So, because it seems pertinent to the subject at the moment I will quote from one of my own stories on the subject of ship girl appearance. To be clear, I myself try to avoid too many references to physical appearance attributes. I use as a baseline, not anyone famous, but the tallest female classmate in my memory who was about 6'1, and basically stretch the height factor.
So, I'm wondering, does anyone know how the hair length and color for a ship girl is determined, or is that totally at author's mercy?
My translation of various parts of a ship girl are as follows:
Head is akin to super structure, where radar, signals and communications are. Arms are effectively the main guns that she wields. Her body is similar to the hull, where fuel, ammo, food and supplies are stored in addition to the boilers and engineering. The skin and muscles are akin to the armor of her hull; the thicker the armor, the more dense her muscles and skin are. Legs; okay, the length of her legs generally equates to how fast her top speed is as a hull.
Montana class has 37knot top speed, which amounts to a generous leg height not to mention a 1500ft long hull meaning just really tall in general even though the Dakotas are 4000tons lighter than the name ship, so 7'7" for each Dakota compared to 7'11" for Montana rough ballpark height anyway...
As far as relating to horsepower... UAD puts the horsepower at about 467kshp, which afaik, does not divide into 6 easily. It comes out 77,833.333333333 shp per shaft. And I don't think that kinda number decimal would be exactly...kosher for engines...?
The trouble was, when I used springsharp for this, I ran into more issues, like it refusing to generate a picture for a 1500ft long hull [that number being what I estimated the hull length would need to be in order to accommodate 7 turrets, engines etc]. And for some reason, springsharp also gave me a far higher shp value for the same value of ship, and because I surmised from reading through some threads here that 100k shp per shaft was just not done. I went with the 560k shp value as that could be distributed nice and evenly between 6 shafts.
However, now in my current story from which the above note comes from, I've scaled back the shp to 480k shp, which translates to 80,000 shp per shaft. To basically hit 35-37 knots in a pinch if need be. But not necessarily at full speed for a great deal of time, because over time, from my limited understanding, prolonged high usage of any mechanical complexity will result in degradation at a rate higher than the planned for attrition rate. So hence, it makes more sense to design a ship for a faster cruising speed, rather than a higher max speed.
Iowa's had something like 212,000 shp or so, and that was four shafts at roughly 53,000 shp per shaft [I forget the exact figure, I don't mind corrected here]. The Yamatos had around 150k shp that worked out to 37,500 shp per shaft [or 75,000 per shaft on two shafts if it wasn't four shafts].
But anyway, I see the horsepower and engine room debate dying down somewhat, just wanted to offer my perspective even if I'm not really an engineer. I have an interest in stuff like this, but not really all that serious. I may try to go back and dredge up the post I did in this thread last year to link the picture I posted.... Yeah.
Picture for reference found 18 pages ago. One advantage to UAD is that you make ship, and then actually test it in a battle to evaluate it. While the game doesn't yet have specific hull modifying features outside of displacement/length of overall ship. It has a decent amount of flexibility and detail as far as statistics go. I'm still working out the gun layout for the battle cruiser in my story, and I'm using UAD in that regard.
====================================
"...Tillmans had nothing...."
I agree with you Hornet, and yet this is why I created my own unique version... Granted, the picture I linked above is from the older version, where I only had the A-150 hull to use along with the Japanese style superstructure.
We could go on and on about ship design and how dockyard size and other factors contributed to ship design remaining mostly within sane and roughly standard layouts. I do have stories in the very stages using historical values, and yet the idea of the biggest still interests me.
I've always liked oddball layouts, like the Nelson with 3 forward turrets; an improvement to that would be one additional turrets to the rear, or having the scoutplane hangar be basically midships for even more gun coverage. There's still that giant hole of disadvantage to that design because of the all forward layout. Alternatively, one could go with a full astern layout, but you would be running very long shaft assemblies through the entire ship. I like the Amagi type of layout myself as well as the other varieties out there that feature a so-called "non Iowa layout".
To be fair, the Iowa layout is perfectly fine, but I've always been more of a symmetry person; two guns forward, should have two guns stern side to balance it out. Its more that the firepower is lacking if you only have one turret at one end versus two or more. Now that I think of it, the layout may have to do with the "chaser or kiter" process. A battleship is meant to be more of a chaser type, which generally means more guns to the front [Iowa/Nelson layout]. A kiter is more suited to a battlecruiser type like Amagi, where a majority of the turrets are on the stern end. Whereas if you have an even split, like Hood, Bismarck, or the Wowarships Montana; its more of a so-called broadside or line battle brawler layout.
I've rambled on enough here. Sorry about that. <pokes self> Stop editing to add more....