Naval Gunnery - Why do battleships miss after they get their first hit?

I can confirm this pattern from my experience in World of Warships 🥳

the Laws of the Improbability Principle state that:

Something must happen
With a large enough number of opportunities any outrageous thing is likely to happen
You can make things as likely as you want if you choose after the event
Slight changes can make highly improbable events almost certain
Events which are sufficiently similar are regarded as identical

or, as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy proves,

"If such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do, in order to make one, is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!"

G'day, Drach! Must say, I'm surprised that you only lightly touched on (one comment) sea state & didn't mention meteorological/weather effects at all, as they are quite significant variables in long-range naval gunnery.

Because both they and the target are moving?

i was under the impression that Iowa could put all 9 shells in a US football field at max range
barrel wear being not stated

Because they missed most of the time in general, so they usually missed after a hit or after a miss.

-Mind real life problems, idiot! - said granny. I never took her advice.

Just something that popped in from my memory … during infantry basic training (1965) we were told that if we came under mortar attach the safest place was in the hole made by the first round that hit. Evidently the mortar is not a weapon for accuracy.

You say the chance of hit is one in three, it is unlikely, more likely the chance one of nine/ten. Sorry

Before watching, waves, moving targets, maneuvering, rocking motion from previous firing seem like the most obvious reasons

In a previous video on rangefinders you explained how the range and bearing of a target ship were measured. Before radar, how were the course and speed of a target ship determined?

Ships roll from the recoil and the reaction from the force of waves constantly changing firing requiring acquisition to target.

Wait, World of Warships modeled something more or less correctly?

I can not handle the rambling as if we are very young and naïve in elementary school. But sounds like a good topic.

Bracket fire- either a shot is over or short and gun directors must adjust correspondingly-and anticape enemy evasion manoeuvers.

I mean just starting the video, but I bet these will come up:
-The firing ship is moving
-The target, if it is another ship, is also moving
-The sea itself isn't static but is also moving due to both prevailing currents and whatever weather conditions are present
-Both the shell itself and the propellant may have slight variations in mass, etc.
-At the ranges involved, a relatively small variation in the initial conditions due to any of the above can result in significant enough effects to be a miss, as even a large battleship is a very small target when it's that far away.
-If the first hit did damage, causing flooding, fire in the machinery, etc. that could slow the targeted ship down and so the previous firing solution would no longer be accurate.

Does it basically just come down to pure luck whoever has the luck wins whoever doesn't loses

ADM "Ching" Lee approves this video!

The final scenario is why I would miss all the time when I started playing World of Warships. I couldn’t figure out how fast the opponents were going

What a word salad video.

all due respect, and i have a lot of it to be sure, the reason why ships miss other ships is because the captains of the ships have not sacrificed something worthy enough to the sea god, who usually sees this as a slight and sends his water goblins and manticore to do all kinds of shenanigans with the trajectory. now , because on rare occasions BOTH CAPTAINS sacrifice to the sea god, then then you may have other issues to consider. one of them has to do with the number of pirates or ex-pirates on the ship. obviously this weighs in favor of one ship against another , unfortunately, pirates also tend to develop praticular issues, such as running a still onboard to augment to puny rum ration with some grog. but this is nominally overlooked by senior officers on most ships of the line, as that it provides good diversion and prevents the pirates from leaving.

I have often wondered about the repeat accuracy of the guns to return to the exact angle of fire. plus or minus how much in degrees, minutes, or seconds.

a CEP means that 50% of a given number of missiles/projectiles fall within a definable circle. obviously if you have a big CEP it means that the radius of the circle is large , say a half-mile， ,then only 50% percent of the shots fell on it and the rest are outside even that.

Both ships are constantly changing course, speed, roll and pitch, the air is constantly changing speed, direction and density, the sea is constantly moving about in all three dimensions, so actually scoring a hit beyond 2 miles distance can only be down to luck, the number of shots fired during the battle and a few educated guesses.

You are moving, they are moving, the wind is blowing, your ship is rolling with the waves, there are variations in air temperature and moisture, the temperature of your gun barrels as they get used, the bore wear, the fact that most big guns could only be reloaded with the barrels lowered to a certain angle and so the constant up-and-down resetting, false radar echoes or no radar echoes giving inaccurate shell fall (Washington reported a few occasions where it appeared visually they had over and short salvos on Kirishima, but radar gave no echo on them, which would mean if they were relying solely on radar to adjust, they wouldn't have had any data to do so). Then there is the spread of the shells---how often a 8 or 9 shell salvo can hit everywhere around a ship but not hit the ship.
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I often wonder what the outcome would have been, had the Bismark been one second sooner or one second later in firing the fateful salvo at the Hood, or if the Hood started its turn a tad sooner or delayed it a bit longer. That slight change in tilt from the waves, the angle of the Hood's hull, the dozen or so extra yards. Yet, such was fate--all those factors came together.

Don’t Yamato hit Gambier Bay with the first salvo and kept hitting?

An in person interview with a crew member of HMS Glasgow at Coronel refers to the German practice of rippling fire overwhelming the British ships. Could that have been split salvos?

Hoover, I deeply admire and respect your morals and ethics. Your dedication to this work is what keeps me coming back. Great job.

