Existential Trauma And Little Bits Of History Repeating - Let's Play Azur Lane!

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Existential Trauma and Little Bits Of History Repeating – Let’s Play Azur Lane!

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Okay, Jay, What Is Azur Lane?


Azur Lane is a mobile… Not quite idle game? But definitely a Free to Play one with…

Microtransactions? Argh, We Out!

Understandable, although it’s curve is pretty friendly until waaaay late into the game, and even then, you can treat it as a marathon, not a sprint.

Helps that there’s only a limited amount of shit you can buy with gems more than once. So unless you seriously give a shit about wedding every single shipgirl, it’s not too bad.

Image And if you do care about marrying some 400+ unique girls, including the Mutsuki-class, someone with a large hammer and a scowl’s gonna have words

(That would be Salted Grump, represented by a chibi image of Roon, who will be adding Sass and Co-Commentary)

But yes, if you’re microtransaction vulnerable, stay away, it has them, it has gacha (random drops of ships and loot, although, again, we’ll get into why it’s friendlier than the usual), and it has events which would make a completionist’s teeth ache (it sure as hell has mine, and on this account, it will do once again.)

Image By Friendlier, he means that Construction has a flat 7% chance of the highest rarity. Compare to, say, Fate: Grand Order with its highest rarity pool being 0.7% Proc chance, and the pool has items instead of usable characters in it.

Anyway, to continue…

Azur Lane?

Yes, a mobile game about the struggles of Kansen (shipgirls), imbued with the power of WW2 era ships (Y’know, destroyers, cruisers, battleships, etcetera), fighting against an alien (?) menace, and also, especially at the beginning, and quite often, each other.

Oh, and they have the memories of those warships as if they were people. Told you there was existential horror here (and indeed, more hidden in the event storylines.)

Also recent events that come to mind include testing Idol Singing as weaponry, so… It’s not all misery and drama.

And so, you send various ships you collect through this wringer, in order to win battles, to unlock more story, more ships, cool things… The story is surprisingly deep (and, indeed, makes reference to battles of World War 2, when it’s not going full shounen sci-fi), but the day to day of it is not.

Image Cute Battleship Girls Doing Cute Battleship Things

Except PvP. Oh, we’ll get to you, mate… We’ll fucking get to you

Okay, So You’re A Masochist. How Are You Going To Show Us This Journey?

I’m so glad you asked, imaginary thread reader! Updates will be pretty varied, with story segments in screenshot form, battle segments in video form (They take, at most, 40 minutes. We’re good), some other video when necessary, and updates dealing with mechanics and the various shipgirls (I may or may not end up getting some assistance from Salted Grump here, because dang, there’s a feller who appreciates the history involved.)

Image Sass interjection from the Grump: Damn Fucking Right.

It’s gonna be a rather big thread and, as time goes on, I may switch to my main server, because by the time we’ve gotten to the grindy bits, I’ll have hopefully gotten through the fuckers. As it is, I’ve got some ships reaching the current level cap of 120, and since this was written in April of 2020, I may well have more (Yes, I’ve been planning this for a while. Insert edit)

Okay, But This Is A Mobile Game, How’re You Gonna Record This?

Ah, now this is where it gets both interesting… And annoying. See, the phone I’ve got has a “You can use your phone on your computer” app… But Azur Lane doesn’t have support for, say, keyboard control on said app. So playing it can best be described as “A fucking nightmare”, unless it’s on autopilot.

Image Sass interjection: I told him about Bluestacks. It’s much better on the front of ‘playing the game on PC…

Koff. Er, yes, the game is actually recorded on Bluestacks. It requires virtualisation supported and turned on (most modern CPUs can handle this), but it runs mostly smoothly (smoother than DeX for scrolling, for sure), and has keyboard control support. Although the default, bafflingly, doesn’t account for the “Call Submarine” button. At the time of inserting this paragraph (Day 15 of the run), I have yet to edit this properly.

The game is, thankfully, friendly enough to warn you “Oh hey, if you play on autopilot, your shipgirls are going to faceplant into torpedos.”

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Pictured: What happens when you autobattle, as demonstrated by noted klutz Glowworm.

So there will be faceplanting into torpedoes (Less. But believe me, torpedo faceplanting still happens.) And trust me, I’m wincing along with you. Less so later, when even normal enemies have some aspect of bullet hell to them… But playing on manual comes highly recommended, except for missions where the level of the enemies is lower than the level of your ships by at least 10 levels.

WARNING!

Obviously, the ships are girls. Some are women. Many are girls. Don’t be a creep. Lest Grump pull out some of the nastier stories from the history, rather than summaries. Y’know, like a ship being torn in half and went down with only 3 survivors. Out of 1,418.

Image That would be HMS Hood, By the way. Pride of the British navy, overdue for a full refit, took a 15” shell through her main armour belt and went up like a roman candle made of explosions and gore.

Anyway, here’s the first trailer (Flashing imagery warning), and the first game OP that I’m aware of (With a tune we will be hearing again, and soon.)

CHAPTERS

DAY THE FIRST – OH BOY, TUTORIALS (Tutorial, 1-1 to 2-1, Exercises)
SIDE UPDATE: A Handy Dandy Guide To Your Base
SHIP UPDATE: Day 1
DAY THE SECOND: THE CORAL SEA (2-2 to 3-1, Hard 1-2)
SHIP UPDATE: Day 2
DAY THE THIRD: THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
SHIP UPDATE: Day 3
DAY THE FOURTH: THE DEATH OF YORKTOWN
SHIP UPDATE: Day 4 (Plus SALT BONUS)
EVENT: CRIMSON ECHOES
SHIP UPDATE: Crimson Echoes
SIDE UPDATE: The Fun And Frolics Of Challenge Mode!
CHARACTER STORIES: Long Island, Warspite, and Portland
DAYS THE FIFTH AND SIXTH - Solomon's Nightmare, Part 1
SIDE UPDATE: The Daily Grind
SHIP UPDATE: Days 5 and 6... Part 1
SHIP UPDATE: Days 5 and 6, The Part Where I Find Out It Was Just 12 Girls, Not 14
SIDE UPDATE: Meowfficers, or Hands you a catte

GRUMP EXPANDS ON THINGS

Aoba the utter asshole
Warspite's Badass Early Days
Warspite's Still Badass, To The End, Latter Days
The Life And Times Of Chicago
Prinz Eugen Part 1: The Battle of Denmark Strait
Prinz Eugen Part 2: Shot in the Ass, Still Victorious, Nuked Twice, and That's What It Took For Her To Show Her Entire Ass
Mogami's Godawful Luck
How Illustrious Got Her Curves (The Illustrious Blitz)
Tartu and Conte Di Cavour, Two Ships Done Wrong
Penn's Kill-Board Doesn't Need Any Expanding
Solomon's Nightmare Part 1
Solomon's Nightmare Part 2
Solomon's Nightmare Part 3
Solomon's Nightmare Part 4

TWYBIL'S FASHION COMMENTARY

Mogami - That Cuirass is Gonna Hurt.
The Impracticality of Illustrious
Tartu's Top and Conte Di Cavour's Legs Do Not Make The Grade

FAN ART
Gordon Threemen wrote:Image
Hurrock wrote:
Thu Sep 24, 2020 5:54 pm
I made some fanart for an upcoming event!
It's because JamieTheD lost the footage and I wanted to help fill in the gaps in the narrative.

Spoiler for the Dreamwaker's Butterfly event.
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(I may or may not have lost the footage for that. It will be a mystery until we get there.)

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DAY THE FIRST – OH BOY, TUTORIALS (Tutorial, 1-1 to 2-1, Exercises)

Azur Lane has one of the friendlier tutorials, although a forced one. It teaches you concepts at a good pace, starts with a battle (The Battle of Denmark Strait. Which we’ll get to), and your first actual battles in 1-1. After that, it lets you go and do your own thing…

And the first thing that happens, due to nothing more than lucky timing is… The HMS Hood. Welp. Still, the Hood’s a damn fine start, as are our first (random) builds. We’ll get to that in a side update, in which we talk about the shipgirls of each day, but suffice to say, we got a good start right out of the gate. The starter is good no matter who you pick out of the Big Three (Plus One, but again, we’ll get to that) of Laffey, Javelin, or Z23, and, as you can see in the video, your early game is very friendly indeed.

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VIDEO: Day 1, Part 1


So long as you stick to manual play, the odds are pretty high you won’t get an A rank until 2-4 at the earliest. Although this will, eventually, change. I found a big sticking point in the 5th and 6th chapters, but you won’t be hitting big brick walls until about chapters 8 and 9. Out of 13. The game’s difficulty curve is pretty friendly.

Image The Difficulty Curve goes from ‘Friendly’ to ‘Fuck you and the Horse you rode in on’ at World 10, when enemy fleets start aiming for your flagship with HE ammo and average level 100-105. Don’t get me started on World 13 and it having a Great Marianas Turkey Shoot with you as the Turkey.

This, Grump, is because you’re what we call “Fucking good at the game.” For the average player, it’ll be world 8 or thereabouts. And they begin sending big bomb ships earlier. 😛

Although, agreed, Level 120 vs Level 120 is evil. But it’ll be at least 6-8 months before you get there.

Image Took me over a year, but I’ve been playing since EN beta release in August 2018

And, even better, we had a second stroke of good luck! You see, the very first event we had on the account? Was also one of the earliest, Crimson Echoes!

Image behind Visitors Dyed in Red, Fallen Wings, and a passel of others

We’ll be showing that off in a side update, along with its followup, Visitors Dyed In Red, which is an archived event. Also archived, although probably shown later, are Fallen Wings, and Encircling Graf Spee.

So, before we continue, I’d like to reiterate something from the tutorial video: You do not need full loadout for a while yet. Don’t bother with T1 and T2 techboxes, just wait to craft them into T3s. And by the time you’ve hit 6-4? Even those will essentially be a free source of money. Aaaand this is advice I completely forget Day 1, only remembering later… (FUTURE ME AT 6-3: Iiiii really need to tidy up…)

So, because the early game is pretty easy, we get to 1-4 pretty easily. It should be noted at this point that experienced players will be screaming at me, because I am a stingy git when it comes to fuel. I had bad experiences around 5-4 on my main, so I hate letting it drop below 3k when I’ve got enough fuel. Not least because there’s a valuable as hell Commission (we’ll get to those) that gives loads of XP, and a very respectable amount of coins.

It should also be noted that, after a while, we won’t be showing commissions, and a lot of the busywork. This tutorial will show the most of the busywork, with a couple of exceptions when new busywork comes along. It is mostly, however, useful busywork. And Day 2, we’ll sum it up.

And a lot of ships get built. Hooo boy, you start with the money, you start with the cubes, you start with the Quick Finishers… You can get a lot of ships early, with a little luck, and, for future reference, be happy if you get elites and above. They’re going to be your heavy hitters, either through raw firepower… Or powerful special abilities. This isn’t to say the common ships are slouches… But they’re not going to be your primary murderbotes.

There is a tradeoff, however, although you won’t feel it in the early game: The higher the rarity, the more fuel it’s going to cost. So going with all golds in your fleets is a really good way to be out of fuel every day.

Image Ask me about my fleet of Gold-tier USN Battleships and Heavy cruisers. Ask me how I can stomach the 80 oil cost per fight.

For now, though, you unlock auto-combat at 1-3, and Commissions at 1-4, and by this point, you’ll have also gotten your second fleet. Commissions… Well, unless you’ve been lucky, you don’t need to worry about filling all your commission slots (2 to start with, but it gets better) for a short while yet. And you definitely don’t need to worry about running out of fuel or money unless you build even more than I did. Shit’s nice and easy for 1-1 to 1-4.

A final note before the next half of the day: Every day, there is a mission for your daily challenges, except Sunday, when it’s all of them (less the Submarine Missions, which we’ll get to.) Losing them doesn’t lose you one of your three tries at it a day, but it does cost fuel… A frankly tiny amount that you won’t miss (10% of your fleet’s actual fuel cost.)

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VIDEO: Day 1, Part 2


And today’s challenge was one of the two Daily Challenges I like to call… The Helldailies. Specifically, Advance Mission (Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday), aka “I hope you like Bombships!” Because oh boy, the mission is basically either expertly shooting down bombships that come at you in waves, letting some impact your Main Fleet, but not enough to kill them, deliberately faceplanting your Vanguard into bombships so they *don’t* hit the Mains (because you were shooting another bombship.) Most likely, you’ll be doing a combination of the above. If your Vanguard or Main get annihilated, you lose. Survive for 90 seconds, and you get one of the few reliable sources of skillbooks, and money. You’ll need both. Thankfully

I mentioned how we’d get to Exercises. Despite your first day nearly always being discouraging: Stick at it. Pick 2 a day out of (in UTC, anyway) 8AM, 8PM, and 2AM, and you will have 1 time you get 5 exercises, and, after the first day, another time you’ll get 10 (the maximum.) So… Yes, this is my first day on the new server (and, in older servers like Avrora, you will get your shit pushed in for a while.)

Stick with it. You’ll be getting free experience, and it doesn’t cost morale.

Image Also, merit points can be traded in for two unique girls and a steady accumulation of puddings that say ‘Buli’

(Oh god, Bullins and Purins…)

VIDEO: First Exercises (Uncommented)

Now, things still happen in between updates. One of these was that I got Downes (I may have gotten Comet in update, my memory’s spotty about Day 1 at the time of writing)

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The other was forming a guild. Costs 300 gems to do so, and, sorry folks, it’s already full, but… It was made. And so a saga of hitting things with big sticks, and not being a bigot was born.
 

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Finally someone else joins me in the gacha mines.

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Blarg. Sorry, folks, converting things from WordPress blocks to forum posts is a git, so this might take a while to update to the current day. Plus, there are edits to the shipgirl stuff that's gotta be made before that. Anyway, feel free to discuss the first post while I'm doing that in between everything else.

And yes, Ibble, I'm in the mines with you. But good news, at the present time, I'm almost out of the Dread Fox Mines...
 

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SIDE UPDATE 1: A Handy-Dandy (Brief) Guide To Your Base!

Let’s talk in this texty update about various features, and how, in the early game, you’re going to be using them.

DOCK 

This is your meat and potatoes, where your shipgirls go, where you add their gear, where you limit break, retrofit, and enhance them (FEED THEM TO WARSPITE, MUAHAHAHAHAAA!)

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Image Don’t, actually. Feed her other battleships and destroyers. Give the Cruisers and CVs to everyone else

It’s also where you can adjust things like skins, and tap them to read their in-base lines.

Image Or find their profile in archives and find all the lines you’ve unlocked, including when they’re mad at you.

(We’ll talk about when they’re mad at you later on.)

DEPOT: 

Ah yes, the Depot. Split into three areas, the main portion is your Gear stash, where you can see what gear you have left (or, if you’re curious about who’s got what without getting into the Dock screen, you can see all the gear. This is highly inadvisable, especially in the late game.)

Image Your Average girl kitted out for a fight has 5 gear slots. With A current tally of 443 unique girls, (368, not counting retrofits) that shit adds up

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Case in point!You can even enhance it from here, which is pretty useful for the weeklies.

Next up is the Items slot, where all your cubes (for building shipgirls), your plates (for upgrading weapons), your books (for upgrading skills), your food (for the dorm), your blueprints (for retrofitting shipgirls, a different type of upgrade), and your tech boxes (Wheee, item lootboxes!) come in.Important note here: You do not need a full set of gear at first. Those T1 techboxes can be crafted into T2s, at a rate of 5:1, same with the T2 techboxes… T3 and above, alas, can’t be crafted, but, in any case, you mostly don’t care about 1 star items in the warehouse, and you craft anything below a T2 as soon as you can. The skill books can also be upgraded, also only T1 to T2, at a ratio of 6:1, but… It’ll take a while before you can do that.


 Image Never open T1 or T2 boxes. They’re all trash. Get your girls kitted out in purple-tier gear and you’ll be happy as a fucking clam until World 11

 As a final note here, I’m really glad this doesn’t take up space, because you will, trust me, be flooded with T1 plates. Especially torpedo plates. Can’t move for the damn things, and you’ll find yourself using them less the further you go.

Image Until you start getting Gold and rainbow-tier torpedo launchers, and even then the investment isn’t that heavy.

Finally, there’s crafting. Various blueprints can be obtained in levels, and through challenges and commissions, and you can even grind them out, if you know where they are. But, by the time they become truly important, you will be drip-fed some pretty nice ones. Although it’s still a fairly good idea to grind utility blueprints, because those seem to be the rarest sort of item.

 Image There’s also ship class blueprints, but those are for retrofitting and giving Jamie aneurysms when he realizes that Warspite and San Diego need unique items to complete their Retros to make them GODS OF THE SEAS

 …Wait, Warspite too? FFFFFFFFFF-

 Image She sails around smacking manjuu out of life preservers for their coins so she can get a new sword. For a week. ‘Drive me Closer, I want to hit them with my sword’ is the name of the game for her.

DORM


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An example of an early game dorm. Some furniture’s been bought, but not a whole lot, and the place hasn’t expanded much.DORM: 
Another way of levelling your shipgirls besides exercises, commissions, and battles. And it’s a pretty reasonable one. Put in food, buy decorations with decoration points to improve the place for better levelling (it tails off after a certain point, and beyond it, you’re mainly buying stuff for a pretty medal), and you get levels out. At first, you’ll be using this and commissions to get as many shipgirls possible to Level 10, their first upgrade slot. After a while, commissions alone will do most of the work there, and you aim for bigger and bigger levels.

 Image It’s a quick way to get some levels into a newbie so you can feed them into the grinder without much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

 CATTERY: 

We’ll talk about this later, because you don’t get it until later. Suffice to say, cattes.

ImageSee this cat? This cat, in particular, is a badass.

Image There’s historical References in there, too. Best catte is Oskar, Aka. Unsinkable Sam, who Survived the Bismarck, HMS Cossack, and HMS Ark Royal all getting shot out from under him. He then spent the rest of the war being smug in Gibraltar because nothing’s sinking that Rock. In AL, Oskar is a smol Bismarck in every way. The artist of the SR-tier cats, Muuran, is infamous for making images of weaponized adorable.

