General Victory Belles Questions Thread

[RockyArby]

How do Belles view ships without Belles? Do they still see a spirit in them or are they just ships?

[lazarusdw]

i wonder how similar biologically speaking are belles to humans. We know they can eat but do they need too do they have the same organs as a human. or are they only human in appearance

[lazarusdw]

Also what rights and protections do belles have. they have navel rank so they have the rights and protections of navel personal but do they have more than that.

would scrapping a ship with a belle be legal or murder

[lazarusdw]

I wonder how would belles feel about being converted into civilian ships after the war

[Dmnt]

1 hour ago, lazarusdw said:

I wonder how would belles feel about being converted into civilian ships after the war

For all we know, they could very well just disappear after the war ended, their mission being over, and being no longer needed.

[lazarusdw]

I

10 minutes ago, Dmnt said:

For all we know, they could very well just disappear after the war ended, their mission being over, and being no longer needed.

I think that would be sad l want them to live in peace

[Dwenneven]

Hmm I was wondering and pardon me if this question has been asked before, but will the game feature rarity levels for the different belles? How will we aquire them? If they’re droprate based, will their droprates based on rarity or event be stated? 

[Legate of Mineta]

Dwenneven;

Some Belles' Vestures are rarer than others, and can take a while to collect. There isn't anything in the game that differentiates them, though. You gain them through Combat, Diplomatic Channels, Stories, and so on. I don't think I've seen anything about drop rate or event, though.

[Rhialto]

Are there any plans to have references to things from Academagia in Victory Belles? or references to things from Victory Belles in Academagia? I could think of a few ways to make such subtle references.

[Legate of Mineta]

Rhi;

Hahaha! There are some Scheherazade references in VB, but it's not likely to have references to any of our other works.

Academagia, through Gates, I suppose could have some references, though.

[Dwenneven]

Legate;

Thanks for the reply. That’s welcome to hear. I’d be a little sad if there was rarity between the belles and obvious stat differences. They’re all good to me. 

[Legate of Mineta]

Dwenneven;

The Belles all begin very significantly differently (their equipment and their stats can all be pretty varied), but any Belle can be the best in her class if you work hard at it. As an example, Bearn has a certain capacity for aircraft at start, but if you work at it, it can ultimately be as large as a fleet carrier.

[Gerrion]

Hi ho! Hope you're all well today.

I wanted to ask the Belles something a little... awkward, if I may. The notion of a Belle having an offspring, while both amazing and unsettling at the same time, is a bit impossible from the perspectives I've been gathering (unless miracles are involved, of course). So I wanted to approach the next, closest option related to the issue: adoption.

 

Would it be possible/affordable for a Belle to have a vessel of a different family/country under her wing, combat-ready or not? Would they have a different care over between Belle-present ships and spirit-linked boats as a human would respectively treat an adopted child and an adopted animal? And how would Belles cope with differences in country or culture between them and their adopted protégés?

My apologies if the question brings any... troubling feelings.

[lazarusdw]

27 minutes ago, Gerrion said:

Hi ho! Hope you're all well today.

I wanted to ask the Belles something a little... awkward, if I may. The notion of a Belle having an offspring, while both amazing and unsettling at the same time, is a bit impossible from the perspectives I've been gathering (unless miracles are involved, of course). So I wanted to approach the next, closest option related to the issue: adoption.

 

Would it be possible/affordable for a Belle to have a vessel of a different family/country under her wing, combat-ready or not? Would they have a different care over between Belle-present ships and spirit-linked boats as a human would respectively treat an adopted child and an adopted animal? And how would Belles cope with differences in country or culture between them and their adopted protégés?

