[PvK]

Originally posted by Gryphin:
In terms of “Realety”, Hm, Yes, large guns on small ships would be a problem on Earth today. Those are weapons with a Recoil.
My itterpretation of the wepaons in SEIV do not use Recoil based weapons. The point about Spinal Tap weapons beling less accurate is certaily valid. I wonder what a 15” gun in a Destroyer hull would have done with WWII technology. Anybody here know the math?
I would think if you could close to within Direct Fire Range that accuracy would be fairly high when aiming at a Cruiser size hull. Imagine 3 direct hits from 15” guns at fairly close range. Too bad we will never know.
I can see a Mod for a “Spinal Tap” weapon
Low to hit
High Damage bonus
1 Per ship
At least a 3 reload time.
At least 50kt.

A DUC would have recoil. Many Star Wars weapons seem to have recoil, but that's Lucas physics. However, as I said, the problems would be different, but probably there will still be engineering issues and tradeoffs due to size and mass, power requirements, spacial issues (massive turret blocking other surface facilties), etc.

In WW2, a destroyer with a 15" gun would I think be technically problematic or even impossible due to mass. A destroyer is also not a very stable firing platform, which would mean that even if you could fire without capsizing (or even sail without capsizing), the gun would be very inaccurate at long range, and one of the main points of having a 15" gun is to be able to out-range your opponents. The reason a WW2 battleship is superior to a WW2 cruiser is that it can nail the cruiser before the cruiser can even get in range. The 15"-armed destroyer probably wouldn't be able to hit anything at the gun's longer ranges. Much more practical was the heavy weapon which was given to destroyers - the torpedo, which would do as much or more damage than a 15" gun, and may have had similar accuracy when mounted on a destroyer, to what a 15"-armed destroyer would have had. I suppose with enough engineering, maybe a spinal-mount heavy cannon of some sort on a destroyer might have had intermediate range and been an interesting and perhaps feasible alternative weapon. I tend to think they'd still be held at bay by the more accurate long-range guns of larger ships.

In any case, though, WW2 destroyers were rarely able to close the range with capital ships, because they would get nailed by direct-fire before they got within torpedo range, more often than not. But sometimes they did, and the threat of them doing so was tactically important, and of course destroyers were extremely useful in all sorts of other roles.

Of course another major factor would be expense. A 15" gun was expensive to produce, much more so than a torpedo tube.

PvK