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ACADEMY

This is a multi-tiered area. It’s an easy way to get to the Dorm, Cattery, and Shop, but mainly, you’re here for upgrading oil and coin collection at the right levels, upgrading your School (More on that later, because, again, it doesn’t come up until later), keeping an eye on your skill upgrades, and watching some of your shipgirls wander about. If you’re lucky, and you still have them in your dock, you’ll see the fabled Bulin and Purin. Who get around in some rather unique ways. Moving on…

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A fine example of a formation. Is it a good formation? Maaaaaybe.

FORMATION:

The tutorial teaches you this already, but this, friends, is where you form your fleets. At first, you’ll only have one, then quickly get two, your first submarine fleet somewhere around day 3 or 4, and eventually, you’ll have 6 ship fleets to play with, 2 submarine fleets… And you’ll be playing with one to four, for various reasons. But, for the early game, you’ll definitely be playing with the first and second.

 Image Also, we don’t talk about what the Subs wear. Especially not the American ones. I know every artist draws smut, but Good God.

You’ll notice there’s a back (Main) line, and a Vanguard (Front) line. The Main are where your artillery and aerial attacks are going to come from, while your Vanguard are going to be the ones who move around, dodging torpedoes and the like. This doesn’t mean they don’t get attacked, they demonstrably do (we’ll talk about threats later), but they, overall, tend to get attacked less than the frontliners.

Image For those that might have read about ‘Cannon’s Elegy’, the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, some people might argue that the venerable battlecruiser should be a frontliner because of how many torpedoes the old girl dodged in her last action. You’ll get no argument from me here

The story in question can be found here (Google Doc Link)

SHOP: 

Ah, the shop. This, friends, is where the microtransaction vulnerable can get pulled in, because of course, there’s a paid currency (It’s a Free To Play game), which gets you packs, costumes, and other things… You’re fed quite a few gems in the early game, and we’ll be talking about what, optimally, you’re going to be doing with them, but costumes are bought here, occasionally shop items…

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Image Optimally, you’ll be increasing dock slots and flipping off anyone that says ‘get oil with gems’ because they’re shitwits

 And yet, if you take it slow, the game is pretty enjoyable to play slowly, and I will note right now that if you’re a skin-shamer, someone who picks on people for not having paid for skins… Fuck you, you are trash, fuck off.

 Image Some skins are absolute Eyecatchers, like Prinz Eugen’s Bikini, but that’s for thirst golems

 Okay, PSA done, let’s talk about the main shop. The main shop usually comes in three flavours, two of which you unlock relatively early. The coin shop’s the easiest, and, if you keep a sharp eye out, is a good source of lovely vittles for your shipgirls. It’s also, in the early game, a good source of T1 and T2 packs to round you up to those 5s you want (or outright buy 5s), and occasionally offers sweet items.

 Image Late-game, keep an eye out for the occasional high-tier food being sold there; a pack of ten Full-course meals is worth the 20,000 coins, because it’s a 20% Exp buff to girls in the dorm

(For almost the time it takes until the meal runs out, too.)

The Merit shop is where you spend the points you get from Exercises. And, if you’re playing your cards right, you won’t be spending any cash in here for a long time. Why?

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The USS South Dakota and USS Eldridge. That’s why. On the one hand, that’s a silly amount of points, compared to everything else, but they are very much worth it, and, as we’ll be demonstrating by the beginning of Day 3, you’ll be able to rack up those points moderately quickly. Once you’ve got them once, relax, now you can spend ‘em on Purin and Bulin, for the most part. The Purin can level up SoDak and Eldridge without you needing to spend silly merit-money, and, for reasons we’ll go into, you’re in no major hurry.

 Image Yes, 40K points for both of them is expensive. No, there’s no other way to get them. Yes, they’re both stupidly good.

Finally… The Core shop. Data Cores are gotten in Hard Mode (occasionally in events), and, again, you’re first going to want to go for the high value shipgirls, because, with only a few exceptions, this is the area you want to get them. After that? Well, the choice is free, but I’d highly recommend waiting for the Pure Oxy Torpedos. Your subgirls are going to come in useful, and the Pure Oxy torpedo isn’t a torp. It’s an accessory to make your torpedoes extra shitkicky.

 Image Apply two Rainbow Dildos to any torpedo-happy ship, watch her torp stat and reload spike, giggle as you find yourself deploying tactical nuclear warheads

So it’s pretty nice.

Event shops, when they pop up, spend event currency. Again, you’re generally going for ships first, and for many events, you don’t need to worry about whether you can get everything in the shop. Unless it’s a battle centric event, odds are high you will just get them all.

BATTLE: 

This, funnily enough, is where you pick fights, move on in story, and multiple other objectives. We’ll be dealing with each in their own segments, but this main one is essentially for dealing with Story Mode.

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Advice at first? Like I said, relax, you don’t need full kit at this stage, and, while automatic battles are unlocked as early as 1-3 (just to make sure you’ve got the hang of manual control), I would still recommend playing manually overall, as it helps with level disparity. Why?

 Image Insert screenshot of the Auto-battle warning here. Glowworm about to eat a torp is the perfect image

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This. It’s not joking, when you’re playing on automatic, there are more torpedo facepalms. So many torpedo facepalms. And considering that, if you don’t grind (you will be grinding sooner or later), you’ll have enemies up to 4 to 8 levels above you by 3-4? You don’t want that, because enemies higher level than you not only do more damage due to their levels, they do extra damage, simply because they’re higher levelled. It hurts.

 Image Sekrit Mechanics talk: For every level in disparity, the higher-leveled one gets 2% more damage dealt, and 2% less damage taken, to a cap of 50% at a 25-level difference

 But then, for the early midgame, so long as you do a bit of grinding, and at least try events, you’ll be able to play on auto more.

EVENT BATTLE:

Usually an icon in the top right when it’s available, these are basically extra maps, usually coming in 6 map + 1 SP flavours, or 3 map mini-flavours. Doing these helps level up your ships, get nice rewards… It comes recommended.

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Image Event Battles also have STORY to them, letting you poke at the madness that is the multiple timelines and WTFery of wrangling Sirens. There’s a lot of WTF.

WAR ARCHIVES: 

Memories holds some of the event maps. Right now, there’s Visitors Dyed In Red and Fallen Wings in the SP (6 Map) flavour, and Encircling the Graf Spee in EX (3 map) flavour. Collecting the Declassification Keys (2 a day) will help you get ready to play these, and they’re a good, early source of shipgirls you’ll have trouble getting elsewhere. Although, sadly, they don’t get you the event shop girls, just the battle event girls. It’s okay, most of them are available elsewhere.

 Image And If you’re lucky, VDiR will gift you with a fresh, chirpy Zuikaku, and you’ll be laughing like a bloodthirsty maniac for days.

DAILIES:

Dailies, as the name would imply, are events that happen once a day… Well, mostly. Submarine attacks are weekly (2 a week), and I suspect this is to give newbies time to get to 3-4, unlock at least one subgirl, and get stuck in there. Otherwise, events run on specific days, except for Sunday, when they’re all available. And this is a nice, easy source of both experience, and victory rewards. In fact, on Sunday, you can get the Victory daily rewards just by doing this.

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 Image Also Cash. Holy Fuck, you want to hit the Commander level 80 to unlock the top cash rewards in those because they’ll let you get at least one ten-build a day in an event (15K sounds like a lot until it all goes down the tubes trying to get your hands on Amagi, or Bismarck, or So many Others with low proc rates

(AKAAAAAGGIIIII!!!!)

 Image Akagi is drop-only in 3-4. Amagi is her dead older sister that you get in the Crimson Echoes Event, and one of only two gold-tier Battlecruisers
 (Akagi and Kaga are also the few examples where we know the drop rate. 0.7% Fuck.)

 Image Boss-only drop, 0.75% drop rate, and they both drop from the same boss. Fox Mines are Real, and hate you.

(I will laugh so hard if I get one of them, first try. If I get both of them, I’ll be smug about it for the entire damn LP)They have increasing level options as you go up in Commander Level, and, with most of them, manual comes highly recommended. 

The one exception to the daily rule is the Tactical Training, which unlocks at Level 60. It runs every day, and if you don’t have a fleet specifically built to handle it, you’re going to be in big trouble. It comes in three flavours: Torpedo, Aerial, and Artillery. It’s a smallish fleet of high level ships, and a single, hefty boss lady with bundles of HP. Only those attacks do anything of note. Of the three, Torpedo is technically the easiest, as with a good homing torpedo set, torpedo centric cat commanders (CATTE), and torpedo bombers on an all carrier Main-line, you can put out boodles of damage.

 Image Or Just go to manual, have Ayanami Retrofit, and let her cuddle the Yuubari with a twin volley of Rainbow Dildos

 Aerial and Artillery follow pretty closely, however, as this is basically “Push that aerial button/aim that artillery, Vanguard must live.” You can, at the requisite level, pretty much do this on automatic, with good gear.

 Image Or Bad gear, though you tend to lose out on the big reward due to it being time-locked

COMMISSIONS: 

Got shipgirls that need levelling up? Got at least one shipgirl of the right level and type? Commissions are a nice easy way of levelling them up, coming in two flavours: The ones that don’t run out until you use them, and the Urgent ones, which do run out if you don’t use them. Each gives you XP and some sort of resource, and has six slots to put shipgirls in. Of note is that high level shipgirls don’t always register with the commission autofill as fitting criteria (so you have to put them in manually), and it favours girls who already have levels, ignoring Level 1s after early on (so you have to put those in manually, either before or after an auto-recommend, which fills up the remaining slots.)

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Wait for the timer to run out, bam, you have the rewards, and your gals get the XP. The basic dailies, with one exception, don’t give all that much XP, ever, but it’s always enough to give a Level 1 shipgirl a head-start. The two exceptions are the 4500+ gold reward one with the long-ass timer, and the Urgent missions, which will usually have long timers, but always provide more XP and bigger rewards. Both are worth budgeting for, as the 4500+ gold commission takes a large chunk of your oil, and the Urgents nearly always take some oil, although rarely, if ever, enough to hurt your oil budget.

 Image Keep an Eye on Urgent Commissions. Bath Ironworks/BIW occasionally drops one on you that lets you have a chance of getting free gems.

 Suggestions? Prioritise cubes (only a chance of dropping, but a chance worth taking)

 Image ALWAYS GO FOR CUBES

 …Then oil, then money (thankfully, many commissions provide both.) If you see an Urgent with a shipgirl on offer, or gems (this only happens at higher levels), take the chance. It’s a low, low chance, but the rewards are nice, and if it happens, yay, shipgirl or gems!

Image  I have only gotten three blue-tier and 6 grey-tier girls from the launching ceremonies, but they give nice money and exp anyhow

Finally... See that Defense Exercise? It is simultaneously a boon, and a frustration. The money’s really good. But christ, there’s going to be periods you cannot use it without taking shipgirls from your main formation.

EXERCISES: 

Ohhhh, Exercises. You will get your shit pushed in. You will, at the very beginning, have trouble getting your 3 exercises daily reward. You will, at the beginning at least, have trouble getting the 30 Exercises weekly. And you will groan at all the torpedo whiffs and faceplants, the absolute waaaaves of bombs and artillery and assorted fun bullshit (often with gear skins, so you have the shame of your battleships being bombed by balloons, for example.) For the first day, you will groan. But stick with it, for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s a 15/day source of XP, and so long as you’re around for one of its refreshes, you’ll have a nice bundle of exercises for the next part of your day.Secondly, it doesn’t count toward morale hits from battles. And rightly so, you’d start some days with some very miserable ships indeed if it did.Put your highest level ships in here, only worrying about skill and gear synergy when you’re high level. You will at least get by pretty quickly. And you’ll be getting your dailies relatively quickly.

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Two of these players can and will push my shit in. And one of them might if they’re being sneaky about a ship’s point values.Well, sort of. See, the higher in the ranks you get, the bigger the players you’re likely to face. And those fleet points? Ahahaha they lie. Click on them. Check them before you battle. Because sometimes, you’ll say “Oh, a 3000 value either side fleet? I can take th- WHOAH, NELLIE!!!"

That’s right… It’s just two ships. But it’s 2 ships at max level. At least one of them will be married, for more stat boosts and higher morale. And they will ruin you.

 Image Incorrect. If you find a Level 120 warspite with only 3,000 Value, that player’s stripped her of equipment, so she only has her raw stats to bludgeon you with. You’re still looking at a better than 50% chance of getting your ass kicked so hard you’ll be wearing it as a hat, but at least you only have to worry about 500 Firepower and not 750+ for that damage roll.

(Counterpoint: Often they use Laffey as the Vanguard. Good luck hitting her with anything, including divebombers.)

 Image Counter-counterpoint. A Fucksight better than Yukikaze the ‘25% chance to only take 1 damage on a hit’, Jintsuu the ‘let me buff your torpedoes’, and Ayanami the ‘I get a 60% buff to torpedo attack, and my player gave me the German Homing Torpedoes. Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye’

 (Overall, check both the power and what you’re actually facing.)

There is some other stuff, but some of it, like mail or the chat, is self explanatory, some of it we don’t need to deal with on day 1 (unless you’re lucky, and the videos show that), and some of it, you won’t have to deal with at all, unless you engage with it.
 
 
 

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SHIP UPDATE: Day 1

Oh boy… Thank you very much, Grump, for talking about these ships. I’ll try to keep them to a reasonable level, so we don’t overwhelm either you or our readers.

Image  I’ll be nice. Once. Mostly I’m just extending a middle finger to Shigetaka Kurita for this section because of his claim that ‘one may cry while playing Kantai Collection, but never in Azur Lane

 Oh god yeah, we’ll get to that with the first two Events

Image  Amagi. Nuff’ Said.

 Our starter team seems like a good start, and after that… We’ll see. First up… Our chosen starter. There are three (one of which, Z23 is switched in Korea/Japan with the fourth we in the US/UK regions will unlock, Ayanami), and we’ll be dealing with the others as we get them. But for now, the sleepy drunken murderbunny, Laffey.

 Oooh, good time to mention Slow Ahead, a 4koma about the daily lives of the shipgirls. It’s fun stuff, and you can read it here

Image  Slow Ahead is getting an Anime adaptation, too; from Yostar Pictures, which was created after Bilbury Animation Fucked the Dog on making the Azur Lane Anime

 Ve do not talk about zer anime…

Image  Unless very drunk and wanting to laugh at stupid design decisions, like HMS Sheffield going commando.

Important note, we will not be dealing with every single ship we built at the time we built or got them. Because, on Day 1 especially, you build and get a lot of ships. Well, unless you’re unlucky.

FLEET 1

LAFFEY

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Laffey’s been through some shit, historically speaking, and now’s as good a time as any to go into how shipgirls have the memories of the ships in our history, translated into a sort of human form. Narcoleptic, a boozehound…

Image  She makes her own Torpedo Juice. Lucky she hasn’t gone blind

 …And god-damn, can she throw out a silly amount of torpedoes and gunfire if you let her. She’s a speedy ship, which is why you’ll often see single Laffeys in PvP with a backliner (usually Hood or Enterprise.) She dances around artillery fire, torpedoes… Even a fair amount of gunfire. She’s a fuck to hit.

Image  You will. I get the mean PvP groups due to being on Avrora

 And you can make that work for you. Pretty easily, as it turns out. Don’t put slow ships with her, instead torpedo boats and quick reloaders, and she will fuck shit up. It helps that her skills are, on top of the usual All Out Assault (a special barrage every 15 (10 for the second tier) times the main gun is fired), a starter skill that allows her a 5% chance every time she fires her main gun to speed up her reload and heighten her evasion by, at its lowest level, 20% (40% at its highest)

 And when you retrofit her? Prepare to see a metric fuckton of bullets, because she has a 40-70% chance (minimum level to max) of not only increasing her reload speed by 200%…

Image  Giving her a total of 300% base reload speed, referencing her 3 surviving guns in her last stand

 …but of firing a rapid burst of torpedoes. Every 20 seconds. She’s terrifying when she’s levelled up.

Image  Laffey’s short and violent life ended at Ironbottom Sound between Guadalcanal and Savo Island, when, at 1 AM, her squad of destroyers and cruisers almost-literally bumped into an IJN task force assigned to do a ‘boom and zoom’ on Henderson Airfield.

 She ended up nearly getting rammed by the Battleship Hiei, proceeded to rake the battleship’s bridge and upper works with every working gun she had, then took a 14” shell to the face, a torpedo to the fantail, and her boilers exploded as she sank, killing most of her crew.

FORTUNE

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It’s of little surprise that I forgot Fortune’s character when I was drafting this, because her character is “shy.” She’s a little religious, but mostly… She’s a stammering, shy woman, who even umms and ahhs when she’s telling her opponents she’s going to crush them with her special skill… Bless.

 Image Her Retrofit doubles up on the ‘Angel’ Motif, while her sister, Foxhound, gets the ‘Devil’ attitude.

 Skillwise, Fortune’s all about damage reduction and evasion. Every 20 seconds, she has between a 15-30% chance to avoid all incoming damage for 6 seconds, and, post retrofit, she reduces damage to the main fleet by 5-15% as long as she’s alive (Note, this doesn’t stack with any other ship with the same skill, a rule that holds true for all buff or debuff skills that don’t directly affect the ship itself)

Image  Finding loopholes for stacking buffs is part of the fun

Image  British Destroyer, got given to the Canadians and renamed, spent most of her time dropping explosive barrels on U-boats and keeping Convoys safe.

KENT

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Kent, characterwise, is a jock. She plays hard, she cheers hard, she does athletics, and she sends you your mail by throwing paper planes at you (alas, not shown.) One of her lines, funnily enough, refers to a historical misadventure, where Tiggy the Tiger was brought aboard the Kent in 1930 for transportation to an English zoo… And arrived in 1936.

