Fletcher Pratt Pt 4 (what I think is wrong with the FP Gunnery/Damage models)

The basic model of damage from gunfire is attritional. Each hit contributes a number of points of damage (which is modulated by armour penetration ..) and the loss of fire power and speed of the ship is proportional to the fractional damage (the points damage received divided by the ships points value). This is a perfectly acceptable model if that is how you want to represent accumulated damage in the game (in my opinion it is not the most suitable model for gaming but that is another story)

In addition to the attritional damage if in the measuring up in the gunnery round a shell is deemed to have fallen on a gun position (assuming the ability to penetrate the local armour) that gun position is deemed knocked out. There are at least two problems with this, the first is that this means that the conditional probability of a gun position hit is the ratio of gun house plan area to deck area of the ship which may be OK-ish at long range but will be wrong at shorter ranges. Secondly it is inconsistent with the attritional model of ship damage effectivly double counting the guns when it comes to taking damage. In addition we could ask why we do not apply the same method to machinery spaces.