My apologies if the question brings any... troubling feelings.

well Fubiki is considered the mother of the Morden destroyer

[Gerrion]

Well, I'd like to think in those cases beyond blueprint genealogy  

[lazarusdw]

true hood was not that close to kongou who is kinda her aunt. However hood said that she thought of her self as a mentor to Nelson and Rodney

[TwoHeavens]

I'd like to know more about the power ratio between Belles and their equivalent conventional ships, not that I'm intending a life of mild piracy or attacking conventional fleets... that anyone can prove... but purely for a sense of proportion. What type of tonnage can a Light Cruiser Belle take on and reliably handle? Has the INPF found a way to safely test Belle defenses? Hurling a 41 cm shell at Belfast is all well and good if it's more like tossing a wad of paper at someone than an actual attack, but if certain volumes of conventional fire can damage a Belle either by sheer volume or by a single overpowering shot, well that'd obviously be a bad thing to say the very least. Conversely what type of damage could Belfast's guns do compared to conventional weapons? The Town class cruisers were equipped with... 6 inch Mk XXIII naval guns off the top of my head, which would probably have... 800 m/s or so muzzle velocity. Some very brief research suggests Belfast would be getting about 76mm or so of armor penetration at medium range striking side armor... prior to manifesting herself that is. Final technical question, do Belles impact propulsion at all? Can Belfast jump her speed or make a slightly tighter turn that a conventional Town class ship? We've heard about augmented defense and weapons, but increased propulsion and range would be similarly valuable.

P.S.

Sorry for using you as the example Belfast, didn't know who else might be joining you. Courier with flowers and some fresh tea I picked up in the Pacific should be hitting your usual pier in an hour or so, and barring that, will pass things on to Rawalpindi. 

[Ninjapacman]

1 hour ago, TwoHeavens said:

I'd like to know more about the power ratio between Belles and their equivalent conventional ships, not that I'm intending a life of mild piracy or attacking conventional fleets... that anyone can prove... but purely for a sense of proportion. What type of tonnage can a Light Cruiser Belle take on and reliably handle? Has the INPF found a way to safely test Belle defenses? Hurling a 41 cm shell at Belfast is all well and good if it's more like tossing a wad of paper at someone than an actual attack, but if certain volumes of conventional fire can damage a Belle either by sheer volume or by a single overpowering shot, well that'd obviously be a bad thing to say the very least. Conversely what type of damage could Belfast's guns do compared to conventional weapons? The Town class cruisers were equipped with... 6 inch Mk XXIII naval guns off the top of my head, which would probably have... 800 m/s or so muzzle velocity. Some very brief research suggests Belfast would be getting about 76mm or so of armor penetration at medium range striking side armor... prior to manifesting herself that is. Final technical question, do Belles impact propulsion at all? Can Belfast jump her speed or make a slightly tighter turn that a conventional Town class ship? We've heard about augmented defense and weapons, but increased propulsion and range would be similarly valuable.

P.S.

Sorry for using you as the example Belfast, didn't know who else might be joining you. Courier with flowers and some fresh tea I picked up in the Pacific should be hitting your usual pier in an hour or so, and barring that, will pass things on to Rawalpindi. 

This is all quite related to something that's been in my mind for quite a lot of time.  I believe I've brought it up several times, in fact.  It's to do with how belles' power actually works, and the reason they're the only ones able to fight the Morgana.  It's been stated (update 14) regarding the first encounters with Morgana that "Only a handful of ships survived those encounters, Captain, and almost all of those had Belles manifest aboard." and that "Early conventional attempts to stop them ended in disaster."

Now, of those handful, only most of them manifested belles.  Knowing what we know now from update 115 about sleeping belles, it's harder to determine this, but I can well assume that of those that didn't manifest a belle, it's likely that they were simply fast enough to outrun, and lucky enough to not get hit.  There is still the chance, though, that they did in fact fight back, and were strong enough as conventional ships to engage and destroy these Morgana.

This brings me to the actual question, of how Belles are able to engage the Morgana so successfully.  There's two theories I have.  The first is to put it simply, magic.  Morgana are magically invicible, as are belles, and they each simply have the magic to get through each others' invincibility.  Other than that, they're all regular ships.  It eliminates the fighting back part, and means that all ships that survived early encounters simply could run.  There's a couple holes with this theory though.  Mainly it's that there isn't any power scaling.  We know that belles get more powerful, but with this theory, they're just regular ships.  So more powerful doesn't need to happen.  It also means that Morgana and belles have actual firepower equivalent to their non-magic counterparts, so things like the Treason-class battleship, which we know has 31" main batteries and ridiculously strong armor, would be literally insurmountable for anything with the power of a regular ship.