 Skillwise, she’s got a solid basic buff (25% chance every 20 seconds to increase all the fleet’s damage by 5-25%), and an okay barrage, but… She ends up falling behind in the mid to late game, simply because, as Grump notes below, she can dish it out… But she’ll melt under fire, and, being only middling in speed, in an absolute hailstorm of torpedoes and bullets… She will melt.

Image  Kent is what happens when treaty limitations demand that a ship be kept under a certain amount of weight, but is still required to A: have enough fuel to circumnavigate the earth, B: have big fuckoff guns to intimidate littler ships, and C: ended up with tissue paper for armour. Like other ‘Treaty Cruisers’ like the Northampton-class, Kent’s a Tinclad, in that she can dish it out, but can’t take a hit worth a damn.

 That’s also why her top’s so fucking thin you can see the colour of her nipples in her splash art

 Yup. She even asks you to guess how thin her “armour” is when she’s into you.

LONG ISLAND

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Long Island is a lazy gamer girl. She lounges around, plays fighting games (to be fair, she’s good at them), eats chips and drinks Oxy-Cola. Her entire side story is about the Commander trying to get her to bloody exercise (So many potato chips and colas confiscated. So, so many.)

Even outside of her questline, she’s a playful soul… And soul is an accurate word, because she refers to herself as a ghost, and pranks like a ghost and party animal combined (Oooh, food russian roulette, with the “live bullet” being spiced with Wasabi? NOICE.) It’s… Slightly disconcerting that she’s into it enough that she talks about possessing you (maaaaybe in the ghostly sense) if she’s romantically attached.

Skillwise… Do you want to launch planes immediately after each other? Well, with Long Island’s basic skill, that happens between a 15-30% chance every time she launches planes. Yes, this includes the immediate reload launches. Get her up to max skill, and the odds are pretty reasonable you can get at least 3 airstrikes off in less than 3 seconds. I know this because it happens later in the LP. It’s glorious.)

Her other skill, post retrofit, is to buff other carriers’ Air Power by 5-15% for 8 seconds… Again, after every airstrike. Alas, she gets less viable once you’ve got other carriers to level 70+, but seeing her skill fire off multiple times is a very pleasing sight to behold indeed.

Image  Long Island was basically the first Escort Carrier made by the USN, just to see if it was possible. After doing nothing of note, she was retired after WW2 and returned to civilian life as a cargo and passenger ship

HOOD

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Hood, funnily enough, is another good example. We briefly touched on her story in the OP, but oh boyyy, did she have a time. Relationship wise, she has an awkward thing going on with Bismarck, because… Yeah, their ship memories have history with each other, and at least one of them doesn’t really know how to diplomatically deal with that.

 Image That’s Canon to Crosswave, the PS4 and PC game; In the phone game, there’s less ‘confused lesbian noises’

(They really are Disaster Lesbians in Crosswave)

Personality wise, she is the stereotypical epitome of the British Lady. Drinks tea with pinky extended (and knows her teas intimately), chastens you for poor etiquette (and Repulse, if she sorties with her), asks you to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a midsummer’s day?) to her when she’s in love… But she’s also a good flagship, only bowing to the Queen Elizabeth, and, in a Royal Navy fleet (5 or more ships), she gives a rousing battlecry: We are the pride of the Royal Navy, FORWARD! (Something something half a league onward?)

Her special barrage is actually quite nice in PvP matches, or when enemies are clustered together, because it does solid damage to a large portion of the mid-back.

Image  Her middling gunnery for a SR aside, the 40% speed boost to all backline reload is the big draw.

 Alas, it doesn’t do a whole lot to the side mains in a PvP fight, but for flagship on flagship slapfights, Hood is a solid choice. It is, however, her only skill.

Image  For the longest time, she also had the highest HP total of any backliner, too.

 Literally the largest warship the British made, at some 45,000 tons of weight and 840 feet in length, Hood was well-known as the Pride of the Royal Navy because, honestly? She was pretty to look at.

 Then Bismarck put a 15” shell right through her armour belt, blew up Hood’s 4” ammo stockpile, which touched off the 15” ammo stockpile. 3 survivors out of 1,418 men, as the then-22 year old Battlecruiser sank completely in less than 3 minutes.

UNICORN

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AAaAAaAAaAAaaaaAAAa, DEATH BY CUTE!!! Unicorn is perhaps the most adorable shipgirl in the game. Shy, she’s nonetheless a fairly good Carrier, and… Oh, yeah, her unicorn, Uni-chan, is alive. Just so you know.

I can’t think of any Azur Lane player I’ve met who doesn’t think Unicorn is a cute little button. However, since she refers to the Commander as “Big Brother”, it’s also safe to say that Unicorn is one of the reasons we have a “Don’t be a skeevy fuck” rule.

Some of her lines are amusing, however, because firstly, when sortied with Illustrious, she wants to protect her big sister (bless), and secondly, three of her lines are references to Gundam… Unicorn (my favourite being “Unicorn’s horn… Is not going to transform?” )

Essentially, Unicorn is the Cleric for the Vanguard. She’s a little fragile (okay, she’s pretty fragile), but she heals the Vanguard by 3-8% of their HP every time she launches an airstrike (which isn’t bad), she also increases their reload by 5-15% while she’s alive. It’s not a lot, but sometimes, the small buffs will save your ass.

Image  8% of Prinz Eugen’s 6606 HP at level cap is enough to put her back to full health after a battle.

 She’s also the only Aircraft Carrier in the world to use guns to destroy a fortification, during the Korean war. She spends a lot of time looking up to HMS Illustrious, because for most of 1943 and early 1944, she tagged along with Lusty and her sisters as the RN’s CV contingent moved to stomp a hole in the IJN.

With the addition of Little Illustrious to the cast list to celebrate Children’s Day 2020, Unicorn is now the Big Sister to something even more dangerously adorable than she is.

FLEET 2

PORTLAND

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That is, no joke, an IndyPort doujin she’s holding.The biggest fan, and promoter of her Idol, big sister, Indianapolis, holy shit, does Portland go on and on and on about Indy. There are very few times she isn’t, and god help you if you put the two in the same fleet. Seriously, every single line, including her affection lines, references her little sister in some way or another.

 Image All but one line references Indy, and the one that doesn’t references the omission

 However, putting her in with Indiana… Wait, shit, Indianapolis! …Is a good idea.

Image  One’s a state, the other’s the city. Also, I think there is a battleship Indiana. Late-game, Portland’s retro being a flat stat buff makes her solid, even as Indy falls off in damage output and viability

 Her Firepower, Anti-Air, and Reload all get buffed by 5-15% when they’re sortied together, her Defense Order has a 25% chance to reduce all damage taken by the fleet by 5-15% for 8 seconds, every 20 seconds (Again, note that same name skills don’t stack unless they specifically apply to the ship itself), and her barrage is not bad at all. 

Image  Her personality in-game is a disservice to Portland; 16 battle stars do not lie, and she was the one to, as one observer put it, ‘Firing squad with Naval Rifle’ FUCKING POI after the second battle of Guadalcanal. (Where Laffey, Atlanta, and Juneau all bit it)

CRAVEN

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Oh, poor Craven. She’s really not a bad Destroyer, all told, but god-damn, does she have the most unfortunate name. Her main charm comes from her Double Torpedo skill, which has a 15-30% chance to launch another wave when you fire torps. It’s not got the ridiculousness of Long Island’s multiple launches, but stick a quintuple acoustic guidance set on her, and you’re golden. Personality wise, she’s… A cheerleader. No joke, pretty much everything she says, linewise, has to do with either cheering, or cheering people up. I like her.

Image  So, did some digging, and Craven’s got some good luck and some bad luck to her history: Good luck; she was part of Enterprise’s escort group from 1940 until November 1942, keeping her involved in raids, and trading paint with Northampton once, before she ended up getting involved in the protracted ‘Knife Fight in a Phone Booth’ that was the Guadalcanal campaign; she was directly involved in clearing Vella Gulf, and scored assists on 3 Japanese destroyers in that action. After that engagement and an overhaul, she got to play escort for Enterprise right up until the end of the war, in both Task Force 38 and 58.

LONDON

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London is, skillwise, a pretty solid shitkicker of the frontlines. Not only does she have a Vanguard buff to firepower (5-15%, doesn’t stack with similar skills), and the usual All Out Assault, when retrofitted, she gets The Sharpshooter of Londinium, which gives her a 15-30% chance of double damage, and, with every enemy she destroys, up to 8, she gets a 0.5-1.5% buff to her Accuracy (So, relatively quickly, she can rack up a 12% Accuracy buff)

Image  The big kicker is that her Retro lets her equip secondary guns in her torpedo slot, which maintains the frankly-stupid 160% Efficiency bonus. General jokes about her carrying a Laffey into battle for the weight of fire she can unleash ran rampant

Image  Old Hand at fighting; served from ‘28 until ‘50, shot, and shot at by Germans, Spaghettis, Japanese, and Communists. Retrofit, again, makes her scary-good because her second slot can fit DD guns instead of Torpedoes, and then she gets to not only look stylish, but carry around a little Laffey for constant weight of firepower.

Personality wise, she refers to the Commander as Your Excellency, is efficient, calmly cheery, another tea-fiend, and, once she gets to know you, she comes out of her shell to mercilessly mother you. Because she likes you, and she wants you to go up in the world.

Image  It’s stated by the Developers that within the AL’verse, London is part of the Maid Corps, essentially, the Royal Navy’s spies, bodyguards, and wetworkers, led by Shiny Sheff.

We’ll talk about Sheffield when we get to her. A long way in the future…

OKLAHOMA

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Oklahoma is one of those ones where, personality wise? There’s not a whole lot to say. She’s somewhat thirsty, and she pushes herself hard. That’s.. About it. Not all the characters get fun… Well, characters.

Image  Digging deeper, Oklahoma’s heavily traumatized by her death at Pearl Harbour, and as she never fired her guns in anger, being allowed to deploy in-game basically makes her fall in love with her commander because you’re trusting her to do what she had been built to do, but she never actually got to do.

Oklahoma is… An odd one, skillwise. She has one defensive skill, but, while a damage reduction of 50% is good, that 3-8% chance of actually proccing that on a hit? Noooot so good.

Image  Vice Defense is a misnomer; It’s a reference to Okie being the second ship in the world with an All or Nothing armour scheme, which weighed less but protected the vitals more-completely than older ‘comprehensive’ armour schemes.

Similarly, her retrofit skill is… Kinda eh. Okay, yes, double damage on the main gun… 15-30% chance per firing to proc that. If you have a powerful main gun (and, at high levels, you should), it’s… Alright? But it’s not a wowser like some of the others.

Image  This one’s a tragic story. Short version? Pearl Harbour. 9 torpedoes in the same location. She rolled over and sank in water shallow enough that her keel and bottom were exposed. With crew trapped inside. People on watch after the battle had to be constantly rotated out from her wreck because of the tapping from inside, even as rescue efforts managed to save 30 people. Out of the 480 trapped.

 449 died, trapped in her wreck, in the darkness, starving, in fouled air, and partly-flooded.

REPULSE

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She’s very peppy, and pushy, and probably mockney, and… Well, that’s Repulse! Her guns are alright (I suppose it comes from loving the outdoors. Oh ho, ho ho ho ho.)

Image  Historically, Repulse and her older sister, Renown, are basically the last of Fisher’s Follies, where the mantra of ‘Speed is armour’ got slapped into the ground a few months before the R-class siblings were completed. Toting 6 15” guns and having a top speed of 30 knots meant they could dish it, but they had armour nearly as thick as Kent’s

 But while her skill is alright, with a reload buff of between 30-50% if she takes damage (in 8 second segments, because it doesn’t stack with itself, and lasts 8 seconds), she’s… Honestly unremarkable, skill wise, although she’s one of the faster Battlecruisers.

Image  Repulse and Renown’s skills, rolled together into one becomes Hood’s Skill. Because Hood is their little sister, and those 3 were the last Battlecruisers of the Royal Navy.

 I’d just insert a link to Cannon’s Elegy here. Repulse is one of the oldest girls in the game, and deserves a retrofit. She also had the nicknames ‘Refit’, ‘Repair’, and ‘The Biggest Destroyer in the Royal Navy’

WARSPITE!!!

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The unofficial mascot of this LP (FEED THEM TO WARSPITE, MUAHAHAHAH!), Warspite is not only the knight of the HMS Queen Elizabeth, she’s a solid individual overall. Serious, calm, and an absolute shitkicker of a Battleship. Want something large made very, very dead? Warspite.

Image As per the comic Queen’s Orders, they’re Classmates, but we all know they’re sister ships

It’s no exaggeration to say that she gets MvP a lot in the early game if you get her early.

Image  Also Midgame. Also Lategame. She’s beaten out by only One other girl for raw firepower, and for the longest time had the best reloading stat for backliners

She only has the one skill pre retrofit, which then becomes improved after you do, but holy shit is it a good one. Every 35-15 seconds, she’ll launch a barrage that automatically crits at the farthest enemy (so, in PvP, always at someone in the backline), and, from level 6, the ammo is AP, regardless of what ammo you have on your Main Gun. Post retrofit, not only does it automatically proc 10 seconds in, and 35-15 seconds after that (Let’s be real, by the time you hit retrofit, it’s Level 10, and it’s 15 seconds and automatically AP), it also paints the enemy ship for auto targetting by other Royal Navy shitkickers. In missions, every battle will increase the damage from the first barrage in the next battle by 80-130% (again, this will probably be 130% from the time you retrofit.) I haven’t tested it yet… But it may keep improving.

Also post retrofit, she gains the skill The Royal Legend, which increases both her Firepower and hit rate against Destroyers by 3-15%, and lowers her Dispersion Rating (the spread of artillery fire) by 0.5-5 (A mixed blessing, but if you know the ship ain’t moving, that means every part of the barrage is definitely going to fuck it up.)

Image  The big thing there? Her firepower buff. Because THAT is global. And it stacks with her older sister’s HMS 15% ‘fuck you and the horse you rode in on’ buff. Put Warspite and Lizzie in the same fleet and you turn a sledgehammer with nearly 500 raw attack power into a fully automatic sledgehammer jackhammering someone’s everything into paste

Personality wise, she jokes about her age (She is, as noted, storied and her career lasted a while), she’s athletic, loyal, serious… And goodness me, she doesn’t like Hood, as noted by her additional line when sortied with her. “Elegance has no place on a battlefield…”

Image  Warspite, circa 1916: “BITCH, I Took FIFTEEN Large-bore Hits at Jutland, Another 150 6 inch or smaller hits in the same battle, and then on the way home tried to RAM the U-boat that shot torpedoes at me. Elegance can get FUCKED.”

Image  Warspite is to the Royal Navy as Enterprise is to the US Navy. No Exaggeration. In her storied 35 year career, she had been shot, shelled, strafed, torpedoed, mined, rammed, wrangled italian bomb speedboats, wrangled ITALY, and took a pair of CRUISE MISSILES to the Chin. She was still the first battleship to open fire on D-Day, and between her and HMS Rodney deleted pretty much every slight hint of German Resistance against the British Landing Beaches, then helped the US get off Omaha beach. Oh, and she circumnavigated the world twice, sailed from Malta to Puget Sound, Washington State with a 40-foot hole in her side, and was the only capital ship on the west coast of North America that could respond meaningfully when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour.

This also gets referenced in an additional line when she’s sortied with Enterprise. Turns out there’s friendly rivalry there (also shown in her questline. Which we’ll get to.)

R.A.B. Mitchell wrote a poem, funnily enough, about Warspite refusing to be scrapped, called “The Subject.” It’s not placed on any poetry sites, but it can be read in this reddit post.

Image  He served aboard the Grand Dame

BULLIN AND PURIN

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Created specifically for the purpose of having a Limit Break material, the Bulin and Purin are… Technically usable? But the Bullin has no skills, paper for armour and HP, and the Purin… I’ve seen them do skill-like things in fights? But they’re skills that always whiff, or don’t do anything except show a cloud of Bulin duplicates (maybe that’s a bullet skin.)

Like Akashi, they have their verbal tic they put everywhere, but, unlike Akashi, they are dumbasses…

Image  Adorable dumbasses

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…The Purin being the prouder of the pair. They’re useful, but never put one in a fleet, and never lock them. However, if you see them on the Academy grounds, sit and watch. Purin jetpacks, and Bullin uses her ahoge (the sticky curvy hair thing in anime) like a helicopter. It’s adorable.

The Others

Now, we did get other ships in this update, but we’re going to be dealing with them, once the time seems right, in other updates, according to their class. The… Fletcher Class will be a two parter, because 17 out of the 175 Fletchers are in the game.So, a short list. You can look them up on the Azur Lane wiki, if you want.

 McCall (Sister ship to Craven)
Aulick, Foote (Fletcher Class)
Cygnet, Crescent, and Comet (Cygnet Class)
Cassin and Downes (Mahan Class)
Ranger (Ranger Class)
Foxhound (F Class)
Leander (Leander Class)
Bulldog (B Class, of the A and B Class)
Hammann (Sims Class)
 
 
 
 
 

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Okay, that'll do for a first upload. I can do Day 2 once we've got some replies, and I can do Day 3 once a) I'm done with it, and b) I've edited stuff together.

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Man, I played this game for a while ages ago, back towards release, before you have Live 2D on the home screen. It just got so grindy that I stopped having fun. But I'll happily watch this, because history is fun, and cute battleship girls remain cute.

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Speaking as the resident History bastard, I honestly like the fact that the devs have an honest-to-god naval historian on staff to keep things properly sorted in regards to the actual historical exploits of the various girls.

Between that and some actually-decent pun work (Such as Nagato being all three meanings of the word 'Miko'), well, AL's pretty interesting for me.

Also the fans will take any opportunity to create confused lesbian noises at each other, as shown with the mostly-canon depiction of Bismarck and Hood in Crosswave, or the ascended meme of Cleveland and Helena being more than just close friends, or Prinz Eugen and Prince of Wales hooking up. Most recently, people are starting to pair the Vichy French Battleship Jean Bart and the USS Massachusetts as those two ended up fighting each other at Casablanca, and both of them now have stylish dresses.

