25 millimeters of steel

After many, many months of work, quartersbrief has learned its next major trick: how to handle ships’ armor definitions. Ever wonder if your guns are big enough to overmatch that pesky cruiser over there? Wonder no more.

There is more than just destroyers

Quartersbrief already has many useful topics at this point, but there is a bit of a bias toward destroyer play: concealment, knife fighting, radar - these are all topics that you will be mostly interested in when zipping around in your Gearing or Shimakaze, not so much your Montana or Yamato.

As a cruiser or battleship captain, the interaction of artillery and armor is usually at the core of your game. At the very least, you usually need to know who overmatches you, and who you overmatch in return.

Catering to other classes

So, the overarching goal of the next major release is to provide you with answers to those question. This will be a quantum leap for quartersbrief’s utility when you’re playing ships other than destroyers. Learning how to read the game’s armor data is a major step toward that goal.

A lot of work still remains until armor information can be delivered to you. First, extraction and conversion of ships’ armor models needs to be incorporated into quartersbrief’s update mechanism. Then, an algorithm to process those models will need to be devised. In particular, the models extracted from the game files contain interior decks and bulkheads, which will need to be removed. Finally, the processed armor needs to be displayed in some way. Still, being able to read the game data is a major breakthrough.

New topics sighted, sir!

Once all of this is complete, you can expect to see four new topics dealing with ship armor:

1. A topic showing you what parts of your ship can be overmatched by the enemy.
2. A topic showing you who on the enemy team you overmatch, and where.
3. A topic showing you what parts of your ship are vulnerable to the enemy’s HE/SAP shells.
4. A topic showing you where your HE/SAP shells can penetrate the enemy.

Keep an eye on the downloads page for a first alpha release.