Going back to update 14, we see: "...among our talents is the ability to know when a Morgana is near, what her name is, and a general sense of course and heading. In battle, we can sometimes tell if they are wounded, and where, and even the best place to direct our fire."  So we know that belles can engage Morgana far more effectively, due to inherent capability, than regular ships.  But something like this intuition alone would not have any chance of beating a Treason.  So in comes the second theory, which is simply explained as "Leveling-up."

For this theory, the belles and Morgana are entirely regular ships.  Nothing really magic about them.  Guns are guns and armor is armor, there isn't any special protective field.  Their weapons and armor however, do become more powerful.  Their 6-inch guns punch like 8-inch guns.  Their 2 inches of belt armor stops shells as if it were 5 inches.  So regular ships would have no problem damaging them if they're weak, but if they "Level up" then the odds tip largely in the favor of the belle.  An 11-inch shell hit from a regular ship is still an 11-inch shell hit though, so even a leveled up Morgana or belle would take the same damage any ship would.  it seems to be the more popular theory, and it's clearly the one Twoheavens has based his post on. 

Using Twoheavens' post as an example, For the magic theory, it would work something like this:

Using the first theory, a 41cm shell from a regular ship is fired at Belfast.  She's a nice tough belle.  Even having just awoken, her protective magic is strong enough that the 41cm shell crunches against her armor.  She fires back, and her shots are able to punch through even the toughest belt like it was made of butter, even though they aren't normally strong enough.  When she fights her next Morgana, her crew are not so lucky, and the foe's 6in shells punch through that same belt with no issue, leaving large holes in the poor Irish girl.

Using the second theory, a 41cm shell from a regular ship is fired at Belfast.  She's a nice tough belle.  Having just awoken though, that 41cm shell hits her belt as if it were 8 inches thick, which it can still punch through, but the shell loses more momentum, and doesn't do as much damage inside.  She fires back, and her shells, despite being only 6 inches, still can't punch through the armor of the battleship, but they leave sizable dents, as if they were the guns of a much stronger heavy cruiser.  When she fights a Morgana, its much the same.

This has run a little long, so I'll cut it here for now.  If you have any questions about the theories, feel free to ask.

[lazarusdw]

here's a question it's been implied that are host is a civilian ship that has a manifested belle if true is she the only one?. I mainly ask because I want to know if any RNLI boat has a belle?

[Mignonette]

It's been a while since it was last asked, but is there an actual ETA on the 7 vs 7 video now? Or hell, how about the rough ETA some game play demonstrations? I'm not even going to touch on the estimated ETA of the Beta anymore after this (probably), all I can guess is it's basically not going to happen this year anyway with the way things are moving.

How much longer will BCS keep just giving us text-only (let's not be smartasses by pointing out there's talking avatar pictures in them) lores, duos, answering questions on a game where we can't really apply it to? There hasn't even been videos showing off stuff like voice work (eg. the Bulldog video over a year ago) and that was before the back-end kerfuffle.

Edit: I just remembered there hasn't been any Go/No-Go updates in months either. On the actual kickstarter page and not the forums, I can't remember when was the last time it was mentioned at all.

[Legate of Mineta]

M;

v_L had a similar question.

Although you never can tell, I'd say be on the lookout in the next few weeks. There are a few UI touches going into Combat, and when those builds have gotten the OK, you'll see the 7 v. 7. I won't spoil the Belles that were used, but there's a surprise in that set.

That's all I *should* say.

[Mignonette]

Von Lip's question was asked back in *February* and even he was given a "a video approaches, but I don't know the timing of that." and my response of backing up Von with "I can't spoil it!!". There has been NO videos since before the back-end kerfluffle up to now.

