Second World War Notes

Second World War Designer's Notes

Contents

	The Naval War
	Titans of the Pacific

Resources

Charts and maps

The Naval War
In spite of the strategic importance of Jutland it was the Second World War in the Pacific which revolutionised modern naval strategy and practice.

Steel Fleet was actually born in an attempt to play out some of the complex and demanding encounters of the Solomons Sea; First Savo, Eastern Solomons, Cape Esperance, Santa Cruz Islands, the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and Tassafaronga. That we ended up going back to Heligoland and the Yellow Sea is more a testament to how much we wanted to get the later surface engagements right by tracing the development of the relevant technology than how much we wanted to model the older battles. Not that they aren't fun too.

Having said that the Russo-Japanese and Great Wars are rewarding subjects and a thorough knowledge of the naval architecture, gunnery and doctrine of their periods is essential to get the design for later conflicts right; it seems.

Titans of the Pacific
So be reassured that as we develop our rules around the 12" duels of the Yellow Sea it has always been play-tested with the Titans of the Pacific; the Iowa and Yamato class models we developed early in the design have been constantly and faithfully updated as play-testing has revealed new requirements.

We are considering releasing, in fact, a free tutorial mini-game called Titans of the Pacific with just those two vessels¹; let us know if you would like us to do something like that.

Shaun Appleby 02 August 2014
Please note that links on designer's notes pages often redirect to existing topics on other relevant designer's notes pages.

¹Of course one could could construct a fairly large division of Iowa or Yamato class vessels if one wished. We were going to provide a generous number of named vessel playing pieces and ship sheets for each class in spite of the actual limited construction programs of these vessels during the war.