Now, I'm going to be straight-up with you lot. While I am knowledgable, I'm not infallible. If I make mistakes while talking the actual histories, or anyone has anecdotes from their older family members that may have served, I encourage you to step up and tell us about it; My biggest worry and why I started history-bombing two discords is because all of the history is being consigned to the dryness of technical books, and doesn't have the heart of the accounts from people that were there.

So please, feel free to jump in and talk history with us.

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I'm all for history, especially about military tech like this (though ships aren't my specialty, despite having a dad who was in the Navy), so I'll jump on that whenever I have something to share.

As for the game itself, I stopped playing right around when the Neptunia crossover hit the English version. If I remember right I barely played actual battles, mostly just collected shipgirls, which I quickly lost interest in when it was clear that the game had no interest in actually applying any advertised rate-ups to me.
 

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The Desire Sensor is Real. And Hates Jamie on a personal level.

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God, it really... Really does. I think I only just managed to get all the most recent event ships on LPSave, and for the event before that, I'll have to use screencaps from DeX. Or, in the case of ones I didn't get on my main account either, ask Grump to screenshot.

JamieTheD wrote:
Fri Jun 26, 2020 10:15 am
unlike Akashi, they are dumbasses…
Citation needed.

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I present to you, Yeronner, exhibit A -
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Source - Ethan Forsythe's great newspaper style comic, Akagi^2.

I fail to see how that proves Akashi is not, in fact, a dumbass, as she listened to Akagi.

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The fact that as a collaboration between herself and Yuubari, Akashi's known as the safety-conscious one, and she's working to repair wisdom cubes, which is about as advanced as technology the Sirens have, much less humanity and the Kansen do.

She's greedy, lazy, obsessed with shiny things, and mewls like a happy kitten when you pet her head, but there's a reason she was Japan's only repair ship from 1937 until 1944, and she worked hard on saving as many lives as she could. (To the point that the raid on Truk Lagoon had her singled out as a priority target)

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DAY THE SECOND: THE CORAL SEA (2-2 to 3-1, Hard 1-2)

Okay, so on with the day! This is still a day where we’re speeding along in the missions, and we won’t be slowing down significantly until somewhere in the 5th or 6th chapter, so we have more story, since the story doesn’t stop until 3-4, and the better news is that the videos now get more bang for their buck, because events, side stories, and, of course, the bumf gets the chop. Only new builds and collections get a spot. And we get a few new drops, so… Nice!

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Day 2 Video, Let’s Take On The Coral Sea!


Hard mode remains… Well, the same maps, but with no story, and, if you clear them completely, you only need to fight the boss… Which can be a mixed blessing. After all, some maps have some pretty good ships as rare drops, which you can send low level fleets to try and harvest for much less fuel, so you want more battles there, but for boss only drop maps, like the Fox Mines of 3-4, you’ll want to be fighting that boss, 3 times a day.

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…Errr, where did that picture of an Exercise where I’m getting my ass kicked come from?

Threat Level Safe in normal just means… You don’t get ambushes or air strikes. Which… Yay, you can use those to farm rare drops with even lower levelled ships, for much less fuel, and the rare drops here are easier to get than later areas which have lots of ships to potentially drop?

You’ll still be getting 20 billion Aulicks, Crescents, Cygnets and other commons of the area, however…

Image At last count, through drops, I’ve accumulated some 32,000 girls. My docks have a total of 387 due to the 19 collab-only girls, and a near-full stock otherwise.

Image They’ve been well-fed with long pork.

The battle of today is The Battle of Coral Sea. Take it away, Admiral Grump!

Image The battle of Coral Sea was an unmitigated defeat for the USN, with the sinking of Lexington being the hardest blow, but Yorktown being crippled by bombs and torpedoes would contribute to her eventual sinking a month later at Midway; US losses also included Sims, Hammann’s older sister, and the fleet oiler Neosho, which was a nasty loss of logistic capacity. An army may march on its stomach, but a ship sails on its fuel supply, so oilers were strategic assets to be protected as much as possible.

Japanese losses were relatively light, for a given sense of relative. Shoukaku got the tar bombed out of her but she survived and got repaired, while the Light carrier Shouhou got dogpiled by both Lexington and Yorktown, causing the famed radio transmission of ‘scratch one flattop’ as the first real allied victory in the Pacific.

Still, the loss of a light carrier was, at the time, a minor setback, while the USN had effectively lost half of its Fleet carriers in the Pacific at the time; Hornet was in transit (and would make it to Midway), and Saratoga was undergoing repairs after the Raid on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands ended up with her taking a torpedo in the side.


Finally, there are a pair of builds I missed in the video, one of which is pictured below (the other being Pensacola.) Which’ll have to wait for next week’s ship update, because I forgot her this week too, and that update’s long as is. Sorry Northampton, apologies Pensacola!

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…And something else important that happened on this day. Something that cost me 300 of my gems… Some of which I had from that $0.99 microtransaction to get a first microtransaction reward.

Image A free Saratoga and 5$ worth of gems for 1$ is about average for AL’s dealmaking math. The devs really did their best to minimize the Microtransaction affliction

Yes, I did say there were microtransactions and the encouragements and tricks therein, even if Azur Lane is friendlier and less intrusive about it than most. Anyway…

I made a Guild. What does it do? Well… Not a whole lot, actually. It’s a social thing.

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Image For now. The 3rd Anniversary stream for the CN servers revealed upcoming Guild Raid Events against Siren Empresses and the Ashen

The red means the Guild is Crimson Axis, but… Well, as we’ll mention, it doesn’t mean much right now.

Wave your e-peen with and at your friends, maybe friend each other, look at each others’ dorms, see how they’re doing, maybe even share useful tips that the world chat isn’t going to give you on a consistent basis, because, y’know… Public chat in what’s effectively an MMO… So… Yeah. It’s a feature. It doesn’t do much. It costs 300 gems to do, and it levels up like any other feature.

Image Guild leveling, at the moment, just adds more capacity to the number of people you can have in the guild.

I’m not quite sure what competitive guilds do, they might level up differently? This is a casual guild, for people not to be bigots, to hit things with big boomsticks, and to level the guild up just by… Having fun!

Image In Jamie’s Not-LP account, he’s in my guild on the Avrora Server.

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SHIP UPDATE: Day 2

KINUGASA


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Aoba’s little sister, Kinugasa looks up to her big sister (As we get to Aoba, you’ll ask yourself… why?), and, otherwise, mothers the poor Commander if she’s ever put in the Secretary position. But that, honestly, isn’t a bad thing, so I appreciate her character, at least.

Skillwise, Kinugasa has a reasonably quick All Out Assault (9 shots at 1, 6 shots at 2), and a 30-60% chance of buffing her firepower by 20-40% every 20 seconds. She’s alright, but unremarkable.

Image Like most grey-tier/common girls, they don’t stand out, but they’re the mainstay and incredibly reliable. AL went to pains to make sure that all the girls are at least Viable up into lategame, even if they’re not optimized

Japanese Heavy Cruiser, somewhere in between the Furutaka-class and the Takao-class. Little sister of the Muckraker, Aoba. Didn’t get to do much, mostly tagged along with her older sister while Admiral Goto made stupid decisions that got his cruiser division cut to ribbons.


Image Got murked by Enterprise the day after the Knife Fight in a Phone Booth that was the second battle of Guadalcanal.

AOBA

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Aoba is a scummy journalistic type, looking for revealing photos and tabloid stories on all the other shipgirls (and the commander.) Why Kinugasa looks up to her… Nobody knows. She is, however, one of the few who will at least try to call out that if the Commander is basically living in a harem anime. So… That’s one thing going for her, I guess?

Image Japanese heavy cruiser, best known for having some of the most-asshole captains to ever asshole, Directly responsible for the sinkings of Kako, Furutaka, Fubuki, and Murakumo due to captain assholery, and abandoned the Kumano to US Retaliation after Samar in October 1944. They also ordered her subordinates in the same cruiser division to kill prisoners of war to ‘save resources’, so… War criminal.

Characterized as a total muckracker and yellow journalist as one of her crew was considered ‘The father of Japanese Science Fiction’ novels.


Skillwise, she’s another somewhat boring one. Full Firepower and an All Out Assault. She’s somewhat speedy, but nothing special.

Image Decent enough mechanically, but one of those personality types that makes you wonder why she hasn’t been slapped into the brig for harassment, slander, libel, and sundry.

OMAHA

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Image One of the Three Stooges, with Glowworm, Omaha, and San Diego collectively having less braincells than fingers. The Omaha-class Light Cruiser is basically a pre-world-war I design, only built in the inter-war years, because someone in the US had a boner for stupid decisions. Spent almost all of WW2 pootling about South America to avoid getting sneezed at by anything more lethal than a mild glare.

She’s the hungry one of the three, and… Well, that, and anxiety about her weight are pretty much her character. You’re fine, Omaha, enjoy your snacks!

Skillwise, she’s utterly unremarkable. Quick Reload and an All Out Assault. Waves tiny flag and woos quietly.

Image Omaha’s career was unremarkable, with a bit of snark in 1937, when she ran aground off of Castle Island, in the Bahamas. As per the official report, “she quickly and evenly decelerated as the bottom engaged the smooth reef.”

Image Meanwhile, in 1942: “One day, as she was at anchor in Carenage Bay, Trinidad, one of her sailors had returned from an especially “hard liberty” (read: drunk off his tits) and found a spot on Omaha’s direction finder deck to sleep off the effects. When the ship rolled unexpectedly the inebriated sailor rolled from the deck, down an awning, across the quarterdeck and then over the side and into the water. According to Captain Chandler, “probably due to his perfectly relaxed condition”, the sailor was uninjured.

RALEIGH

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Despite having the rather boring skill pair of Quick Reload and All Out Assault, I like Raleigh. She adjusts her glasses when she wins battles, she’s a strict teacher, and if it weren’t for her visrep being much younger than her personality, I’d like her more.

Image Omaha-class ‘scout cruiser’, got to pootle around most of the war. Was torpedoed at Pearl Harbour, and her gun crews claimed five kills. Got to spend most of the war patrolling the Aleutian and Rat island chains, wasting ammo on rocks shaped like people.

She quickly becomes a mainstay in the two main fleets I run with, bless her. 🙂

NORFOLK

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Norfolk is, honestly, a sweetheart. She’s not very brave (although that’s arguable, considering she still does her job), she’s shy, she doesn’t like the dark, and she likes fairytales. So… A smol of a cruiser. She also dislikes winter, and there is a story behind that, as implied by her talking about her radar freezing when you meet her.

Skillwise, she’s not badly armoured, is good with torpedoes, and, apart from her All-Out-Assault, her defensive skill, Forward Armour, isn’t that bad. When she takes damage, she has a 15% chance to spawn a shield for 5-15 seconds that blocks up to 12 shots. That’s normal shots, not the special shots, but that’s still less damage, and, if she’s at the front, that’s the whole formation she’s protecting when you’re moving forward or staying neutral. That ain’t bad.

Image Norfolk is one of five ships that gets shields, so she’s in rare company. While her appearance and lines go all-in on the ‘Little Red Riding Hood is Scared’, in this case, Little Red Riding Hood has eight 203mm guns, and a distinguished service history.

While much of her time in WW2 was spent wrangling arctic convoys and patrols, she was not only responsible for shadowing Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, leading up to Denmark Strait, and then following through until naval aviation could be brought to bear, two years later, she was responsible for putting out Scharnhorst’s eye; in the Battle of North Cape, one of her barrages destroyed the Battlecruiser’s Zeetact radar system, preventing Scharnhorst from noticing Duke of York’s interception.

She’s a good girl, and her little sister, Dorsetshire, is right in admiring Norfolk for all that she was able to do.


HERMES

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Ah, the HMS Hermes. How can I describe her? Oh yes… Scots Twitter Yu-Gi-Oh Carrier.

Okay, the Scots Twitter part is an exaggeration based on her costume, it’s much more “Yu-Gi-Oh protagonist who happens to be an aircraft-carrier-girl”, and many of her lines are direct references to the joy and power at the heart of the cards. It’s her passion, it’s her life, and y’know what?

Image Hermes also shares a VA with a Yu-gi-oh Protagonist.

She has the skills to back it up, especially post retrofit. As it is, she has a 15-25% chance to deal double damage for 10 seconds after each airstrike, and post retrofit? She has the Destiny Draw. At base, she gets 7 extra luck when her health drops below 30% But that’s only a cherry on top. No, every 20 seconds, one of three things will happen to her chosen target, and they all have quite evocative names. 1 in 3 chance of the Blackburn Fire Blast (a Heavy Incendiary Bomb), 1 in 3 of the Swordfish Bombardment of Destruction (3 Medium Bombs), and 1 in 3 of the Obnoxious Carpet Bombing (A whopping 24 Light Bombs)

She’s a keeper. And regardless of her Yu-Gi-Oh character, I still prefer to believe there’s that Scots Twitter touch, like that famous Scots Twitter Poketrainer.

Okay, okay, she was constructed in England. So it doesn’t work. But I so badly want it to…

Image Historically, HMS Hermes was the Very First Carrier to ever be laid down as a purpose-built aircraft carrier; all her forerunners were conversions, and at that point in time, her only forerunner was USS Langley. Due to construction delays and strikes however, she was the last of the ‘First three’ to be completed, having been beaten not only by Langley, who had been converted from a coal-hauler, but also Houshou, who had been laid down after Hermes, but completed two years before.

Hermes, for her part, spent her career basically teaching the Royal Navy how to, and how not to, operate a Carrier; while quickly supplanted by the Furious-class conversions, Ark Royal, and, in 1940, the Illustrious-class, she was still considered a vital part of the Naval Air Arm’s force projection. Until mid-1942, where at the battle of Tassafaronga, she was caught redeploying under orders from the admiralty with no escort (barring the very out of date HMAS Vampire) and proceeded to get dive-bombed to pieces by some 90 Japanese planes.


Image Hermes took a minimum of 40 direct hits before sinking, and lost over 300 of her crew.

That’s… That’s a lot

Image To paraphrase one ‘Mighty Jingles’, Former RN officer and Youtube snarker over World of Warships, ‘British Carriers are tough as old boots.’

YORK

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York is an odd one. Yes, she talks about the Force, which leads some to call her a Jedi (More accurately, considering the destructive bits, a Sith, if you interpret her that way), some think she’s just an embarrassing, deluded character (The japanese term is chuunibyou, and has a somewhat loose definition)

Image Chunni directly translated to ‘Eighth-grader syndrome’, where someone pretends to be something much more impressive than they actually are. Eg, an eighth-grader being a shounen protagonist.

but… Honestly, I’m not really convinced by either of these interpretations. Is she someone who Dramatically speaks in inconsistent Capitals of Important Nounage? Yes.

But also, post retrofit, well, her skill is Darkness (or Terror) Field, and… Yup, Darkness fits well, because it both extinguishes the “Light” (read: Bombships do 20-40% less damage, HE rounds do 5-15% less), and dramatically expands her Dark Force (Her secondary gun gets 40-70% extra crit chance, and ignores armour type.

As it is pre-retrofit, she gets Armageddon Cannon (MAGIC… ARMAGEDDON… CANNONNNNN!), which, after every shot of any of her weapons, has a 20% chance to increase her firepower by 20-40% for eight seconds.

Image Like all Heavy Cruisers, even without you being able to play with her secondary mounts, she’s boasting a brace of small guns that let her be a bullethose. Armageddon Cannon is hilariously overpowered as a result.

It’s kind of a shame she’s both unlucky and somewhat squishy, although, bravely, she fights against Fortune. The concept, not the ship. That would suck.

Image Historically, HMS York is one of a handful of heavy cruisers lost in WW2 from the Royal Navy; she was badly mauled by explosive motorboats while defending Crete from Italian and German invasion, then picked apart by torpedoes, dive bombers, and high-altitude level bombers until she was more scrap than ship.

Image I looked up the damage assessment in the official Royal Navy assessments; it took up about 3 pages in a 400-page book. Warspite took up less paper space.

Ah yeah, one of the quotes reference that as a nightmare she feels she has to face. And that definitely counts as a nightmare!

Image Her sister, Exeter, didn’t have much luck either, being mauled by Graf Spee in her first Engagement in WW2, then getting slaughtered by IJN bombers in the Java Sea. Looks like the York Class was rather unlucky.

As a side note, York and Exeter are, in the Azur Lane universe, members of the Royal Family. Specifically, they’re both Princesses. So, so far, we have the royal knight, and at least one of the two Princesses.


TENNESSEE

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Tennessee is focused. She’s combative. She’ll push the Commander because god help her, if he doesn’t shift his ass, she will, and, as such, she’s terrifying to her foes. There’s not a lot to say beyond that, and honestly? There doesn’t need to be. She speaks for herself, and she’s a good shitkicker in a fleet.

Image Tennessee is a Pearl Harbour Survivor, and her focus, drive, and need to beat people flat is almost wholly her coping with the trauma of seeing pretty much her entire family get murdered around her. In fact, she took only minor damage during Pearl, which only exacerbates her issues and self-flagellation

In fact, let’s borrow from wikipedia for a picture.


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Image That’s Tenn, barely scratched, next to her younger half-sister, West Virginia. Who is quite visibly sunk. In front of her at the time was Maryland, who took multiple bomb hits, and Oklahoma, who died incredibly horribly. Behind her? Arizona. Tennessee spent 3 days surrounded by her dead or dying sisters before she could be pulled free of her moorings.

Much like Pennsylvania, she Really wants to expend her hate-on towards Japan by hating them out of existence.


Oh boy, Pennsylvania’s even scarier. But we’ll get to her soon enough…

And that terrifying nature? Represented in her sole skill, Coercion. Every 15 seconds, the enemies deal 8-15% less damage for 8. It’s not a bad skill, and with her 200% damage on DD guns, bombships aren’t getting anywhere near her.

SHOUHOU

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I like Shouhou. Real down to earth gal, admitting she’s unlucky, but hey, ya live life, y’hear?

