either penetrate or they don't. They either cause functional damage or they don't. While cumulative damage may affect the structural integrity of the vessel, that isn't the only effect. Considering that locational damage was one of the most significant parts of the battle of Jutland - ships blowing up from ignited cordite in the ammunition magazine - you might as well just write that off as a statistical anomaly and ignore the historical outcome in the simulation, which it might well have been.

It's a very interesting article.

Regarding the determinism of the combat, there are arguments on both sides, however if the purpose of the game was to look into how ship captains needed to manoeuvre, then realistically random combat resolution was a secondary concern.