Foreword

Thanks for waiting, Captains and Designers!

In NavalArt v1.5, alongside our regular parts updates, we have heavily focused on overhauling and expanding the combat system.

In this version, we've made massive changes to shell damage mechanics and naval gun ballistics. We've also implemented the early stages of our Anti-Submarine Warfare system—you can now use anti-submarine rockets for ASW operations.

Basic Anti-Submarine System

Depth charges are weapons designed specifically to combat underwater vessels. Featuring high explosive charges, they can effectively suppress and damage underwater targets. In emergency situations, many depth charges can also be used against surface ships. However, because airbursts are far less powerful than underwater detonations, their damage output is significantly lower in this role.

To ensure a reasonable hit rate, the current version's anti-submarine depth charges utilize a combined proximity and depth-setting fuze. The depth is automatically set based on the target's depth at the moment of firing, while the proximity radius varies by part, typically between 7 and 15 meters. When aiming, the fire control system will provide both horizontal and vertical lead indicators—simply align your mouse with the enemy ship. This provides a high hit probability against targets that are not actively changing depth.

In this build, while the AI will not actively control submarines, it can and will use ASW weapons to defend against them. You can use submarines in Quick Battle and the Operation Editor to challenge AI ASW formations, or host a unique "fish-bombing" competition with friends in multiplayer!

Added weapon type: ASW Depth Charge Launcher (Hotkey: 5)

Placeholder weapon type: ASW Depth Charge Dropper (Parts currently unavailable. Can be spawned via the Misc tool in single-player after enabling Developer Tools)

Added mechanic: If the locked enemy ship is underwater, its silhouette will be highlighted.

Added mechanic: The deeper a depth charge detonates, the greater its explosive power and blast radius become.

Added mechanic: AoE explosion damage. ASW depth charges now have a "near-miss" effect, dealing damage to targets without requiring a direct hit. We will monitor this mechanic closely and, once stable, introduce near-miss effects to naval guns as well.

Currently available ASW weapons: Soviet 213mm RBU-6000 "Smerch-2" ASW Rocket Launcher (RGB-60 ASW Rocket), US 324mm RUR-4A "Weapon Alpha" ASW Rocket Launcher (Mark 1 ASW Rocket).

Hidden parts: (These ASW weapons are currently unavailable but can be spawned via special methods for decorative use).

Shell Mechanics Rework

To address several pain points in the current version—such as AP shells essentially acting as oversized SAP shells making it hard to damage magazines, large-caliber HE shells bypassing armor to instantly wipe out magazines, and shells losing no velocity after penetrating a single layer of armor (making spaced armor ineffective)—we have decided to completely rework the shell damage mechanics.

Main changes include:

• Refactored armor and shell code to improve readability and long-term maintainability for developers.

• Shells now experience significant velocity decay after penetrating armor.

• Removed the ricochet system.

• Rebalanced missile penetration values.

• Added kinetic energy decay for underwater shells to balance the threat posed by standard-fuzed shells against underwater armor.

• Gun parts in the dockyard inventory will now display more detailed information.

• Misc Tool updated: Now provides new armor-penetration data and can spawn depth charges.

• Explosion blast waves now feature damage falloff based on distance from the epicenter.

• Visualized explosion blast wave decay mechanic in FireEye.

• Added overpenetration damage from shells to magazines and hoists.

• Added a new raycast detection solution between the explosion origin and modules, balancing visual effects and performance optimization. If a heavily armored hull is within the explosion radius, its armor will act as resistance to protect the modules.

• If a magazine's HP drops to zero, it is considered destroyed, guaranteeing a 100% chance of a turret magazine detonation. This will inflict bonus damage equal to 125% of the turret's highest base damage stat.

• Explosion blast waves now support damaging multiple targets simultaneously, theoretically allowing for the simulation of nuclear warheads.

• Increased module HP; modules now contribute a larger percentage to the ship's total HP pool.

• Added penetration modifiers for AP shells. Current values are mostly placeholders and will be gradually adjusted to historical data over time.

• Added weight information for AP shells. Current values are partially placeholders and will be gradually adjusted to historical data over time.

• Adjusted some underlying logic for shell damage mechanics.

• Adjusted the criteria for the overpenetration prompt: A hit is now only considered an overpenetration if it penetrates all parts without arming the fuze.

• Magazines and hoists will now take bonus damage when overpenetrated.

Armor-Piercing Shells (AP)

• AP fuzes adjusted to a standard 0.035s delay.

• Fuze arming is now a single-instance check: Assuming a 40mm arming threshold, passing through four 10mm effective armor plates will NOT arm the fuze. It must penetrate at least one plate with a 40mm effective thickness.