Do you get that in Western terms, she’s a southern gal, which is represented in Japanese by the Kansai dialect (due to many of the same cultural associations)?

She loves life, and she’s a solid support carrier, having, funnily enough, the skill of the same name, healing the Escort fleet (which is that again?) for 3.5-8% of their max health after every airstrike. Load her with a Steam Catapult, and quick launching planes, and you’re golden… Especially after her retrofit, where, again after every airstrike, she increases the Air Power of other carriers and light carriers in her fleet by 5-15% for 8 seconds.

Shouhou’s solid, and yeah… I love joie de vivre!

Image I don’t have much to say about Shouhou; she didn’t have a long career at all, with her most notable feat being the target of the infamous line ‘Scratch one Flattop’ at the Battle of Coral Sea.

So, I mean, getting bombed to shit, and torpedoed by Lexington and Yorktown, and subsequently becoming the first Japanese carrier sunk in world war 2 is notable, but it’s not exactly a ‘happy’ note.

Image Her character references her swift destruction, but she’s one of the few that is in a reasonably decent headspace about being smacked by overwhelming firepower.

SARATOGA

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Ah, sister Sara. That’s sister to other shipgirls, not sister as in nun. That’s another shipgirl. Saratoga, of the Lexington class, is a prankster and a Virtual Idol in her spare time, and… Well, she has trouble taking things seriously, even if her heart’s in the right place. She does, after all, apologise for her pranks… Sometimes. When reminded.

Image While given the name ‘Sister Sara’, there’s nothing little about her. During her 19-year career in the USN, she was the first of her class to be launched, first to be completed (making her older than her big sister, Lexington), and last to die. Also, until the Commissioning of USS Midway, one week after World War 2 ended, Saratoga held the title of ‘The World’s Longest Warship’ from 1927 until 1945. She was also the only warship in the world to be over 900 feet long until Midway was completed.

She’s a carrier, it’s true, but she’s by no means only a carrier. Her skill Artillery Support means she fires a barrage every 20-10 seconds (damage dependent on level, and it’s kind of a spray and pray deal… But it makes for a nasty surprise to someone in the wrong place at the right time), and, when she launches an airstrike, she improves the escort fleet’s damage by 5-15% for 8 seconds.

Image That’s a Spray and Pray of Eight-inch shells, referring to her original design specifications being outfitted with heavy cruiser guns, just in case. It was soon realized that heavy guns were not really a viable option for a carrier because firing across the flight deck would ruin the deck and send planes flying off the side. Also, if a carrier’s in gun range, shit’s fucked.

After her retrofit, however, she gets her unique skill, and it’s a fun one: Witch’s Prank. After launching an airstrike, she has a 40-70% chance to launch extra planes, whose damage is based on skill level and aviation stat (why would you not buff both to max ASAP?)

Image Sara has, bar none, the highest natural aviation stat in the game, too.

Said planes also cause burn and flood damage on hit. That’s two separate damage over time effects, at the same time. Sister Sara’s fun.

Image Sara’s a Survivor. She took more abuse than Enterprise, more often, but was often pulled off of the line of battle because while Enty kept getting bombed and lit on fire, Sara kept getting torpedoed, which required the rather obvious repair of ‘fix that hole in her side before more water gets in’. Also, surprising next to nobody, she was often considered one of the prettiest warships made, due to her origin as a battlecruiser; the long lines and sleek, tapered bow, gave her and her sister character that very few ships could match.

Post-war, exhausted, battle-scarred, and still wounded from her last engagement, Saratoga was subject to the Able and Baker Nuclear Weapons Tests at Bikini Atoll. She sank in shallow water, with her flight deck less than 50 feet from the surface, fully upright. Her wreck is a popular diving spot, as are the wrecks of the other ships that had their existences snuffed by sunshine in a can.

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So, Jamie and I talked a little about Aoba, but I think she deserves an extra-hard kick, so I'm just going to take a few moments to transcribe some things about her.
The IJN Aoba was known for being more of a massive walking disaster.

I mean, where do I begin?

August 10th, 1942, Cape Savo. Aoba commands all ships in her group to stop submarine evasion. IJN Kako, a Furutaka-class, is immediately hit by a torpedo and sinks.

Casualties: IJN Kako.


October 11th: The infamous "I Am Aoba Incident." IJN Aoba identifies ships. The ships are American, but Aoba's commander thinks they are friendlies.

Everyone in Aoba's group KNOWS those ships are enemies, but IJN Aoba insists on sending a ship to identify them. IJN Fubuki (Yes, THAT Fubuki) is sent and is promptly sunk.

Americans open fire on IJN Aoba's group. Still convinced that the ships are friendly, IJN Aoba's captain uses his light to send a signal to the ships, "I AM AOBA! I AM AOBA! IJN Furutaka tells IJN Aoba to knock it off, but IJN Aoba points the flashlights at the ship only to reveal, that, surprise surprise, the ships were American.

IJN Furutaka tells IJN Aoba to get the fuck out of there, while flashing her lights, saying "I AM AOBA!" and using her hull as a distraction. IJN Aoba escapes, but IJN Furutaka sank.

By the way, IJN Murakumo, the Fubuki Class destroyer sister ship, was also sunk while rescuing survivors off the IJN Furutaka.

Casualties: 2 Furutaka Classes (Both sisters Furutaka and Kako sunk), 2 Fubuki Class (Fubuki, Murakumo).


November 11th, 1944. IJN Kumano, a Mogami-class cruiser, is heavily damaged. IJN Aoba was supposed to tow her back to Japan, but IJN Aoba was also damaged. So IJN Aoba does the most nice move ever: She freaking DITCHES KUMANO out in the ocean.

In enemy territory. Where the enemy planes can bomb IJN Kumano, and American subs are everywhere. And IJN Aoba essentially sends a message to IJN Kumano, which the IJN Kumano essentially saw it as "I'm gonna run away from here". IJN Kumano was eventually rescued, but sunk a few days later.

Casualties and crimes: Kako, Furutaka, Fubuki, Murakumo, Kumano left to die.

IJN Aoba eventually made it to Japan, and was one of the bombing victims of the American Kure raid in 1945.

So that ends the tale of IJN Aoba.
The message Aoba's Signal crew sent to Kumano, by the way? "Now I am not capable of Towing you. Excuse Me."

And that's not getting into the fact that Admiral Goto, on Aoba, ordered his cruiser division to ignore survivors of ships they sank, or, if picking them up as prisoners of war, to shoot them to 'save on resources'

There's a reason Aoba's a hate sink both in-game and out, and even across franchises; not even Kantai Collection has any respect for her.

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So, while Jamie's not looking, let's have a short showcase upon his favourite Bote.

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Nelson, Rodney, and Warspite at Gibraltar, 1933.
A fleet in its own right, a more powerful force seldom assembled in naval history, entire navies would fall in its wake.

Oh, and Nelson and Rodney are there too.


So, let's talk about the Grand Dame of the Royal Navy, Second of her Class, and Sixth to carry her name, HMS Warspite.

Warspite is not a young lady by any stretch of the imagination; launched in 1913 and completed in '15, her 32-year career spanned the duration of both world wars, the advent of Naval Aviation as a complete doctrinal rearrangement of all that had come before, and enough damage dealt and received to kill any other vessel of war several times over.

In Azur lane, only a tiny handful of ships are older than her; The protected Cruiser Avrora, Pre-dreadnought Battleship Mikasa, and Japanese Battlecruiser Kongou are pretty much the only ones older than her, unless you start digging into pre-conversion histories for Langley (a coal-hauler) and Vestal (Also a coal-hauler).

With a total of seventeen Campaign Ribbons earned in her lifespan, she is the most-decorated warship ever brought to the field by the Royal Navy, and, as mentioned in the mini snippet above in the 'shipgirl showcase', is to the Royal Navy what Enterprise is to the United States.

So, let's get down to brass tacks.

Technical details are always boring, but Warspite, being of the Queen Elizabeth class, was revolutionary in several ways when she was being constructed.

First and Foremost, the QE Battleships were the first in the world to use fuel oil instead of coal or oil-enriched coal, and the first in the world to use fifteen-inch guns. (In fact, the BL 15" Mark I guns were so well-regarded they were considered the benchmark every other naval gun was measured against from that point on.)

Secondly, the QE class was the first Fast Battleship design, which culminated in the Iowa-class Battleships some 27 years after Warspite's construction.

So, right off the starting mark, you have a nasty combination; a warship that could hit harder than any other ship, could take more punishment due to her armour design and thickness, and could outpace and beat to death 'standard type' Battleships, which tended to a uniform speed of 21 knots.

Also trending to World War I design features, Warspite was Short, but fairly broad, due to the Royal Navy's experience of fighting in the North Atlantic; when you have a warship gallivanting over 30-foot waves, you need the breadth to act as a stable gun platform, and when transferred to calmer waters, that allowed Spite's gunners to really reach out and touch someone with the thumb of an angry god.

So, that's the technical stuff. It also explains most of her appearance in-game, being petite and with her rigging being rather impressive in both bulk and girth.

'But Grump', you may ask, 'what about her lack of pantaloons or skirts?'

That is due to a communication from 1943, where Warspite, repositioning to beat the ever-loving shit out of both Italian and Nazi forces during the Allied invasion of Italy, arrived at her destination several hours ahead of schedule, and managed to throw off pursuit from the respective air forces that were hunting her.

The Admiral aboard her, one Lord Andrew Cunningham (Nicknamed 'ABC' due to his middle initials), stated that "There is no doubt the Grand Dame can still run when she lifts her skirts." and that's why she goes without in AL.

Now, with that settled, let's look at her actual history, which can be summed up roughly as follows: 'Shot At, Mined, Shelled, Torpedoed, Strafed, Bombed, Rammed, and hit with Two Cruise Missiles.'

Very few, if any, warships endured that level of punishment and maintained function; fewer still could return fire with equal aplomb and effectiveness.

Her first engagement was the Grand Battle of Jutland, where the British Learned the hard way that keeping ammunition locker doors open for faster rate of fire was a good way to end up with a ship being turned into a cloud of flying matchsticks and shrapnel; Warspite, for her part, was in the thick of the battle for almost all of it, laying out hits and taking hits in return, including one particularly galling wound that troubled her for the entire remainder of her lifespan; a German shell had penetrated and detonated within the steering gears, giving her perpetual steering issues when attempting to turn starboard.

Needless to say, having your steering break when you're locked into a turn is not a good time for anyone involved, and in the fifteen minutes it took for her crew to un-jam her rudders, the entire Hochseeflotte (High Seas Fleet) turned their guns upon the wounded battleship, pounding her mercilessly. Incidentally, this also saved several ships that had taken severe damage, notably the slowly-sinking cruiser HMS Warrior, which believed that Warspite had deliberately gone into the slow turn to act as bait, instead of as a result of battle damage.

Warspite gave as good as she got, mind, including landing multiple hits on the Seydlitz and Von Der Tann, of which the latter was Scuttled. (Seydlitz, despite taking 21 High-calibre shell hits, a torpedo that ripped open her side, and swallowing over 5,000 tons of water, sailed home with her foredecks awash and all but one of her ten guns nonfunctional)

Warspite, on Her way home after the battle, was jumped by a pair of U-boats, both of which fired torpedoes at the battleship. While the torpedoes missed, Warspite turned and tried to run down the nearest U-boat, and very nearly succeeded; some apocryphal accounts claimed that there were scrapes on her underbelly when she was hauled into drydock after the battle. A full accounting of the damage took some time, but it was eventually ascertained that Warspite had endured over 150 medium-calibre shell hits, and fifteen hits from main guns.

And that was the start of her career.

We pick up Warspite in her early 1916 Design when you build her in Azur Lane, and it shows; she's peppy, energetic, full of vim and vigor, and has no idea of the hellstorm she's going to sail into. She's a new type of battleship, but a well-designed type, easily capable of dominating the battlefield. Her in-game Retrofit is her 1937 Refit and rebuild, which gave her new engines, an extra 1,500 tons of armour, and a brace of AA guns and secondary turret mounts that would ensure she could at least swat most of the little assholes known as planes.

I could be here all week talking about her world war 2 service, so let's just run down the bullet points instead.

Went to Narvik, Norway, during the Nazi invasion of that country, and, escorted by an armful of destroyers, proceeded to systematically destroy fully one-third of the German Destroyer Fleet, shelled shore positions to kill Nazis, and her catapult-launched floatplane found and sunk a U-boat, giving Warspite kill credit for the first battleship to gank a sub in WW2, and the first battleship to gank a sub with a floatplane. (This is reflected in her Retrofit, as she is given an Anti-Submarine Warfare Stat, and the ability to equip ASW planes in her Auxilary slots)

After sticking around to help the Norewgians as much as she reasonably could, Warspite then headed to what was probably the most-contested theatre of warfare in Europe, the Mediterranean; It's here where she truly came into her own, participating in almost every major battle from her arrival, starting with Calabria, where she mugged the Italian Battleship Giulio Cesare with what's considered the longest-range gunnery hit against a moving target in ever, slapping the Italian at a range of nearly 25 kilometres.

She followed up that by tag-teaming with Illustrious to raid Taranto; while Lusty proceeded to torpedo a grand swathe of italian warships in harbour (and the Japanese took notes for their own recreation some 13 months later), Warspite cruised past a major supply base and shelled it until nothing was left but fire and rubble.

Probably the meanest and most-one-sided fight in the Med was the battle of Matapan, where Warspite and two of her sisters, Valiant and Barham, used their Radars to pursue and ambush three state-of-the-art Italian Heavy Cruisers and their escorting destroyers; as none of the Italian ships had Radar, the battleship squadron snuck to within literal spitting distance before opening fire, blowing apart Zara and Fiume in less than three minutes, shattering two destroyers, and then mugged the Pola, boarding the crippled heavy cruiser and stealing most of her AA guns (and taking her crew off) before destroying Pola as well.

I'll just take this line from Wikipedia:
Allied casualties during the battle were a single torpedo bomber shot down by Vittorio Veneto's 90 mm (3.5-inch) anti-aircraft batteries, with the loss of the three-man crew. Italian losses were up to 2,303 sailors.
Shortly after Matapan, during the failed defense of Crete, Warspite took a torpedo in the side that blew open a 50-foot length of her hull; with no naval bases in the Med able to repair her, as Queen Elizabeth was laid up in Alexandria after a successful attack that had blown a hole in her belly, Warspite sailed from Alexandria at the North edge of Egypt to the Bremerton Naval Yard in Washington State, on the west coast of the US. With a gaping hole in her side. Across nearly 13,000 miles and two oceans.

She was still at Bremerton when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and, in fact, was the only capital ship able to meaningfully respond on the entire west coast of the US at the time, having finished her repairs only a few days before.

Now, don't worry, there's plenty more shenanigans Warspite got up to, like being in overall command of the British forces in the Indian Ocean, Helping in the conquest of Madagascar (to keep it out of French Hands), returning to the Med just in time to pound Italians flat during the invasions of Sicily and Italy itself, accepting the surrender of the Italian Navy at Malta, and taking a pair of Fritz-X Radio-guided missiles to the chin, but for now? This is a pretty good start for you to chew on.

See you soon.

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DAY THE THIRD - THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY

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Day 3 - Battle of Midway Part 1


3-2, in particular, is notable because of the first, in campaign mention… Well, implication, anyway, of Siren Fuckery. We’re going to be hearing a lot about that, especially because today, we’re also going to be discussing Crimson Echoes (in another post), which sets the scene for… Visitors Dyed in Red, both pivotal events in the game’s lore that show… Hints that shit most definitely Isn’t Right.
Akagi The Mysterious And Evil wrote:“The Commander I chose.”

“I swore fealty to ‘them’, otherwise [...]” (Way to play the Pronoun Game, Akagi)

“Perhaps one day… I can escape... This fate.”
These are telling lines. What do they tell? Well, you’ll have to read Visitors Dyed in Red for the whole thing, but suffice to say: Reality isn’t what the characters think it is. The Sirens are behind it all. And Akagi, being a (willing?) pawn of them, knows this.

Existential horror moment number 2: Akagi has died numerous times, not counting the whole “Shipgirls have the memories of their ships.” She is aware of those times. She may even be aware this is a recreation of a battle long before she lived.

And this doubles as an Akagi Is Scary As Fuck moment, because she knows this… And she’s still doing it…

Day 3 is also when... I made a whoopsie. Not a big one, certainly not compared to some tired and boneheaded things happening way later down the line (Or me not having organised recording properly until something like Day 20... koff), and it's one I rallied from, but here's what went down.




Now, why is this an important one? Because of a set of Urgent Commissions that pops up 5 hours before the daily changeover (Which is always at 8AM UTC), and only stays up until approximately 10 or 11AM. They are all really good commissions, with really good XP. Also, there are a maximum of 10 Exercises you're allowed at any one time. Doing two a day (8AM UTC, 8PM UTC, 2AM UTC) leaves two for the next morning. I went to sleep around 6PM. And, of course, you can do nothing until the update or maintennance finishes (Usually around 4PM UTC, although often it stretches an hour or two. Compensation happens regardless for your wasted opportunities, but longer maintennances give extra compensation, such as the famed Apolocubes and Apologems.)

I managed to get everything out of the way on both my main (Avrora) and LP accounts (Amagi) about 10 minutes before the update hit.

So that, overall, was Day 3. A dumbass mistake, a bunch of ships (thankfully enough to fit in one ship update), and some deeply implied Siren Fuckery. Which we'll see, along with the last of the campaign story (right now), and our first event!

Temporary note: I am working on getting the shipgirl update up. It'll take a bit though, and I'm also editing the unmuxed Day 4 and our first event together today.

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SHIP UPDATE: DAY 3

Day 3 is… Kind of light on ships. Partly because it was a slow day, partly because a lot of the early drops had been gotten. Mostly because the Crimson Echoes event had just started. We’ll be talking about the Crimson Echoes Ships in a separate update, so don’t worry, we still have a lot of ships to cover, but… Campaign wise, it was a slow day.

