NATS by the Numbers
There were a lot of interesting numbers that showed up at NATS this year. Overall the percentage of hits was close to the same as at a normal NATS 13.9%. But looking closer you can see the winning team shot at a much more accurate rate. The Axis shot 16.5% while the Allies were only at11.4%. This seams odd as the Allies have a lot more stern guns and the Axis have more sidemounts. The Allies put 755 total guns (489 sterns & 277 sidemnouts) on the water, the Axis 764 (403 sterns 361 sidemounts). This would lead us to believe the Allies should shoot for a higher percentage since sterns are easier to hit with then sidemounts. But this was not the case. If we assume sterns only make aboves and sidemounts only make ons & bellows. The Axis shot at a normal rate of 20.6% with their sterns and the Allies hit only 14.2% of the time. The Axis really won NATS on their sidemount accuracy. They shot sidemounts at an unreal 11.9%, while the Allies shot only 6.3%. You can really see this in the total number of holes for each fleet. The Axis holes were 2655-213-445. The Allies were 3114-486-1128. Even though the Axis had fewer sterns they gave more aboves then the Allies. You can see a lot of Allies had scores with more belows then aboves. In fleet battles the Axis had 16 ships with more then 10 belows, the Allies had 30. There were 25 ships with more then 20 below, Tim Becket’s 27 was the only Axis on the list. In a flashback to 04 NATS in Rolla Lars, Bob & Ron took a lot of damage. They had 486 belows, that’s 7 of the top 10 below scores for the week. Ron had the top score with 81 below. Steve’s Bismark took the aboves honors with scores of 143 & 134. Lars took 3 of the top 4 scores with 23, 20 & 19 on the waterline hits. You know Lars, the waterline does not need to be 1” wide.
In Friday’s battle Ron’s score was 71-22-81 and a class 6 sink. That’s 6510 points! Let’s say Ron was his own fleet. He had almost as many points as the two fleets collected in Thursday’s campain. He had more damage then ALL of the ships in night battle combined. Since 2002 no one has broken 6,000 points. Very few have even got over the 5,000 point mark. Ron has set a new standard for taking damage.
There were 52 sinks in the 1on1s and fleet battles this
year. Of these 30 sink were taken with light damage. Once again over half of
the sinks were caused by a failure of the ship’s systems or the captain’s brain.
Three captains were sunk 6 times during the week. Lars (4
Tiger, 2 convoys), Mike C (
The “Chris Kessler No Score Award” goes to Maggie Grossaint who collected a grand total of 2-3-1 for the week. A close runner up is Paul Block with 28-4-8 and that’s with a Nagato!
We had 45 captains at NATS this year with 78 different ships. The captains were down a little from last year’s 48, but there were more ships then any year since 2002. I’m pretty sure it’s the most ships ever at a NATS. We also had all 45 ships on the water for Thursday’s fleet battle. NATS 07 only had 44 ships on the water in any battle. This might be the most ships on the water for any NATS ever.
The Campain victory by the Axis on Tuesday was the first time they had won a Campain Battle since Tuesday 2004.