Launchers and loadouts

How armament, magazines and standard loadouts fit together, and why a weapon on the armament list is not necessarily aboard.

Three sections on a platform entry describe what it carries, and they answer different questions. Reading them in the wrong order produces confident mistakes.

Armament#

Each row is a launcher fitting. The count tells you how many of that mount the platform carries. The Accepts column lists every weapon compatible with it, and each name links to its own entry.

A row reading Mk-41 Mod2 VLS, fitted 3, accepting 19 weapons means three banks of Mk-41 vertical launch cells, and 19 different weapons will fit in them.

Some launchers accept a whole family rather than a list of individual rounds. Where the database groups weapons, the entry expands the group into its members. Where a launcher accepts a category rather than a defined set, the row says so in words, such as "any guided bomb".

Reading a vertical launch fit#

Vertical cells usually appear as several banks. Add the counts across rows for the total cell count, then look at what each bank holds, because total cells and total capability are different things. Ninety-six cells loaded entirely for air defense is a different ship from ninety-six cells split between air defense, land attack and anti-submarine weapons.

Reading an aircraft's stations#

For aircraft, launcher rows are hardpoints and rails. The number of compatible weapons per station tells you how flexible the aircraft is. A station accepting one weapon is a dedicated fitting. A station accepting a dozen is a multirole pylon.

Cross-check against the aircraft's payload figure. Compatibility says a store fits. Payload says whether you can afford its weight alongside everything else you wanted.

Guns and close-in defense#

Gun mounts appear in the same list, with large round counts and short ranges. A close-in weapon system with a few kilometers of reach is the last layer of a ship's defense. If it is firing, several earlier layers already failed.

Magazines#

Ships and submarines carry magazines: below-decks storage that reloads the launchers. Each row gives the magazine, its capacity and the weapons it accepts.

Magazine capacity is what sustains a fight. A destroyer with 96 cells and a magazine holding reloads for them can keep shooting. One with cells and no reloads has exactly 96 shots, and vertical cells generally cannot be reloaded at sea.

Aircraft have no magazines. What they carry is what is on the rails.

Standard loadouts#

This section shows what the class actually carries. Each named loadout covers a span of years, because a 1991 fit and a 2012 fit of the same hull differ.

Expand one and you get a station-by-station list: which launcher, which weapon, how many. For carriers and helicopter-capable ships, the embarked aircraft appear here too.

Some aircraft have hundreds of defined loadouts, covering every mission profile across a long service life. Where that happens the entry shows a spread across the service years rather than all of them, and says how many exist.

Names without links#

Occasionally a weapon name appears as plain text rather than a link. The database references a handful of names that have no entry of their own, usually older variants that were superseded. The loadout is real and the game handles it. There is simply no page to open.

Putting it together#

For any platform, four steps give you its real reach.

1. Find the longest sensor reference range on the Sensors list.
2. Find the longest weapon maximum range on the Armament list.
3. Check the loadout to confirm that weapon is actually carried.
4. The shorter of the sensor and weapon figures is the platform's engagement range unaided.

That last point catches people out. A ship carrying long-range surface-to-air missiles but only a modest radar cannot use those missiles at their full range on its own. It needs an off-board sensor, a datalink, or an early warning aircraft feeding it.