CHICAGO

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MADAM, PLEASE! When I first got Chicago as my secretary, I, a thirsty individual, felt she was a thirst golem (as Grump puts it.) Offering massages. Telling me that nobody’s around to look. Dramatic “Oh no, my clothes are torn!” when she’s injured… Every single line is thirst. Even before she gets attracted to you.

Image Amusingly, when she starts warming up, she cools off and quits with the worst of the teasing

Skillwise, however, she’s decent. Slow to move (26 speed), but Focused Assault is a pretty welcome skill on a Heavy Cruiser, aka “I bring the gun to the Frontline”, and her All Out Assault isn’t bad.

Image A Northampton-class Treaty Cruiser, she’s a tinclad; Hits like bricks with her 8” guns, has less than 2 inches of armour over her vitals.

And her gym costume reflects that.

Image Marblehead has the Gym costume; Chitown’s got no extra skins yet]

(I meant base skin :P )

Image So NFL cheerleader gear, like her sisters

Even so, it’s good gymwear, gotta admit.

But still… She’s one of the really thirsty girls, like Akagi and Atago.

Image Unlike those two, she won’t make a copy of the keys to the commander’s bedroom, though. Taihou also does that.

True. She’ll just pin you down in the office when you’re working.

AJAX

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Oh, wow, we’re just rackin’ ‘em up, thirst wise! So… Ajax. Ajax is a domme. It’s very obvious she’s a domme. She will step on you, she will call you her little piggy, she’ll promise rewards if you’re a good little piggy who does their work (or give them gifts), and she sadistically plays with her enemies, the few times we see her talking to her enemies. Ajax is pretty cool, even if, as a dom, I’m not terribly appreciative of her trying to dom me. I do the stepping round here, dammit! I do! Me!

Image Ajax’s personal story is all about how much she loves stepping on you, regardless of your consent in the matter.

Yeah, that last part is… Eeeesh. Consent’s important, folks!

Anyway, skills! We’ve discussed Full Firepower before (Every 20s, 30-60% chance of Firepower being increased by 20-40% for 10 seconds, so… At higher levels, it has a good chance of proccing for half the fight), and her All Out Assault isn’t… bad? But it’s not on the level of other ships, so if you want “Fuck your wave”... Well, we’ll get to that.

No, post retrofit is where she gets her specialty. And her specialty is hunting down Cruisers larger than she is… A 15-25% damage boost against Heavy Cruisers. That’s a big deal, and may put her on even terms with cruisers bigger than she is. So it’s pretty useful.

Image Which is a reference to her being part of the squad that was tasked with chasing down Graf Spee, as mentioned in the event of the similar name. After that particular bit of excitement, Ajax spent most of her time gallivanting about the Mediterranean, gleefully ambushing and murdering troop transports and running away from anything bigger.

ACHILLES

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Achilles (Apologies, Achilles, I pronounced it “Ah-sheel!”) is peppy, eats a lot (Sometimes a little too much, as denoted by two of her secretary lines. No, Achilles, don’t eat the butte- Now look what that got you, silly!), and she has one of the sickest burns for when you’re at Stranger level affection, and especially for when she’s Disappointed (You will never get this unless you’re a total pervert, or are really bad at fighting other ships)

Stranger: Did you know, Men who are virgins until 30 years old become Wizards! (A meme that started in Japan in 2001 or thereabouts)

Disappointed: Commander, work hard and become a Magician

Pervy commanders might need ice for those burns they just got. And, even better, her voice is still peppy when she says these!

Image Honestly, of the three Leanders, it’s a hard choice to make between Leander and Achilles for ‘whose more likeable’. Ajax can stay in the dumpster with the rest of the trash.

Skillwise, she’s exactly like Ajax, most likely due to her having assisted in the hunt for the Graf Spee (Which we’ll get to, because it’s an archived event.)

Image Of the three Leander-class Cruisers in-game, only Leander does not get ‘Giant Slayer’ as a skill; partly because Leander was busy shooting at Italians and Japanese, but it’s also a subtle reference to their names. Achilles and Ajax were, in Greek Mythology, renowned slayers of giant monsters, while leander was portrayed as generally more-clever and level-headed.

FURUTAKA

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Furutaka is, to put it simply, a klutz. She’s always tripping, often hurting her knees and elbows, and even when nodding off, there’s a better than even chance she’ll smack herself on the head while doing so.

Image She was given the nickname ‘Furious Taco’ from World of Warships, which is probably some sort of horrible sex joke, too.

But she’s a nice klutz, and appreciates her sister Kako, to the point where a few of her lines are basically “Kako’s short with you, but she doesn’t dislike you, Commander! She’s a nice person!” (And, honestly, she is short with you, and she doesn’t seem like a bad person.) She, like Kako, also references their “sister” Aoba, in her opening line where… Well, she pushed too far ahead escorting her, and I think Grump knows the result…

Image Bit of context here; Furutaka-class cruisers were the predecessor to the Aoba-class, so Aoba’s basically the ‘baby sister’ to Furutaka and Kako. And Aoba, as mentioned earlier, was captained by arguably the stupidest man to ever command anything more complex than a toenail.

As a result, during the ‘I Am Aoba’ incident, (Where Aoba’s captain went ‘the obviously hostile fleet shooting at us is clearly Japanese!’) Furutaka broke from the retreating IJN Fleet to cover the retreat while on fire, and proceeded to take about 90 direct hits from 8” guns to the face. Because Aoba’s captain thought that a USN task force that everyone knew was in the area was secretly a Japanese Transport fleet.


Much like Ajax above, Furutaka has Full Firepower and an All Out Assault, and, post retrofit, gets Craven’s Double Torpedoes. Not a bad mix, decent up til retrofit, then more fun post retrofit. I don’t mind Furutaka, although I’m almost certain Grump could name better ships than Craven and Furutaka at “Wall of Torpedoes”

Image A general design trend among the IJN Cruisers and destroyers is a preponderance towards attack skills, with below-average HP totals. After all, if they’re dead before they can shoot you, you don’t get hurt.

Image HMS Formidable is the current queen of the WALL OF SKILL, but Jamie gets to be sad about never getting her because he was too late to the Italian Event

It’ll come back. One day, I will get Bisexual Casanova: The Ship

Image Considering her recent dress skin and her statement of ‘who can get more ladies to swoon, me or the commander’ followed by declaring it no contest, you can argue that Littorio knows full well that she’s omnisexual and good at it.

SHIRATSUYU

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Forgetful, sleepy, a bit of a space cadet, Shiratsuyu is, in her quiet way, a bit like Laffey, except with slightly less murder. Their voices are even similar, although not the same. She forgets where she is, she gets lost, and, in battle, her brakes aren’t working, she gets surprised by the fact the enemy exists every time she uses her skills, and can’t tell who’s hitting her. Strangely adorable.

Image Like her sisters, she has a strong dog motif. Per her head, give her some steak with the bone in, and she’s about as happy as is humanly possible, even if she’s still a klutz.

Funnily enough, that line about her brakes not working is a good reference to her absolutely silly speed. At 40, she’s a zippy one, almost as fast as Laffey with her 40 speed. Skillwise, well, beyond her All Out Assault, she buffs torpedoes by 5-15% (Does not stack with other group torpedo buff effects.)

Image The ‘lack of brakes’ is a real issue for poor lil’ Shiratsuyu. She ended up sinking after colliding with one of the Japanese Oil haulers shortly before a battle, and traded paint with several other vessels in her 10-year career.

So, zippy, not a bad destroyer, all told, and a bit of a space case. That’s Shiratsuyu.

Image She’s overshadowed by her sisters, Yuudachi FUCKING POI, and Shigure, but the entire class named after her were some of the best destroyers made by Japan. As a comparative analog, the class could stand toe-to-toe with the British Tribal-class destroyers, which were originally considered light cruisers.

KARLSRUHE

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A playful and cheery soul, Karlsruhe loves life, she loves play, and she loves money. Just a little bit. I like her, she’s fun.

Skillwise, Karlsruhe gets the Full Firepower skill, that 20s, 30-60% chance of a 20-40% Firepower Buff, a decentish All Out Assault, and, post retrofit, gets Disturbance Strategy, a skill that allows her 10-25% extra damage to torpedo, bomb, and transport ships. Want to own bones at Escort Dailies? Make bomb ships disappear, and collect treasure ships with the greatest of ease? Karlsruhe. 170% efficiency on torps at max limit break, and 135% with AA also helps her deal with those pesky planes.

Image Not much else to say about this one on a historical basis; she was around, she did lots of stuff, she got hamstrung by leadership so pathetically inept that it would make Jellicoe at Jutland look like he has two working brain cells, and HMS Truant killed her by sneaking up and unloading a whole lot of torpedoes into the poor girl. Norwegian waters are cold that time of year.

KOLN

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Koln is efficient. Koln underestimates her own skill (and is deathly afraid of being dismantled.) Koln thinks you’re a pervert. Koln loves her sisters, and has no patience for the short tempered. Koln is also a nerd. And that’s Koln! I would say I dislike Koln’s lines about the commander being a pervert, but… The subtext of the affection system effectively makes Azur Lane’s love more of a harem anime thing than anything else, so… She’s not wrong.

Skillwise, the Koln gets the same two base skills as the rest of the Konigsberg class, but her post retrofit skill? Weeeeelll, that one’s a bit difficult to fulfil, but if you manage it, you’ve got a solid anti-sub ship (She’s a solid anti-sub ship full stop) : Equip the Flettner 282 Kolibri helicopter, and she’ll launch them 10 seconds after the start of the battle, every 30 seconds after that, and they’ll reveal all enemy submarines… And increase the damage to them by 10%

There’s two problems with this. Firstly, it means this only procs twice a battle, maybe three times at most (Obviously, you don’t want it to proc a fourth time, because that’s dangerously close to the “2 minutes to kill everything”, which means you’re doing badly anyway)... And Secondly, you can only get the Fl-282 as an event milestone in Scherzo of Iron and Blood, an event we haven’t got yet in this LP.

Image Koln’s a survivor, having taken some of the hardest hits between her siblings and coming out mostly okay. (read: she’s the only one of the 3 to survive the Norwegian campaign); as for her retrofit skill, before anyone asks, yes, the Flettner 282 is a real thing, and, in fact was the world’s first helicopter to be put into general production; its testing grounds for some time was the roof of Koln’s ‘B’ turret, when she was on Exercises in the Baltic. Also, even after being sunk in 1945, her guns were still operable and were in use until the end of the war.

KONIGSBERG

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It’s kind of amusing Koln is most protective of Konigsberg when it comes to the Commander’s attentions, because, from the moment you’re introduced to her, or, more accurately, from the moment you make her a secretary or raise her affection enough, it’s clear that she is one of the Big Dom Energy girls. Cheery, into BDSM, and a terror to her enemies, it’s safe to say I like Konigsberg. Actually, I like all of her class.

As the leaders of a group of ships often are, Konigsberg has an all Cruiser reload buff of 5-15% by skill level, an All Out Assault, and, like her sister Koln, she has decent anti-sub stats right out of the gate.

Image No retrofit for her because she died first. Pre-retrofit, all three of the K-class cruisers had identical stat layouts with only differing levels of luck to apply to them; what makes them extremely solid is those stats, with them well-balanced overall. Despite the common rarity meaning you’ll be swimming in them, they’re actually worth having about.

LANGLEY

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Langley is a teacher. She’s older than she looks, she’s just short. And flat. And she’s very irritable about bad students. She’ll throw chalk, she’ll yell… She’ll call the MPs on you if you (SIGH) “Special Touch” her (“*phone call* Hello, is this the military police? Yes, it's the same place and the same person…”), although she shows her dommy side once you retrofit her.

Skillwise, she’s a mixed bag. Pre retrofit, her lone skill is useful if you want to level up carriers, because it’s a 5-15% XP buff (A rare skill), but post retrofit… It’s a reload buff of 5-15%, which is nice, for sure, but it’s for CVLs, which, generally speaking, are not great backliners.

Image Langley’s a good egg. She knows she’s obsolete before the fighting even starts, she worries that she should go back to hauling coal instead of being a CV if she does poorly in a battle, but she takes her job of teaching seriously because she is the Oldest CV in the game, having been completed the year Hermes was laid down. The Devs did good giving her the position of ‘Fleet educator’ for other CVs within the Academy system

So… Yeah. I like Langley. I wish she looked older than she did, and thanks to Grump for telling me exactly who to blame for that.

Image Saru needs to stop injecting their fetishes into their art

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Apologies, folks, re-uploading the video for Day 3, I'm kinda shocked I didn't catch such an obvious problem.

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And done. Oh boy...

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So, a little bit extra about the three K-class cruisers of the German navy, as shown above; players of the game will note that they have different colours and livery compared to their younger relations, like Prinz Eugen.

This is because they're not only pre-war designs, but pre-nazi designs.

Of the six capital-grade vessels Germany was allowed to build between 1922 and 1934, Four of them are in Azur Lane; the Konigsberg-class siblings, and Leipzig, leaving only Emden and Nurnberg unaccounted for.

And, as a reflection of that, AL's art teams decided that all four would have livery reflecting their time of service in the Weimar Republic's Reichsmarine, as that's the navy they had been built for.

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I've seen this cursed content while prepping for the next update, so now, you have to.

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Swear to fuck you welsh git....

So, let's put up some more Wall of Words to scroll that fucking stupid-ass meme off the page, regardless of how accurate it is. (Seriously, Pennsylvania is legit great)

Now, my last big effort was talking about essentially the first half of HMS Warspite's Wartime actions, which, by the end of 1941, had culminated in her getting pounded at Crete during the failed defense of the island, and being sent to the West Coast of the USA with a 50-foot wide hole in her side.

At the time (Early June), Japan was not yet hostile, so the Grand Dame passed through the Indian and Pacific Oceans unmolested, with short stops for resupply at Ceylon (What is now Sri Lanka), Manila (in the Philippines), Pearl Harbour, and Esquimalt, BC, before arriving in Mid-august at Bremerton Naval Yard.

So yes, it took her slightly over 2 months to cross some 13,000 miles of open ocean; despite being the second Fast Battleship ever built, Warspite was showing her age, and technology had been outstripping her ability to keep up with the younger and newer members of the fleet.

After Japan's entry into the Second World War, and Warspite's recommissioning once her repairs were completed, she again set sail, this time to act as the flagship of the Royal Navy's presence in the Indian Ocean; working in conjunction with HMS Formidable and HMS Indomitable, the younger sisters of Illustrious and Victorious. Despite probing attacks on both sides, and the attempt by the Japanese navy to have a Taranto 3.0 by attacking Columbo Harbour at Ceylon (which was foiled by a Canadian-crewed PBY Catalina), Warspite's tenure in the Indian Ocean was primarily focused around keeping convoy routes around the eastern half of Africa clear; during this time, Japanese forces raided Sydney Harbour, in Australia, in an attempt to sink her, despite the fact that she was in Kilindini, off the coast of Kenya.

I'll just borrow from wikipedia for the rest of her Indian Ocean Service, which, to be honest, was a fairly quiet time for the Grand Dame.
In August she was involved in Operation Stab, a feint attack on the Andaman Islands to distract the Japanese from US preparations to attack Guadalcanal. She covered the landings at Mahajanga and Tamatave during the Allied invasion of Madagascar in September. Her surface radar was replaced in Durban in October and Captain Packer, her former Assistant Gunnery Officer at Jutland, took command in January 1943. The remainder of Warspite's deployment was uneventful. She underwent a short refit in Durban in April and returned to the United Kingdom in May 1943, having sailed approximately 160,000 miles since the war began.
After a short refit and yet another attempt to fix her damaged steering, which continued to plague her from the grand battle some 27 years before that point, Warspite was tasked with assisting in the allied operations to 'Stab into the soft underbelly of the Axis'; namely, the allied invasions of Sicily and Italy. This is where she got her nickname, and where she ended up enduring the most grievous injury in her career.

Again cribbing from Wikipedia, as I am a lazy git;
Warspite was detached to refuel at Malta on 12 July, the first visit by a British battleship since December 1940. On 17 July she bombarded Catania in support of an unsuccessful attack by the 8th Army, although her steering problem temporarily delayed her taking up position. She returned to Malta at high speed on 18 July, avoiding several air attacks during the night. On her return Admiral Cunningham inadvertently coined the nickname by which she would be known thereafter when he signalled: "Operation well carried out. There is no question when the old lady lifts her skirts she can run."
Now, in both World Wars, Italy had proven itself to be a fair-weather friend, with the nation coming in late on the Entente side in the First, and again coming in Late on the Axis side in the Second (mostly because Mussolini wanted to conquer Greece, which proceeded to kick his ass until Hitler retasked nearly a third of his army slated for the attack into the Soviet Union to unfuck Mussolini's mess); by September 1943, as allied forces made landfall on Calabria and crossed the straits of Messina to begin the long bloody march up the boot to kick Mussolini's ass, Italian morale was in the toilet, and Nazi forces were moving to intercept allied troops with the tacit knowledge that Italy would surrender in short order.

And so it was, that on September 8th, 1943, Italy was the first nation of the Axis to surrender unconditionally. And Warspite, who had spent the vast majority of her gunnery time bullying the Italian navy, was chosen as the representative for the Regia Marina to lay down their swords, escorting Vittorio Veneto, Italia, and Giulio Cesare to internment at Malta, so as to deny Germany the opportunity to seize some 200 warships that were at the ready.

And three days later, on September 15th, while Warspite was off the coast of Salerno and ruining Nazis' days by blowing up their ammunition stockpiles, she was attacked by the same elite Luftwaffe group that, in February 1941, had nearly killed Illustrious.