I have a question... A shell leaving the barrel is spinning rapidly, right? Therefore when it hits the target, due to the gyroscopic effect it will be at the same angle as the elevation of the gun firing it. Unlike an arrow which will always point in it's direction of motion thru the air!
This would mean that for other than a very short range shot the shell would always strike at an angle of twice the elevation angle of the gun. In the case of a shot fired at 45 degrees elevation, (do they point that high?), the shell would strike at 90 degrees, or side on!! Severely limiting it's ability to penetrate armour!
Am i correct? Is this a problem? I would appreciate it if someone could clarify this for me. Thanks.

Depends on wind and distance... However the battle ships usually fire one long and one short to find the range.. However today's fire control uses satellites and submarines and other more accurate systems...

@Both gun and target are moving.

so this is why i die in world of warships....

...do many people ask this? I have zero naval experience, just fishing off the Grand Banks but I'm amazed at hits like Warspite achieved in WW2 or the Massachusetts both double digital km away. You can be up or down 20ft from one shot to another, and having the wind do 5 different things in layers, some of which you'll cross twice, and early 20th century manufacturing and quality control too. I'm impressed by Nelsonian gunners, but 19000yards is absolutely incredible gunnery.

I had the pleasure of staying at HMS Cambridge near Plymouth in the early 80's. There was a fixed gun on rails that moved back and forth and I believe they used it to shoot at a rock in the sea. Didn't hit the rock very often. Interestingly the food was excellent and I realised I should have joined the Navy not the Army. My most vivid memory was running up and down a steep hill with a jerry can full of water on in a pack on my back and carrying a 'wounded' soldier in a fireman's lift up that steep hill.....

Drach, one thing you missed out is that your own ship will also be maneouvering to avoid the other ship getting a firing solution on you - as that really is a bad day - I recall and interview, from an old documentary many years ago, about the pursuiot and sinking of Bismark, some of the gunners from Rodney and King George V said they always set their turrets so that A turret would use the firing solution, B Turret just long and Y turret just short as this gave them a way to better range and improve hit rate. I don't rememeber the documentary name, but I know it featured Ludovic Kennedy who was a naval officer on HMS Tartar at the time.

regression to the mean

I just had an idea for a way to fool the enemy into thinking they had a fire control solution. What you want is a "fake hit" explosive that does no damage to your ship but looks from a distance like a hit. They fire with the wrong fire control solution and miss you, but you then fire off a "fake hit" explosion to fool them into keeping that incorrect solution.

This video really is one big argument for abandoning Imperial measures and embrace the metric system. Feet, yards, miles - what a mess! :-)

My gosh
Would someone please edit his comments?
He's quite knowledgeable, but "target moves" does NOT require a 3 minute explanation
In every video of his I started listening to, this ..... (see: a point need not be repeated ad nauseum)

Didn't the Japanese use colored dyed to tune their fire?

What about the effect of differences in the powder charge?

The powder charge. At that time in history, all Navies did the best they could to make the powder charges as identical as possible. But there were always some charges that were 'hotter' than others. At that time, nobody had any way to know precisely what the muzzle velocity of each fired round was. Those differences alone, could be the difference between a long or a short shot. Let's look at some figures from NavWeaps on the 16"/50 Mk 7.

When the smokeless propellants (SP) were freshly made during World War II, MV (muzzle velocity) varied no more than +/- 10 fps (3 mps) shot to shot and often no worse than +/- 5 fps (1.5 mps) shot to shot. As SP will degrade over time, a few years later during the Korean deployments MV varied about +/- 14 fps (4.3 mps) and during Vietnam about +/- 23 fps (7 mps). By the time of the 1980s deployments, shot to shot variation was about +/- 32 fps (9.8 mps). This large variation was a primary contributor to USS New Jersey's poor shooting off Lebanon in 1984. As a result, the NSWC Dahlgren facility and USS Iowa were tasked with improving performance. Old propellant lots were remixed and proved to bring the variation back within the +/- 10 fps (3 mps) requirement.

So, it states that during WWII the muzzle velocity would sometime be no worse (I'm using their best case here intentionally) +/- 5 fps (1.5 mps). It also shows the following muzzle velocity values in a table:
AP Mark 8: 2,500 fps (762 mps) (new gun)
AP Mark 8: 2,425 fps (739 mps) (average gun)
AP Mark 8: 1,800 fps (549 mps) (reduced charge)

So lets take an average gun which says it's AP Mark 8: 2,425 fps (739 mps). So, with the tolerance of +/- 5 fps (1.5 mps), that value could be 737.5 mps or 740.5 mps. But that's per second, so you have to multiply the time of the projectiles travel in there too. Let's just say it's 30 seconds(but we know long range shots can take longer than that to arrive on target) now you have a difference of 45 mps, plus or minus for 694 mps or 784 mps. That could easily be the difference in being 50 or 60 yards short or long. That by itself is enough to create a miss.

That's just one small variable. Even in the 80s, when the Iowa's installed radar on the turret tops to track the speed of the projectiles fired, that only gave you the muzzle velocity of that particular projectile. There was no way to know what the next powder charge would be. You wouldn't know until you fired it.

That's just drilling down into one small variable, and each variable has an affect on that projectile. They did the best they could with the tools they had, but when you really think about it, it's a miracle anyone ever hit anyone.

Pinned post for Q&A :)