By July, my new docks are finished. I've got a decent amount of tonnage ready to be thrown into the Dreadnought race if needed.
Oh hey, I finally cracked submarines too.
The Germans are resorting to Armed Merchant Cruisers to raid now.
Speaking of cruisers...
Both of my Pamyat Azova class ships are here along with a squadron of DD's.
It's the 22nd of July, and two in the afternoon. The seas are calm too, which helps quite a bit. We're able to spot targets far far out of our gun range. There's smoke on the horizon; another ship is out here with us. I crank my speed up to 20 knots, and keep on course.
Within ten minutes we spot more ships, smaller. Likely a destroyer squadron.
It's an enemy armored cruiser, and destroyer escorts.
It's a Hertha. She's slower, and smaller than we are.
The Hertha is trying to maneuver around to engage us more effectively. We both open fire at the edges of our ranges. No hits, obviously.
The hits start coming though as we close the range. At around 5000 yards, we're both starting to exchange blows. The Varyag takes a shell to the superstructure, sending shrapnel into the bridge and wounding several officers and crew.
The thing is though that I manage to maneuver into an angle that allows both of my armored cruisers to open up on the Hertha.
Quality 0 9 inch guns at a range of 5000 or so yards can and will punch right through the Hertha's armor. And we're scoring hits.
Six inch shells at this range don't pack enough of a punch to do more than shatter on even a couple of inches of armor. The Varyag shrugs off that hit, though there's probably a crew member or two with busted eardrums
Varyag's retaliatory salvo fired just a minute later strikes home, hitting twice, while the Hertha's barrage skims the top of the forward turret. It ends up putting a nice furrow in the armor, before skipping off the top of it and exploding in the sea behind the ship. The sides of the heavy cruisers look like waves of fire as obscene amounts of light, medium, and heavy guns fire as fast as they can be loaded.
The gun duel is going in our favor; We're shooting one another at 4000 yards. She's angling away, and I'll let her for the moment. I don't want to let that destroyer squadron get too close, and opening up the range a little bit will help with keeping my own ships protected.
My own destroyers suddenly drink up the idiot juice.
In unision, they all turn away together, at a 90 degree angle. For fucks sake.
I have no idea what they're doing, as my two cruisers keep shoveling 6 inch shells into the Hertha.
She's on fire, and has lost some speed. Maybe one of those 9 inch shell hits managed to hit something important.
Her destroyer escorts are swinging in on me.
And then a second later the battle is over. A broadside from the Pamyat Azova scores a pair of hits, one likely to the hull, the other into the rear turret. The shell penetrates through the turret face, then detonates. The explosion sets off powder and the shockwave causes shells to detonate in the hoists up to the turret from a magazine. The entire aft of the ship is blown to pieces, and the sheer force of the magazine touching off ruptures bulkheads and shatters the keel, breaking her even further as fires sweep through any space they can force through. She rolls over within 20 seconds, leaving very little chance of anyone getting off the ship. Bits of steel rain hit the Varyag and Azova, over two miles away. There's just silence for a while after that, as even trained and experienced sailors need a few moments to comprehend the sudden violent end of a ship that until a minute ago, was firing away at them. The commander of the two cruisers orders speed cut for the squadron, to help the Varyag deal with some flooding caused by the Hertha's last few volleys going through the nose of the ship just at the waterline.
The entire battle took less than two hours, even less than that if you count from time of engagement to time of detonation. I'm not going to bother trying to engage those destroyers after that. This is a clear win.
I'll let them pick up what few survivors there are after something like that, and head for home.
The destroyer manages to find around fifty sailors in the water, a small miracle. Some were blown off and away from the ship by the blast. Others were just lucky enough to be topside before the roll over happened, helping to put out the fire already threatening the superstructure. Shrapnel killed unlucky ones topside, and anyone below decks didn't have enough time to get out before the rollover happened. Of the survivors, there's probably a few that simply won't survive the month, due to injuries. It's very fortunate for them that that V2 captain decided to risk getting mauled by two armored cruisers in order to pick up survivors.
Another nameship for a class goes to the bottom. She did pretty well for being outnumbered two to one, all things considered.
The Battle of Bornholm is possibly the most decisive victory in the Russian's favor so far, in terms of shifting the balance of power. The Germans simply don't have enough armored cruisers in the Baltic anymore to dissuade me from setting up one of my Gromobois as a raider.
She produces results in the next month, taking a pair of German merchants as prizes.
EDIT: Rest of the post is coming, don't worry.
I accept the battle, and the gang rides out.
We make contact off of Bornholm. A German light cruiser and destroyers.
I just tell my armored cruisers to go independent and pursue. They should be able to handle this just fine.