The dry summary is as follows:
Early in the afternoon she was attacked by a Luftwaffe squadron of Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter bombers and then, from high altitude, by three Dornier Do 217 bombers from KG 100 armed with an early guided bomb, the Fritz X. She was hit directly once; a second near-miss ripped open the torpedo bulges while the third missed altogether. The bombs that did hit her struck near the funnel, cutting through her decks and making a 20-foot hole in the bottom of her hull, crippling her. Although the damage had been considerable, Warspite's casualties amounted to only nine killed and fourteen wounded.
Now, that sounds plenty rough, but it doesn't go into the detail, and frankly, this is the wound that Warspite never recovered from, so let's see what supplemental information can apply to fill in the gaps.
One bomb penetrated six decks before exploding in the number 4 boiler room. This explosion put out all fires and blew out the double bottom. A second Fritz-X near-missed Warspite, holing her at the waterline. She took on a total of 5,000 tonnes of water and lost steam and consequently all power, both to the ship herself and to all her systems. She was towed to Malta by tugs Hopi and Moreno, then returned to Britain via Gibraltar and was out of action for nearly 9 months; she was never completely repaired, but returned to action to bombard German positions in Normandy.
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That little image, by the by, is from the 1952 summary "H.M Ships Damaged or Sunk by Enemy Action, 3rd Sept 1939- 2nd Sept. 1945" Warspite's damage takes up nearly 4 pages in the 400-page book.

The Japanese, in internal dispatches, called Warspite 'Scarred, but Unsinkable'. I think you are getting the picture as to the how and why.

At Rosyth Dockyards, during her repair from being hit by what amounted to a Guided Missile, Warspite's 6-inch guns were removed and plated in, and a concrete caisson covered the hole left by the missile. One of her boiler rooms and the X turret could not be repaired, remaining out of action for the remainder of her career. She left Greenock on 2 June 1944 with six 15-inch guns, eight 4-inch anti-aircraft guns and forty pom poms, joining Bombardment Force D of the Eastern Task Force of the Normandy invasion fleet off Plymouth two days later.

And on D-Day, June 6th, 1944, Warspite was the first capital vessel to open fire, laying down a two-hour barrage upon the Villerville Battery in support of the British forces landing at Sword beach, before moving to Utah, Omaha, and Gold beaches respectively over the following six days, allowing her exhausted frame little respite in punishing German forces that tried to move to counter the landings.

Much like the monitor HMS Terror, who spent months terrorizing Italians in North Africa (because 2,000 pound 'headache pills' are a thing), Warspite fired her guns in support of the landings that she had completely worn away her barrel liners when she was ordered to return for a final refit. Heading back to Rosyth once more, Warspite gained another feather in her heavily-adorned cap, being the first British battleship to sail through the straits of Dover since the war had begun, avoiding German coastal artillery, air strikes, and other attempts to assassinate her, she ended up being cursed once more, striking a 1500-pound naval mine that disabled half of her engines.

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Even after repairs that took until August, Warspite was left with one dead propeller shaft, limiting her top speed to fifteen knots, though, by that point, after all the abuse she had endured, the Admiralty considered her to be a bombardment ship, instead of an active combatant in fleet actions.

Warspite arrived off Ushant on 25 August 1944 and attacked the coastal batteries at Le Conquet and Pointe Saint-Mathieu during the Battle for Brest, where her big guns were happily encouraged by the US forces attempting to capture the fortified city. The U.S. VIII Corps eventually captured "Festung Brest" on 19 September, but by then Warspite had moved on to the next port.

In company with the monitor Erebus she carried out a preparatory bombardment of targets around Le Havre prior to Operation Astonia on 10 September, leading to the capture of the town two days later. (This is why Erebus has a unique line when she's deployed with the Grand Dame, I might add)

Her final task was to support an Anglo-Canadian operation to open up the port of Antwerp, which had been captured in September, by clearing the Scheldt Estuary of German strongholds and gun emplacements. With the monitors Erebus and Roberts she bombarded targets on Walcheren Island on 1 November 1944, returning to Deal the next day, having fired her guns for the last time.

Even then, exhausted, beaten, and utterly defiant at everything that had been thrown at her, Warspite had survived the worst two wars could throw at her; by the time Japan Surrendered, there were already calls to preserve her as a Museum vessel, in no small part due to her long and storied history, but the British Government, literally could not afford it, having run the country into immense amounts of Debt while fighting.

So, her last journey started in 1946, when she was approved for scrapping.

And there, the Grand Dame decided to not go quietly, but instead live up to her name once more.

On 19 April 1947, Warspite departed Portsmouth for scrapping at Faslane, on the River Clyde. On the way, she encountered a severe storm and the cable of the tug Bustler snapped, whilst the other tug, Melinda III, slipped her tow. In storm force conditions Warspite dropped one of her anchors in Mount's Bay, which did not hold, and the storm drove her onto Mount Mopus Ledge near Cudden Point. Later refloating herself she went hard aground a few yards away in Prussia Cove.

In 1950 an attempt to re-float her was tried. A large crowd and the media watched on as the salvage crew set to work. Despite the use of 24 compressor tanks pumping air into her tanks, the salvage failed. There was insufficient depth of water to float her clear of the reef in a rising south westerly gale. The salvage boat Barnet, standing guard overnight under the Warspite’s bows was holed in the engine room, towed off and eventually drifted ashore at Long Rock, a few miles to the west. However, by August the battleship was finally beached off St Michael’s Mount and after further salvage another attempt was made to refloat her in November. The Falmouth tug Masterman spent the night on the Hogus Rocks after failing to tow Warspite; and her sister tug Tradesman had 60 feet (18 m) of wire wrapped around her propeller when trying to haul Masterman off the rocks.

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You say you have no subject
And your brushes all have dried;
But come to Marazion
At the ebbing of the tide.

And look you out to seaward,
Where my Lady battle scarred
Hugs the rock that is more welcome,
Than the shameful breakers yard.

Paint her there upon the sunset
In her glory and despair,
With the diadem of victory
Still in flower upon her hair.

Let her whisper as she settles
Of her blooding long ago,
In the mist than mingles Jutland
With the might of Scapa Flow.

Let her tell you, too, of Narvick
With its snowy hills, and then
Of Matapan, Salerno
And the shoals of Walcheren;

And finally of Malta,
When along the purple street
Came in trail the Roman Navy
To surrender at her feet.

Of all these honours conscious,
How could she bear to be
Delivered to the spoiler
Or severed from the sea ?

So hasten then and paint her
In the last flush of her pride
On the rocks of Marazion,
At the ebbing of the tide.

-Commander RAB Mitchell, RN.

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DAY THE FOURTH - THE DEATH OF YORKTOWN

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Day Four - A Death In The Family


Well, this is where things start becoming, apart from the events, a bit of a routine. Press forward a little each day. Level up ships, limit break them, enhance them, do the dailies...

We still have enough to talk about, however, because the end of this chapter… Is the death of Yorktown.

The same Yorktown we will eventually get ourselves, but… That’s due to Wisdom Cube fuckery, which is Siren fuckery, and… It’s one of those things where if you think about it too hard, it leads to shudders. Y’know, like the pokemon who are stated to kill people in their bios. It’s a somewhat apt comparison, too.

Image I’ve talked about the abuse Yorktown took at Coral Sea, and she was still only partially repaired when she deployed to Midway, where Hiryuu’s retaliation for the ‘Five minutes of fate’ ended up hammering the poor girl twice over. Yorktown’s air wings, flown from Enterprise, put the final nail in Hiryuu’s coffin, and had already claimed Souryuu as a kill earlier in the day.

In-game, and personality-wise, Yorktown’s despair and depression is two-fold. Firstly, she died before it was confirmed that Midway was to be the pivot where the IJN ended up on the back foot for the rest of the war, and secondly, her wreck is one of the deepest in the world, being some 3 and a half miles below the surface, deep in the abyss where next to no life exists.


This, alas, is where the story currently ends, and part of the blame is, apparently, on folks pressuring the AL crew to tell a different story, one where, as Grump would (and has) put it, “The IJN Did Nothing Wrong!”

Image Also known as Kantai Collection fans.

If AL adds I-8, I’ll throw a crowbar at someone. Kantai Collection’s fans call her ‘Warcrimes-chan’ for a reason.

For obvious reasons, I hope the pressure is not bowed to, since, as it stands, the story is tense, and also encourages people to look at WW2 history once they’re told (or realise) the fights are effectively anime story forms of actual WW2 naval engagements.

Image Manjuu’s on record as sticking to their guns, and they’re working on getting Chapter 4-8 properly storyboarded and sorted; the IJN advance into the Solomons was a bloodbath.

So there we go. Apart from the fact that the Crimson Echoes event, which we'll be dealing with very soon, began on this day of recording, Day 4 (and a bit of Day 5) is, essentially, a day in the life.

Although god-fucking dammit, some of these future bosses... :evil:

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SHIP UPDATE: DAY 4

We’ve… Actually got a pretty small docket for this one. But what the hey, we’ve got some ships, so let’s talk about them!

SUFFOLK

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Suffolk looks like a ditzy sheepgirl, and, to be fair, that’s exactly what she is. She’s noted for cloud-gazing, getting lost, and being the laziest member of the Kent class cleanup crew (to the eternal irritation of the Maid Corps.)

Image It is strongly implied that Suffolk is the head gardener of the Maid Corps, and has a way with greenery that makes the other maids look like rank amateurs.

Thing is, Suffolk is squishy, but she hits hard. Not only does she have Full Firepower, with its usual buff of 30-60% chance to improve firepower by 20-40%, not only does she have a pretty decent All-Out-Assault like her sister ship Kent, she also has Double Gun. Like Double Torpedo, it’s a chance to fire an extra round… With her Main Gun. 15-25% chance, but if you put a gun with a relatively good rate of fire on her, she’ll wreck face. Until she gets blown to bits, that is.

Also counted in her abilities is to be slightly less irritating to get as a build than her sister.

Image Historically, Suffolk was pretty much the everyman’s vessel in World War 2; she went everywhere, fought everything, and somehow managed to avoid the worst of possible retaliation, including being essential in shadowing the Bismarck after Hood’s destruction at the Denmark Strait.

It’s implied that her habit of stargazing is due to her two years overseeing arctic convoys, as going above the arctic circle meant she’d become very proficient at navigation without using a compass.


LEXINGTON

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Lexington is an idol singer. She thinks of herself as a big sister, especially to folks like Sara. And she’s a giggly and cheerful mentor. I kinda like Lexington, even if she is drawn by… Saru (mutter grumble)

Image Lady Lex is honestly one of the more-stylish characters in the game, especially with her Chinese New Year’s Quipao skin from 2019. And she is the big sister of American Aviation, being CV 2; operating in tandem with Saratoga, Lexington was almost-wholly responsible for parenting the concept of American Naval Aviation, which Langley had proved was viable as a concept.

She’s not terribly notable skillwise, having a Fleet Carrier skill (per airstrike, a buff of firepower to the vanguard of 15-30% for 8 seconds) and Artillery Cover, a special barrage every 20-10 seconds with 20.3cm guns.

Image Skill and stat-wise, Lexington and Saratoga are identical in every way except luck, until Sara got her retrofit. Lex, being Dive Bomber happy, like her sister, can sling out walls of boom much faster than her more-balanced or torpedo-centric relatives do, and she’s reasonably nippy on the reload cycle, to boot.

So yeah, Lexington: Big sister to many, idol singer, mentor to folks, and a good carrier.

Image Lexington is an idol for two reasons; during the inter-war years, she toured the American coastlines, letting people see a ‘whole real aircraft carrier’, which was plenty impressive in and of itself, but after a hydroelectric dam failed due to water shortages in 1929, Lexington used her engine turbines to supply power to the entire city of Tacoma, Washington, and ferried relief supplies to Managua, in Nicaragua, after the 1931 earthquake.

Image In war, however, the Lady was laid low at the Coral Sea, when she and Yorktown tangled with the Crane siblings of Japan. After violently deleting Shouhou and beating the tar out of Shoukaku, Lexington was badly wounded by Zuikaku’s retaliation.

Sadly, due to an unknown spark source and fuel fumes from the main aviation fuel tank, Lexington ended up dealing with severe internal explosions and fires, causing her to end up being scuttled the day after Coral Sea’s conclusion.


BOGUE

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Ah, Bogue. Bogue is, despite her claims of being a pro baseballer, she’s more pro-am than anything else… At least until she retrofits. She loves baseball, she loves the fast pitch, and she loves sinking submarines. I like her, and for the longest time, she was a mainstay of my main account’s main fleet.

Image Bogue holds the record for ‘Most Submarines sunk by a single ship’, with kill credits for 11 U-boats and two Japanese I-boats.

Thing is… She gets outshone pretty quickly. Yes, she has the Quick Takeoff many of us know and love (5-15% chance of an immediate second airstrike when she launches one, which can proc multiple times), and she has a 5-15% buff to the main fleet’s AA when she’s retrofitted, but… That doesn’t really save her from being outshone by so many carriers.

Image Honestly, Bogue didn’t get up to anything ‘shiny’ or impressive; she was an escort carrier, first of her class no less, she escorted convoys her entire career, and she did a damn good job of it, considering her scoreboard, which, I might add, earned her a Presidential Unit Citation.

Post-war, she remained in service until 1955, was retired in 1959, and scrapped in Japan.

Which is a shame, because I like the dork, and I’m pretty sure Grump does too.

Image You could argue that her passion for baseball is due to the sport being Japan’s national sport, and that’s a fair argument to make. Now if only she’d not wear a microskirt when pitching.

Grump, this is Thirsty Ships, the game. What are the odds of that happening?

Image The same odds of me finding Long Island tolerable in any dosage.

THATCHER

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Even though we got her today, we’re… Not really dealing with her yet. Grump is determined to put the Fletcher Collective in one or two posts of their own, and I can’t really disagree with him, because the vast majority of them are unremarkable except for their personalities (sometimes not even that), and we’re lucky there’s only 17 in the game, because there have been 175 Fletcher Class ships.

Imagine, if you will, one of those fight scenes in the matrix. Except there’s 175 ships. And most of them are tripping over their own feet, spacing out, eating large baskets of sandwiches, and have already defeated the hero because the very first thing they did was fire their 5-inch batteries and torpedoes all at once. That’s the Fletcher Collective.

Image Cleveland commented that all of the Fletchers like to play intramural sports like soccer together. That does a number on the field, as you can imagine.

As Ablative noted in the Beach Discord… “The full set of Fletchers is approximately half a Laffey of torpedoes per second.”

Image Fletcher herself snarks that her parents were probably rabbits, considering the whole ‘175 of the same class’. Amusingly, the Benson-class was the parent design for the Fletcher, and in AL, the Bensons, including Laffey, have bunny themes.

Shit, did we get Bailey yet? I can’t wait to talk about Bailey…

...No. Damn.

SALT BONUS - ENTERPRISE

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Enterprise is a survivor. And that implies more than just her toughness. She’s seen shit. And as a result, she tries to cope by being the best there is. And, in at least one reality, that’s led to consequences. But we’ll save those for later, when it’s relevant. She’s a warrior, hiding deep pain, and she’s very good at it. In fact, she’s famous for it, and despised by her enemies, who call her… The Gray Ghost.

Image Reported sunk no less than 3 times by the Japanese Navy, Enterprise was at one point the only active american Carrier in the entire Pacific. Which her crew commemorated with a banner titled ‘Enterprise vs. Japan’

Image Enterprise won.

Skillwise… Ah, this is where the salt is revealed. You see, Enterprise is a godsend when she’s on your side, with her sole skill, Lucky E, having not only a 40-70% chance of dealing double damage with any airstrike… But if it procs, congrats, nothing except guaranteed hit attacks will hurt her for 8 seconds.

Remember, this is per airstrike. So if, say, you’re facing up against her in an Exercise, and it procs, and it procs every single fucking time after that… You’re at a risk of breaking crockery.

As such, Enterprise is a big part of the Exercise Meta (along with WARSPITE for artillery, and Hiryuu for their utter bullshit we’ll get to sooner or later), and I, also, despise her. This is nothing to do with a recent few days where I’ve had multiple infini-procs on Enty’s Lucky E.

Nothing at all... :evil:

Image Salt aside, I like Enty for more than her balanced stat spread and willingness to drive people to drink. As a character, she’s very much the middle sister of her family, and, as the only survivor, she’s honestly suffering from a lot of repressed survivor’s guilt, including asking if she could somehow transfer her infamous amounts of luck to her sisters, and expresses desires to learn about things beyond combat.

Considering Yorktown, Hornet, and her Half-sister Wasp were all sunk during the war, it’s amazing that Enterprise is as functional as she is; I’ve known people with less trauma completely collapse mentally and emotionally.

She’s also a bit of a dork in the christmas celebrations, where she’ll happily leap into the role of Santa Claus for the entire base, and give presents to everyone, even past enemies.


Oh, and let’s not forget her hatred of eating her greens (I sympathise), and fear of lemons.

Image Less a fear and more of a dislike; it’s from an official trading card collaboration, but has become memetic due to the fanbase suggesting that Essex, of the CV class following Enty’s lead, will threaten her senior with the citrus.

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So, due to pestering, haranguing, and a not-inconsiderable amount of 'Someone has to fill the empty space between posts', I put out a challenge of 'Name a girl from the rosters, from a fleet that's not been done yet, and I'll do a write-up on her'

And the only response was 'Chicago'.

So, let's take a deeper poke at the fourth Northampton-class, her life, her adventures, and her death at the hands of the Japanese Navy.

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Isn't that an adorable baby picture? It was taken a month after her official commissioning

So, first off, let's get the technical horseshit out of the way; this goes for the class as a whole, but I doubt anyone interested in this will want a writeup on Northampton or Houston anytime soon.

So, the Northampton-class cruisers are all treaty-limited heavy cruisers, meaning that they were allowed a maximum weight of 10,000 tons. Their predecessors, the Pensacola-class, toted ten guns in four turrets, using a 2-3-3-2 arrangement, but to save weight the Norths got 9 guns in 3 turrets, a standard design feature that was used on virtually every large-gun warship made by the US from 1930 onwards; two turrets forwards, and one aft of the superstructure.

