Boggzy

You're right that MOST players won't feel much of a difference of 0.2 sigma, but I certainly will .

One of my most-loathed combinations is long-reload, low sigma. When the Chonky USN BB line and IT BB lines came out, Deadeye was a thing and the accuracy took that into account. Without it, the things just felt like a Jackson Pollack painting machine. As you likely recall, Kansas especially had an atrocious sigma of 1.5 and didn't have the slot 6 accuracy module to offset it, so it was just a nightmare. Kansas has since had a buff up to 1.7 and it made all the difference in the world.

You're welcome!
You can actually see all that for yourself in a nice and handy website called "Shiptool": https://shiptool.st/

You can compare ships of any tier and sort visually by a wide variety of metrics. It's REALLY nice when you want to sort of talk about the differences between what a ship is and how a ship feels.

California on paper stacks up very well, but people have a common theme that it feels worse than comparable ships.

For those curious about the difference between Florida / California accuracy…

Florida has significantly tighter dispersion, but far worse Sigma.

California has excellent Sigma, but dispersion on par with other BB’s.

It’s hard to argue properly which is “better”, but I think it would be fair to summarize as: Florida is a long-barreled shotgun. The shots seem to land relatively in the same small area, but without much consistency around the central point where you click. California feels much more like you drop a “line” of shots that is wider, but more reliable at putting a shell exactly where you click.

And that's just the thing: the HE doesn't blap like the British, and the AP doesn't overmatch like the Sinop or Colorado.
You are forced to take the very best shots you can and reeeally hope they work out.

It really is kind of funny, because I never really looked that deep into the specifics of the T7 battleships that carefully until you convinced me to look at California. Once I did, I realized that it's not just the Cali that feels hard, it's that nearly ALL T7 battleships suffer from the same thing: the armor-scheme paradigm-shift that happens between T7 and T8.
California is a big chonker that eats a lot of HE damage, but it's actually pretty hard to citadel as it sits quite a ways below the water. The 35mm torpedo belt is pretty trolly when it comes to deflecting BB shells as only Musashi can overmatch and ignore it. It's just so slow that you end up taking a fair chunk of damage before you can reposition so it doesn't "feel" tanky.
I actually appreciated the trip down exploratory lane. I never realized that the Scharnhorst and Gneisnau arguably have the best armor layout of any T7 BB.

See, the AP pen (or lack there-of) was also a major problem for me until I realized that the AP is perfectly suited for citadeling the cruiser from Tiers 5-7, but will struggle horribly against BB's.
So I started shooting the CL's and CA's more often

Ahskance has been swearing by the Oklahoma Secondaries
We've gone back and forth about this in the office.

My pleasure :)
I literally think of you every single time I take out the California so I was determined to make it work .
It really isn't easy though. I will grant you that 100%. I actually like boats that are tougher to succeed in but the 356's at T7 with 34.2 natural reload is roughums.

I want you to know, Sailor_Moon that I used to hate the California as much as you do. Or maybe you love it, but hate how it plays .

I dug through the stats and compared them to the other BB's of her tier trying to pinpoint exactly why the damn thing always FEELS so anemic when I play it. The actual stats surprised me with not being as bad as I had previously thought, so I doubled-down and started comparing it further and settled on the tagline of:
"It's a New Mexico with better accuracy and AA at T7".
The problem is that American HE doesn't pen like German, doesn't bash things like British, and the AP shells don't overmatch as much on a T7 ship as they do on a T6 ship. Further, up from T6 to T7 the ships around it and facing it tend to get faster, leaving a thickums like California still on the slow side of things while it's closest counterpart, Colorado, at least has the nice overmatch potential that comes with 16-inch guns. Colorado even gets a...

In all fairness, brother - you're comparing a T10 DD with insane ballistics and advanced AP pen angles to a T8 light cruiser with lofty american ballistics.
This doesn't prove much in my opinion.

I'm confused here: SAP shreds destroyers, so how does this work?
If you mean that a bow-on or tail-on DD won't take as much from SAP as from HE, then that's partially true, but I respectfully disagree that a cruiser with this many barrels and SAP ammunitiion with a reload booster will in any way suffer trying to engage DD's

How about I tell the devs to make more ships faster?
I still want a USS Johnston...

Craziest thing? It plays like an Omaha on steroids

If you guys are curious and want to know what the armor thresholds are, this site is extremely useful: https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Armor_thresholds
The very first section is armor thickness thresholds. 127mm SAP with 36mm pen is enough to penetrate a HUGE variety of what you will commonly face at T8.

You're welcome!!!!
Best Supercontainers I've received have been steel drops and T8 Kii. I think I got a T5 Krasny Krym from a super as well, but that one just made me laugh.

Guys...
Please try to remember that you cannot directly compare the theoretical DPM of HE and SAP as a 1 to 1. It's just incorrect. They are two separate shell types with two separate characteristics.
Penetration:
USN 127mm SAP: 36mm (pens Bow / stern of nearly every BB below T8 / basically every cruiser deck that isn't Goliath / Petro / Moskva / Napoli / Stalingrad)
USN 127mm HE: 21mm (pens DD's / some light cruisers / all superstructures)

That's a HUGE difference. 127mm SAP can apply damage FAR more easily and regularly to a vast array of the game's ships, while 127mm HE gets much of it's damage from fires or by taking IFHE to raise the threshold to 26mm. It's direct-damage through penetrations as a primary source vs. fires as a primary source.

You simply cannot equate the Atlanta's HE dpm directly with San Diego's proposed SAP dpm without acknowledging that - it's just wrong. It's wrong the same way saying "Petr...

A1) If periscope depth does not use battery then there is almost no reason to be on the surface. This is a game mechanic choice and is unlikely to change.

A2) This is already done. Submarine detection is lower when you are at periscope depth and then lower still when at maximum.

B) There are only 3 depths that change mechanics: Surface, Periscope, and Max. While you can cruise at different numbers, those 3 sections are what matter to keep it simple enough.

C) This is not true. Submarines at maximum depth can only be spotted by other submarines or Hydroacoustic search at 2km. Airplanes cannot spot submarines at maximum depth.
Here is a link to the devblog containing submarine information: https://blog.worldofwarships.com/blog/279

That's what testing is for, folks - finding these things and collecting them.

Join us on Twitch for NA Community Time: Submarine Mythbusting and SPOTLIGHT: Hindenburg!

We'll go over some specifics of interacting with submarines and do a spotlight on how YOU can get better at playing the Tier 10 German CA, Hindenburg! You voted for Hindenburg last week, so come vote on what we should play next week!

5 - 7pm CDT!

https://www.twitch.tv/worldofwarships