• Tactical Role: As the ideal anti-ship shell, AP has a smaller explosion radius but high damage efficiency against heavily armored hulls. It is perfect for striking modules hidden deep within the enemy ship, such as magazines. The long fuze delay also allows for underwater hits (diving shells) that bypass the main armor belt to strike magazines directly.

• However, it has its limitations—fuze triggering is unstable. If the shell strikes impenetrable armor before arming, it will shatter. Against lightly armored or unarmored targets, overpenetration is highly likely.

Semi-Armor Piercing Shells (SAP)

• SAP mechanics are currently implemented for aircraft bombs and missiles, featuring a 0.01s fuze delay.

• The fuze arming threshold is cumulative: Assuming a 40mm threshold, passing through four 10mm effective armor plates WILL arm the fuze.

• Tactical Role: Suitable for engaging lightly armored targets or targets that would highly likely result in overpenetration when using AP.

• Sacrifices raw penetration for more consistent damage output. While overpenetration is still possible, it can be used to target deep-seated hull modules.

• Special Rule: SAP bombs and missiles will detonate even if they fail to penetrate, but future SAP naval shells will still shatter.

High-Explosive Shells (HE)

• Tactical Role: Shells with no deep penetration capabilities, detonating instantly upon hitting any part of the hull. They have a large explosion radius but low damage efficiency against heavily armored hulls.

• Due to the new raycast detection mechanics, HE struggles to destroy modules enclosed inside armor boxes, such as magazines. However, it deals consistent, albeit lower, damage upon hitting enemy ships and excels at stripping deck-mounted modules like AA guns and rangefinders.

Why Remove the Ricochet Mechanic?

Strictly speaking, NA's current ricochet system isn't a true ricochet mechanic. It's essentially shells vanishing into thin air upon hitting at steep angles without achieving overmatch, rather than physically ricocheting.

In real-world naval warfare, while naval guns do experience ricochets, it's usually just another manifestation of a non-penetration—even if the shell luckily didn't bounce off, it would still struggle to penetrate that armor plate.

Iterating further on the ricochet system requires significant time overhead. More importantly, as a high-freedom naval combat game, NA doesn't limit the placement or quantity of player hull parts, unlike other Non-sandbox games with ricochet systems. This means that if we were to fully physicalize and refine ricochets, the shell bounce trajectories and the resulting performance impact would spiral completely out of control, which is unacceptable.

Furthermore, the current system interferes with armor-penetration interactions (such as the incredibly common, tragic pairing of 305mm (12-inch) guns firing at 102mm (4-inch) deck armor). Mere stat tweaks are meaningless here, so there is no need to keep it.

Given the above considerations, we decided to remove the ricochet mechanic entirely. F-formula based effective armor thickness, angling your ship to increase protection, and fighting within immunity zones are perfectly sufficient for NA's current needs.

(Credit: SirPerson)

Naval Gun Ballistics Rework

For a long time, we've received requests from players to fix gun trajectory errors and introduce physical in-flight velocity decay for shells, rather than just using virtual velocity decay for armor penetration calculations. To address this, we've overhauled gun ballistics alongside the damage rework.

Main changes include:

• Shell velocity now decays mid-flight, increasing the difficulty of long-range gunnery.

• Fixed a bug where turret elevation angles didn't match actual shell trajectories.

• Reworked turret elevation and shell fall angles to be more historically accurate.

• Added estimated shell flight time to the gunsight (Note: This estimation is not 100% accurate).

• Increased global shell flight speed to 1.2x to balance the difficulty of long-range engagements.

• Auto-firing guns are no longer forced to a 900m/s muzzle velocity; they now use their actual designated muzzle velocities.

• Extended the horizontal reference line on the gunsight to ease long-range aiming.

• Reduced aiming point error for player-controlled secondary guns, compensating for the reduced target profile caused by the newly implemented high-arcing trajectories.

• Terminal impact angles for shells have increased. High-elevation guns now pose a much greater threat to horizontal deck armor (though still slightly below historical levels).

Guns will now attempt to utilize their maximum elevation as much as possible, resulting in significantly higher-arcing trajectories compared to previous versions.

If you find your ship's guns inexplicably bombarding your own superstructure... we recommend either redesigning the superstructure or swapping to low-elevation guns better suited for that hull...

Additionally, due to these high-arcing trajectories, the effective target profile of enemy ships will be noticeably smaller.

Overall, the aiming difficulty and miss rates in v1.5 will be much higher than before. We recommend keeping gunnery engagements within 25km. Adjustments to the fire control system will be addressed in future updates.