This actually allowed them thicker armour for their size and treaty limitations, but not enough to remove them from the title of 'tinclad', because they'd be unable to stop hits from 4" guns, much less the 8" beatsticks they were expected to face. (There's a whole pile of political reasons, but the long and short of it is that until the First London Naval Treaty, the US was trying to classify cruisers as 'heavy' or 'Light' based on armour thickness, not gun bore. The Pensacolas and Northamptons were originally planned to be light cruisers with the biggest fucking swinging dicks they could mount.)

So, the fiddly details are basically as follows:

Nine 8" guns? Check.
Four 5" guns as secondary weapons? Check.
Utter Bucketloads of Anti-aircraft guns on just about any flat surface? As of 1942, check.

Tissue paper for armour? Check.

And a top speed of 33 knots, making her reasonably nippy. (As a comparison, HMS Javelin, the purple-haired starter of the RN, topped out at 38 knots)

And that's the fiddly bits over with, so let's get to the meat and potatoes of things.

Chicago came into being late in the inter-war period, and actually spent much of her pre-war career on the West coast of the Americas, acting as the flagship and leader of the First Cruiser Scouting Force, a position she held until 1940.

For the most part, as tensions ratcheted themselves upwards during the Depression, Chicago had a fairly quiet life, training her crews, and generally being all responsible, with the only major incident being when she got roundly smacked by a heavy freighter in thick fog; just like when you're in a car, thick fog is evil stuff, and unlike a car that can stop in a hundred feet or less, a 600 foot long cruiser and a 500 foot long, fully-loaded cargo freighter have stopping distances measured in significant fractions of miles.

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Bonk

Three men died, a fourth had an arm amputated, and repairs took from October 1933 to March 1934.

Six years later, in early 1940, as the rest of the world fell to bloodshed and mayhem (and as the US sold weapons to every side except Japan), Chicago was one of the first 6 ships in the US Navy to be equipped with radar; the CXAM radar set very quickly becoming the standard Radar of US ships until the SG radar system was completed. (You might know the SG set due to its use in-game, being a very strong accuracy and evasion booster, and probably the only thing that Helena trusted to work while in the throes of her pre-retrofit depression)

And then shit hit the fan, the US found itself at war, Japan found itself gleefully expanding everywhere, and it was all hands on deck for everyone, Chicago being no exception.

In the first week of the war, she had been deployed as an escort for Lady Lex, as part of Task Force 11; while the flag of 'who was leading' tended to be passed between Lexginton and Saratoga, depending on who had been more damaged at the time, Chicago acted as guard and surface scout for the fleet, in much the same way her older sister Northampton did for Enterprise and Yorktown.

In the early stages of 1942, with the USN stretched thin, the RN stretched thin, and the IJN spreading like the amorphous blob of tendrils, teeth, and warcrimes that is the protagonist of the recently released game 'Carrion', Chicago escorted Yorktown during the battle of Coral Sea, where Lady Lex met her untimely demise; I mentioned in an earlier post that Coral Sea was an unmitigated defeat for the USN due to the loss of an extremely vital Fleet carrier and the crippling of a second; what I failed to mention is that on the strategic level, Coral Sea was the first time the IJN had been forced back from a planned invasion, which Chicago and her companions took advantage of.

Specifically, on the 7th of May, 1942, three days after Coral Sea's commencement as a battle, Chicago's task force jumped the massing IJN transport fleet that was preparing to invade Port Moresby, and proceeded to put the boots to the Japanese forces until the Transport Ships were forced to retreat; with the combination of heavy naval resistance, a loss of airpower force projection with the sinking of Shouhou and damaging of Shoukaku, and, in a few months' time, the destruction of the majority of the Kido Butai at Midway, the naval invasion of More Moresby was removed from the table entirely, forcing the Japanese to attack the city overland instead.

That was the first time Japanese forced had been forced to retreat on a tactical and strategic scale, and the morale boost for that was vastly important to the allies as a whole.

Shortly thereafter, while Chicago was resupplying at Sydney Harbour in Australia, the Japanese sent in a force of midget submarines to plink at targets of opportunity, with the express orders to 'Kill the Warspite', which IJN Intel had in Australia, instead of on the east coast of Africa (Where the Grand Dame was busy terrorizing the Vichy French). At the first sign of the Japanese submarines, Chicago opened fire, forcing the submarines to try to evade; one got tangled in a torpedo net, another hit a mine and sank outside of the harbour, and the one Chicago shot at fired both of its torpedoes, missing the cruiser both times; one due to hitting the (mostly-empty) Ferry SS Kuttabul, and the other failed to detonate entirely, skidding ashore on a nearby island instead.

And then came the first battle of Savo Island, also known as the first battle of Ironbottom sound. Players of the game will know this from the event 'Prelude under the Moon', where you got to experience the desperate last stand of USS Astoria, Quincy, and Vincennes, as a superior-numbered and skilled Japanese Cruiser squadron broke through allied lines and ambushed the three New Orleans-class heavy cruisers. Chicago ended up as Senior vessel in the southern force after the overall commander, on HMAS Australia, redeployed his ship after a tactical meeting.

Let us crib from Wikipedia for a moment.
Anticipating a naval attack to occur during the night, Crutchley split his forces around Savo Island, with Australia leading Canberra, USS Chicago, and two destroyers on patrol of the southern waters, a second group of three heavy cruisers and two destroyers to patrol the northern passage, while the rest of the ships protected the transports or served as picket ships.
Nothing occurred during the night of 7–8 August, and the same arrangement was assumed at 18:30 for the night of 8–9 August.
At 20:45, Crutchley was recalled to meet urgently with US Admiral Richmond K. Turner, overall commander of the amphibious landings, aboard the transport USS McCawley to discuss the proposed withdrawal of the carrier groups, and Australia left the patrol group.
The meeting concluded at 01:15 on 9 August, and instead of returning to the southern patrol, Crutchley ordered Australia to patrol around the transports.
Just before 02:00, the southern patrol force was attacked by a six-ship Japanese task force, and Canberra was irreparably damaged. Three US cruisers were lost in the subsequent attack on the northern patrol force.
Now, before you rip and tear into Poor Chicago for not alerting the northern force, which, she really should have, we have to look at the chain of command.

Admiral Crutchley, aboard the HMAS Australia, had never transferred local command to Chicago or HMAS Canberra, which were the two heaviest assets in the south force during the battle. Chicago herself got banged about fairly heavily by the attacking forces, which, coincidentally, was Admiral Goto's Cruiser Division 6, Aka. Aoba the Shit, Kinugasa, Furutaka, and Kako. (On the way home Kako would be torpedoed and sunk because Goto ordered a cessation of anti-submarine measures)

As a result of Not being Given Local Command, Chicago's captain, one Howard D. Bode, did not order his ship's radios to contact the Astoria in the Northern force, and instead turned to lifesaving efforts in the part of the burning and crippled HMAS Canberra, which was scuttled that morning.

An Inquiry after the battle laid the blame for the destruction of the three New Orleans-class ships on Bode's feet, though did not go so far as to actually censure him or punish him beyond being named as the primary contributor. Bode, upon hearing of the inquiry's findings in April 1943, shot himself, dying the following day, as Chicago was being repaired from the damage she had taken in what was widely considered the worst defeat the US Navy had ever been involved in.

Let me correct myself here. As shown below, Chicago died before Captain Bode did, putting the lie to my statement of her still being under repair at the time Bode shot himself. Let us carry on, then.

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Japanese torpedo went right through her nose.

Chicago returned to the battlefield just in time for the fifth major naval battle of Guadalcanal, Rennell Island.

Again, let's borrow from wikipedia for the overall summary, but this battle was a bit of a clusterfuck.
On 27 January, she sailed from Nouméa to escort a Guadalcanal convoy. On the night of the 29th, as the ships approached that bitterly contested island, Japanese aircraft attacked the force and the Battle of Rennell Island was underway.
During the attacks, two burning Japanese planes silhouetted Chicago, providing enough light for further torpedo attacks; two hits caused severe flooding and loss of power. By the time the attack ended, work by the crew had checked Chicago's list.
Louisville (Chicago's sister ship, incidentally) took the disabled ship in tow, and was relieved by the Fleet tug Navajo the following morning.
Fighters from the nearby carrier Enterprise provided CAP for the wounded cruiser as she tried to make her way away from the battle area. During the afternoon, the Japanese attacked again with 20 G4M “Betty” bombers.
Chicago was hit by four torpedoes, one forward of the bridge and three others in her engineering spaces. The patrolling fighters downed 18 of the attacking planes, but the damage was done.
Captain Ralph O. Davis gave the order to abandon ship shortly before Chicago sank stern first, 20 minutes later.
Now, here's the clusterfuck part.

How did the Japanese planes get so close without alerting the American forces, catching Chicago flat-footed?

Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen.

Again borrowing from Wikipedia, let's have a summary of the opening action.
At sunset, as TF 18 headed northwest 50 miles north of Rennell Island and 160 miles south of Guadalcanal, several of Giffen's ships detected unidentified aircraft on radar 60 miles west of their formation. Having previously insisted on absolute radio silence, Giffen gave no orders about what to do about the unidentified contacts, or any orders at all, for that matter. With the setting of the sun, TF 18's combat air patrol (CAP) from the two escort carriers returned to their ships for the night, leaving Giffen's ships without air cover.

The radar contacts were, in fact, the approaching 31 Japanese torpedo bombers, who circled around to the south of TF 18 so that they could attack from the east, with the black backdrop of the eastern sky behind them. From this direction, the Japanese bombers were hidden by the night sky, but Giffen's ships were silhouetted against the twilight of the western horizon.
Yeah. The italic emphasis is mine. I'd suggest a chorus of little angels, floating about his head, screaming "YOU FUCKED UP, BOY."

In the initial attack wave, Chicago's AA crews took apart most of the planes arrayed at her; however, two burning Mitsubishi G4M 'Betty's, blazing from fuel fires and hits, refused to sink, instead crashing off of the cruiser's port flank, and silhouetting Chicago, which made it child's play for the followup wave to plant two torpedoes into her side, immediately after Admiral Giffen had ordered his squadron to stop evasive action, as he believed the attack was over.

Chicago's crew fought valiantly to save her, and frankly, American Damage Control did a damn good job of it, even as Louisville took her under tow to disengage from further hostilities. Admiral William 'Bull' Halsey also ordered all measures be taken to save Chicago, including pushing Enterprise closer to deploy her planes in a heavy defensive screen overnight, and ordering the two escort carriers of TF 18 to get their Combat patrols up as soon as dawn broke.

Some additional quotes:
Lieutenant Edward Jarman was the Chicago’s air defense officer. He recalled the near miss.
“We filled one torpedo plane so full of steel that it almost exploded on the Chicago. It missed our boat by 10 feet. It burned three or four minutes, silhouetting us for the second wave.”
Fed by aviation fuel, the wreckage burned brightly, illuminating the cruiser and making it an easy target for other approaching planes. “They all concentrated on the Chicago,” Jarman said, “apparently mistaking her for a battleship.”
At 7:40 pm, a torpedo hit the after engine room on the starboard side of the Chicago with a thunderous explosion. Radio technician John Erby was near where the torpedo hit. “I was in the starboard passageway when the first torpedo struck not 30 feet away from me. Not long after the torpedo hit, the communications failed and we had to leave the passageway,” he recalled.
“We joined a gang trying to put out fires and we fought desperately to save the ship.” Two minutes later, a torpedo wake was sighted closing in fast. Almost immediately, a second torpedo exploded against the starboard side, hitting near the No. 3 fire room and forward engine room.

As a result of the first hit, propeller shafts 1, 2, and 3 stopped immediately. Control of the ship was lost as the rudder locked at 10 degrees to the left and no longer responded to commands from the bridge. Four compartments, including the after engine room and the No. 4 fire room, were flooded. Water began to slowly enter the crew’s mess. The Chicago, now listing to starboard, began to settle by the stern. Emergency diesel generators were started to provide power for lighting, electrical fire pumps, submersible pumps, and radios.

The second torpedo hit flooded the No. 3 fire room and forward engine room. The machine shop was demolished. Several small fires broke out. The starboard list gradually increased to 11 degrees. Soon afterward, the No. 4 propeller shaft stopped, leaving the Chicago dead in the water.
Albert Bartholomew, the ship’s carpenter, led a damage control party deep into the ship to close critical hatches. The party “worked like dogs to keep us afloat,” he said. “They swam 30 feet in water chin deep, dodging heavy tables and chairs as the ship rolled, to dog down hatches.”
The following afternoon, at nearly 4 PM Local time, with Enterprise less than 50 miles away, and some 24 heavily-armed Wildcat fightercraft over the two warships, the Japanese inadvertently managed to successfully feint and strike once more. Enterprise' radar picked up a squadron of a dozen torpedo bombers closing fast towards her, and constant harassment from Japanese recon planes had scattered the combat air patrols over both her and Chicago northwards, just in time for the northbound torpedo squadron to pop up some 65 miles away, on a direct course for the storied carrier.

However, as interceptors were spotted by the torpedo bombers, including a half-dozen redeployed from the guard detail over Chicago, the Japanese bombers decided to cut their losses, turning sharply westward. And Directly towards the crippled cruiser.

The battle that followed was a short but frenzied event that took place at high speed in close proximity to the stricken cruiser. With the CXAM radar out of commission due to damage in the first torpedo attack, the incoming bombers were sighted by a lookout on the Chicago at a distance of seven miles. Eleven bombers were counted speeding in low and fast from Starboard, with only the destroyer La Vallette between the bombers and their target.

At least two Japanese planes fell into the water off the starboard side of the Chicago, testament to the skill and discipline of the crippled ship's gun crews, and the bravery of the destroyer's own guns. A third Betty approached as if to crash into the cruiser. With one engine on fire, the plane sped toward the cruiser as antiaircraft gunners tried to shoot it down. The flaming plane missed the stern of the ship and hit the water off the port quarter.
Moments after the bombers had passed, five torpedo wakes were sighted approaching the Chicago from the starboard beam. Under a tow that was making only three knots, the cruiser was in no position to take evasive action. The first torpedo hit well forward at 4:24 pm, showering the forecastle and bridge with water and debris. Only seconds later, three more torpedoes exploded in rapid succession, some hitting near the already damaged engineering and engine rooms. The fifth torpedo passed off to the stern.

Standing between the attacking bombers and the Chicago, the La Vallette was hit by a single torpedo on the port side. Twenty-two crewmen, including damage control and engineering officer Lieutenant Eli Roth, were killed in the blast. The explosion flooded the forward engine and boiler rooms almost immediately, with the water soon spreading to the after boiler room. Quick action by damage control parties managed to contain the flooding. The La Vallette survived the ordeal and was eventually towed to port. The Chicago would not be so fortunate.
“We got off every survivor on rafts. We had nearly 300 recruits, but all were orderly and waited orders. There was no panic.” The Chicago rolled over to starboard and began to sink stern first with colors flying. “She laid over on her starboard side and went down fast but smooth. She even fired a five-inch salute to herself as she went down—shells exploding from the heat of the torpedo-set fires.”

Some crew watched the ship go down while floating in the water. “It was like watching someone I have known and loved go down under the waves. All the men floating in the water cheered.” At 4:43 pm, 19 minutes after the first torpedo hit, the bow disappeared below the surface. The proud cruiser Chicago was now only a memory.

The destroyers Waller, Edwards, and Sands joined the Navajo in rescuing the crew of the Chicago. Planes and ships continued to search the area until all survivors were believed to be recovered. Of the 1,130 officers and men aboard ship at the time of the attacks, 1,069 were rescued. In his official action report, Captain Davis praised his crew for “their excellent and fearless work in keeping the ship afloat after the first action and for their courageous and orderly conduct in abandoning ship when the ship was sinking.”
USS Chicago was the last of the Northampton-class cruisers to have been sunk in battle; her younger sister Houston had fallen against superior numbers off of the Java coast (And was credited with sinking five IJA transports with torpedoes, despite not having any torpedo launchers), while Northampton herself, the quiet a dutiful guardian of the three Yorktown-class carriers at Coral Sea, Midway, and Santa Cruz, ended up being claimed in the red waters of the Ironbottom Sound.

You'll note that I did not once talk about her in-game characterization during all this.

It's because her in-game characterization has no references to her history, how hard she fought, or even the mistakes that killed her friends, and, eventually, her.
Last edited by Salted Grump on Fri Jul 31, 2020 2:36 am, edited 1 time in total.

Never thought an lp would lead to me trying a mobile game. Loving the informative style and these ship history breakdowns.

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So, Lads and Ladies, let's have a quick vote-off; I've talked about Warspite and Chicago, but have not yet touched upon Japanese or German ships (much less the 'minor' factions) within Azur Lane.

So, I throw open suggestions to you.

With the upcoming update being, well, not tardy, but not hasty either, I figure I shall open the floor, and ask; Who do you want me to talk about next?

My only limitation is 'Has to be in the game', but considering there's some 388 unique shipgirls in Azur lane (Discounting the 77 Retrofit models), pretty much Every major member of the roster has been implemented.

So, again, I ask you all.

Who do you want me to actually examine in detail for you?

I guess Prinz Eugen, since the game seems hellbent on throwing her at new players.

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Oh, the Lucky Prinz is on the list, that I promise.

Feel free to keep suggesting.

Maybe Jean Bart, if that wouldn't be too short. Mostly clarification on her history and maybe why she's Iron Blood? If that wouldn't be considered too speculative. I guess any of the French or Italian ships, as I don't think I've ever seen/heard much about them.

Jean Bart isn't Ironblood, she's Vichya. Unless you meant why she's Crimson Axis?

Regardless, I present for the thread's consideration:

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Also I'd like a writeup on Best Pirate too

Oops, yeah on the Jean Bart mistake. That's what I get for replying while sleepy.

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Updates will happen tomorrow. They would have happened today, but somebody not a million miles from here has had to burn 8000 fuel total across both accounts to get the mission. Also to get at least some of the feckin' drop ships for this event.

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So, the Shortlist for writeups at this point, and in No particular order:

Prinz Eugen, the 'Lucky Prince'
Jean Bart, The Last Battleship.

And because Jamie will Never Get her, I'm tempted to add Mogami to the list, because good god, that poor girl had the WORST luck. Ever.

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