a slight cruder variant older world war one era weapons and more modern weapons and i decided it would be unfair to group them all into one big pile because there are some truly excellent world war one era weapons or pre-NUMBER_TOKEN weapons i guess and there are also some actually relatively poor post NUMBER_TOKEN weapons but simply because of the technological change that's involved some really good weapons could get overlooked if you are looking at say the pre-NUMBER_TOKEN stuff and some of the not so good weapons of the post NUMBER_TOKEN era might end up coming out looking a little bit more positive than they actually realistically were so once you've done that split i initially decided to characterize each gun by the following its average rate of fire now this would not be the maximum rate of fire this would be whatever the various documents said was the expected rate of fire or if there was a range of expected rates of fire then i went for a figure in the middle of all of that now why include rate of fire when the typical rate of fire in any engagement regardless of how fast the guns could theoretically shoot was about around a minute well yes that is the reality of most naval warfare however once you get into the end game stages of a particular naval combat with battleship guns that's when rate of fire actually becomes quite important so for getting in those killing blows once you've established the range it's very important if you manage to get a drop on someone and ambush them like say washington versus kirishima rate of fire is very important to make sure you hit them hard and make sure they stay down and also the overall rate of fire much like the range that we discussed earlier can have interesting secondary effects because yes you might have a rate of fire that's much higher than one round per minute you might have a rate of fire that's only barely approaching around per minute but when you're trying to sustain a rate of fire of about around per minute which i said is average in the typical battleship engagement if you are comfortably within your capabilities to do that then you're going to have a relatively simple time of it whereas if you are just about scraping within your capabilities to keep that rate far up the chance of something going wrong are actually a lot higher so rate of fire definitely is in then you have the weight of shell now the weight of the shell again is somewhat important because at the end of the day that shell is going to land aboard it's going to carry a certain amount of kinetic energy and a heavier shell is going to have more kinetic energy and more momentum traveling at the same speed than a lighter shell also a heavier shell will retain its energy better throughout its entire flight regimen so it's going to end up at longer ranges with a bit more hitting power which is obviously a good thing and the sheer mass of the shell is going to be reflected in just how many fragments of it are going to go sliding around inside the target vessel if it manages to hit and then detonate a relatively light shell can only send out so much metal a heavier shell assuming it's got decent bursting charge can send out a lot more metal and thus do a lot more damage so that's why weight of shell is in there range has to be in there we've already gone over range as a prior example so i won't say too much more about that but suffice to say you know whether or not you can hit a target at a given range
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