Are you giving us the same damn answer as of 7 months ago? That doesn't give the customers a lot of faith when the staff can't even figure out on when we should expect things. I could be wrong and there are hard deadlines known by the staff only, but why would you keep that info from the costumers? So they can be "surprised"? You know people can only await for so long (unless you are a hardcore fan).

I checked the comments on the KS page and the last few comments not by Lazarus are people asking where the game is. I see comments in other shipgirl communities asking about it and get replies of "it's dead", "vaporware" and "lol it was a KS scam".

Can we at least get some transparency here? Throw us a bone! What the hell is going on? I want an actual update on the game itself. Explain what the hell has been going on since from a year ago as an actual KS update and not just a forum post nestled away in a huge thread. The backers need to know as well. Slow down on the [redacted].

So does BCS *actually* have a nearly clear ETA on the next big, actual game update? or is it still "in the air", as it has been for the last 1-2 years?

[Legate of Mineta]

Mignonette;

The question from v_L that I was referring to was on the last Update thread.

Now, we are working on a reveal of the Combat Engine, and when that is ready, it will be released. We have stated that in the Updates, as well. Now, I would certainly say we are in the final stretch- in fact, I would go so far as to say it is a few weeks away.

However, we don't want to state anything *definitive* until we are absolutely certain we can hit that date- we were burned pretty severely, as you know, and don't want to make the same mistake. We understand the frustration, but we feel it's much better to be certain when we share dates. We think if you look at it from a different perspective, you'll likely agree. When the first of the Fleet Problems is shared, it will be because it is production ready, Done, integrated and otherwise shippable. That will be the case for all future Game Updates, too- but it also means we're going to be very, very, very careful about giving timelines for the Updates. 

We've heard some of the comments about VB, of course- but the comments are definitely off point, or we wouldn't be here, discussing this on our forums on a Saturday.

Apologies for the long delay, but we're committed to getting to the vision we laid out in the Kickstarter. It's happening, every day. And when the Fleet Problem is ready, you'll see it in an Update near you.

I'll add one last thing to this- we expect that after the first Fleet Problem, we'll be unpacking the engine further- there's quite a lot to the simulation, from the impact of the sea state to dodging torpedoes. Our thinking is that this kind of regular discussion about the gameplay itself might go a long way to removing some of the frustration. We hope.

[lazarusdw]

3 hours ago, Legate of Mineta said:

Mignonette;

The question from v_L that I was referring to was on the last Update thread.

Now, we are working on a reveal of the Combat Engine, and when that is ready, it will be released. We have stated that in the Updates, as well. Now, I would certainly say we are in the final stretch- in fact, I would go so far as to say it is a few weeks away.

However, we don't want to state anything *definitive* until we are absolutely certain we can hit that date- we were burned pretty severely, as you know, and don't want to make the same mistake. We understand the frustration, but we feel it's much better to be certain when we share dates. We think if you look at it from a different perspective, you'll likely agree. When the first of the Fleet Problems is shared, it will be because it is production ready, Done, integrated and otherwise shippable. That will be the case for all future Game Updates, too- but it also means we're going to be very, very, very careful about giving timelines for the Updates. 

We've heard some of the comments about VB, of course- but the comments are definitely off point, or we wouldn't be here, discussing this on our forums on a Saturday.

Apologies for the long delay, but we're committed to getting to the vision we laid out in the Kickstarter. It's happening, every day. And when the Fleet Problem is ready, you'll see it in an Update near you.

I'll add one last thing to this- we expect that after the first Fleet Problem, we'll be unpacking the engine further- there's quite a lot to the simulation, from the impact of the sea state to dodging torpedoes. Our thinking is that this kind of regular discussion about the gameplay itself might go a long way to removing some of the frustration. We hope.

so the beta may start in october

[Legate of Mineta]

@lazarus - Well, the Fleet Problem video will be out- that's not the same thing as the playable Beta, which requires a number of other components. But we'll step through it, one by one.