Instead the light cruiser and destroyers make a run for the south, so I call off the hounds as soon as they're back within sight of the flagship. We're going to go hunt down a few merchants instead.
In the meantime, the German battleships are steaming north, and have been spotted by my screening cruisers.
As the Germans circle, waiting for us in the south, I'm picking off those small merchants. I just need to kill them and I can start to turn around for home.
Or the Flora can decide she wants to be WITNESSED by three predreadnoughts.
Luckily, they all miss her, and she swings away in time, as the rest of my force starts to come together and head south. The Germans retreat into port with their battleships, obviously not liking the idea of their glorified armored cruisers facing off against the proud ships of the Motherland. I'll call it a day too. I've achieved my objective, and Kaiser Bill obviously doesn't think he has a chance of facing me right now.
It's pretty humiliating for the Germans right now. I haven't lost a major surface combatant, while they've lost 3.
Intelligence reports tell us that the German people are also sick of it. Meanwhile, the Nymphe, one of the German raiders takes enough damage from some kind of incident that she has to limp into port for repairs - a neutral port, which means that the ship is stuck there for the rest of the war.
After the hawk party derails the peace negotiations, the raiding war continues. The Germans have recalled their raiders from Northeast Asia, having them head home to address the lack of cruisers in the Baltic. There's no battles this month.
Once again, the Germans lose a merchant ship, while the Bogatyr is having fun warding off that enemy AMC while hunting down enemy shipping.
I decline the first battle of the month, but this one looks juicy.
The Flora is on a patrol outside of the Baltic, along with the Gromoboi to the northwest. We must have made some kind of deal with the Danish to keep the Belts open to warships of both sides.
To the southeast, there's an unidentified ship. It looks like a protected cruiser and a couple of destroyers. Full speed ahead!
The Flora has bigger guns, two knots of speed, and around 3000 tons on the Gazelle there. We can take her, no problem.
It's a close range gunnery fight, and one that I'm scoring the hits with. With so little armor, we're both losing turrets, shell splinters are damaging the destroyers, and things could be better.
The Flora's engines are acting up too, having run around for almost two hours at top speed. As night starts falling early in October in the North Sea, I call it good.
Marginal indeed. We couldn't do much to each other that could have seriously jeopardized the other's ability to keep afloat.
The Bogatyr has a good month.
The next cruiser battle I take was a mistake. Not only is it at night, but it's also raining. And there's a shitload of destroyers. And the weather is terrible. And I can't control my ships. Why? Because they're about to stumble into the enemy.
Aw, FUCK.
The Pallada opens fire, but the Varyag doesn't because she's not sure if it's the Vesta or another friendly ship.
But wait, there's more! Gunfire illuminates some unidentified ships.
I want to note, our sighting range is 1750 yards. We can't see much more than a mile right now. And that's well within torpedo range.
Having determined it's a German destroyer and not a friendly one, the Varyag's captain orders the guncrews to light up the rear ship. And they oblige.
The enemy slips back into the darkness too, and I'm not feeling too confident about this. I'm starting towards home.
The Germans felt the same about it. Despite a few casualties on that destroyer, it's pretty much a draw.
The armored cruisers are having a staredown right now, trying to protect friendly shipping more than engage enemy shipping.
TAKE IT PLEASE BILLY PLEASE. He does. And my game glitches a bit as it struggles to find the designs for those German battleships. Only the Lothringen's show up - looks like he'd put a bunch of ships in for refit or something strange like that. Nothing much really happens because of it though.
It's a quiet month on the raiding front.
Oh, oh FUCK. Febuary 1906 brings with it very good news. Very good news indeed.
She's not what I'd call 'good', but for an early dreadnought design she's pretty standard. 12 inch guns, central firing, 4 inch gun secondary casemate guns, 21 knots of speed and close to 10 inches of belt. She's good enough, and that's all that matters really.
Speaking of which, those predreads I ordered a few years ago are finally finished. They're slower than I'd like.
I also finally get AP caps, which is a big deal. The increased torpedo range also makes it much more likely destroyers will actually launch the damn things.
Merchant raiding is taking a bit of a toll now.
The next month is more of the same.
The Avrora sinks an AMC, really the only enemy vessel I'd think she could sink in a gunfight to be honest.
Oh by the way, we're blockading the germans right now.
Gromoboi spots something in the distance.
NOPE! We're not fighting this thing, our guns can't penetrate her armor.
RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!
Oh thank GOD.
End of the month has some fun stuff to tell. They've rebuilt some of their armored cruisers with better fire control - I should think about doing the same to be honest.
Better fire control over time is a big deal.
Peace, please, for the love of god please take it...
FUCK!