(Credit: 二尾灵猫)

General

• Added: Experimental Visual Setting: [Ship Detail Enhancement] (Disabled by default; some parts may experience rendering errors).

• Added: Chinese Naval Ensign (1889).

• Adjusted: Reworked the icon assets for shell selection.

• Adjusted: Increased the linger time of the shell-tracking camera from 3 seconds to 6 seconds.

• Adjusted: Modified the notification text for destroyed magazines.

• Adjusted: Reduced the torpedo arming time to 1 second.

• Adjusted: Shell splash sound effects—propagation distance has been decreased for small-caliber shells and increased for large-caliber shells.

• Adjusted: Default diameter for missiles.

• Adjusted: Dockyard inventory information for naval guns, AA guns, and missiles. Removed the potentially misleading RPM stat for AA guns, as it previously only affected visual effects.

• Adjusted: The roughness of the deck color separation on German naval guns.

• Adjusted: Conducted a series of underlying code maintenance to improve overall game stability.

• Fixed: An issue where rain and snow coverage was incorrectly rendered on the underwater portions of the hull.

Parts

Added Parts

Reworked Parts

• German 203mm/56 SK L/56 Naval Gun

• Soviet 305mm/62 SM-33 Pattern 1948 Naval Gun

• German 150mm/45 Tbts KC/36T Naval Gun (LDrh LC/38 Twin Mount)

• Japanese 100mm/65 Type 98 AA Gun

• Soviet 406mm B-37 Naval Gun (MK-1 Triple Turret)

• Soviet 305mm B-50 Naval Gun (MK-15 Triple Turret)

• US 457mm/48 Naval Gun (Triple Turret)

Color Separation (Paint Customization)

• New US battleship turrets developed in the mid-1930s will universally feature rose gold gun barrel roots (blast bags).

• Domestic US variants of the 40mm Bofors will now feature color separation.

• US 127mm/38 Mark 12 Naval Gun (Mark 38 Twin Mount) now features additional color separation options.

Career

QuickSortie

• Added: A new dreadnought has been added to the shop. It can be unlocked by clearing the mission [First Contact: Cutting the Supply Line].

• Adjusted: Compressed the thumbnails in the shop interface.

• Adjusted: Filled in missing images in the tech tree.

（Credit：Gurt）

Preset Ships

In this update, fifteen brand-new preset ships will be introduced to players! Fourteen of them are the winning entries from the recently concluded Second Shipbuilding Cup 2026, while the remaining one is a long-awaited winning entry from a past event. At the same time, this marks the first time submarines are joining the preset ship lineup.

There are more excellent selected works from this competition that have temporarily not been added to the preset roster due to specific reasons, such as missing parts. They will arrive in your ports in near-future updates, so stay tuned!

Added Historical Replica Preset Ships:

• Sevastopol (Pr.69-I)

• Massachusetts

• S.S. Bismarck

• Devonshire '44

• Languedoc

• Belfast '43

• Saumarez

• Akagi '20

• Kawachi

• Deutschland

• Ning Hai

• Ersatz Monarch

• Yūbari

• Blücher

• U-764

Changelog:

• Added: A new category folder for Historical Replica preset ships: Austro-Hungarian Empire.

• Adjusted: Replaced with the correct cranes for the Historical Replica preset ships Louisiana, Iowa, and Missouri.

• Adjusted: The original Historical Replica preset ship Belfast has been moved to the Advanced category, with its save file renamed to HMS Belfast.

• Adjusted: Tweaked some details on the Historical Replica preset ships Mackensen and Sachsen.

• Fixed: A bug where secondary guns were left floating in mid-air on the Historical Replica preset ship Battleship O due to a recent part model rework.

• Fixed: Missing armor sections on the Historical Replica preset ship Mutsu.

• Fixed: An alignment issue with the main battery placement on the Historical Replica preset ship Comandante Margottini.

• Fixed: Significantly misaligned masts and support structures on the Historical Replica preset ship Tennessee.

• Fixed: Material rendering errors on certain parts of the Historical Replica preset ship HMS King George V.

• Fixed: Material rendering errors on certain parts of the Historical Replica preset ship Mikhail Kutuzov.

• Fixed: Material rendering errors on certain parts of the Advanced preset ship Project 798.

Looking Ahead

We have re-evaluated our current development priorities and decided to temporarily slow down the development of the Map Editor. Update v1.51 will primarily focus on the onboarding process to reduce the learning curve and improve the overall gameplay experience for new players.

A music player for Operation Mode/Campaigns will be arriving soon. Additionally, more anti-submarine weapons will be added and their designs will be adjusted based on recent player feedback.

（Credit：Winchester）