One Hell of a Storm!!

[waldopbarnstormer]

So here I am, early war (december 20th 1941) on my first patrol I am sent to patrol the Luzon strait for any approaching Jap armada. Not long after I arrive on station I spot a small scout force consisting of a scout plane tender and 3 small escorts. I am in an good intercept position to the north west of the task force with them heading NNW. I dive to periscope depth to begin my approach and stubble across a small problem!

I find myself in the midst of a raging storm with waves so high at periscope depth my periscope is still under water and no visual on the cruiser. I am forced to come up to 40ft just to see my target, and tentatively make my approach. While I wait for the target to come into range I sit looking at my strat map, and speed up time when I notice a destroyed ship icon appear followed by another and another? I quickly go to free camera and investigate my target, wondering if this is some fancy feature of the RSRD campaign with added allied airstrikes or friendly subs.

To my surprise the culprit for this attack is not an ally but the weather, as I watch the third and last escort is swamped by the huge waves and goes down by the stern!:D

This leaves me free to pursue the struggling crusier without fear of reprisal and I quickly dispatch it with a spread of 4 with 4 hits using full realism and manual targeting. Note I had to set the torps to run at 0 depth because of the waves and not trusting on the dodgy mag det to finish the job.

Has anyone else experienced the weather taking a deadly toll? later in the patrol I stumbled upon a battered friendly convoy of sampans which had taken some losses from the weather as well.

[M. Sarsfield]

What mods are you using? I think a side-effect of adjusting the wave sizes (frequency and amplitude only) to match SH3 waves is damaged and sunk AI vessels, including life rafts/boats.

[Khourieat]

Did it give you credit? I didn't know weather could down ships in SH4, but hopefully it didn't. No cheating, the navy is watching :rotfl:

[Ducimus]

What mods are you using? I think a side-effect of adjusting the wave sizes (frequency and amplitude only) to match SH3 waves is damaged and sunk AI vessels, including life rafts/boats.

I adjusted amplitude to twice that of stock in the last version of TMO for sh4 1.4. (stock is 0.2, i used 0.4) This wasn't done willy nilly either, but after testing and much forethought. Eventually i ended up reversing this change because it limits what scene.dat one can use with the mod - one must be tailor crafted.

If one was to run another scene.dat with 1.4 version of TMO, or any other mod that uses similar adjustments, then you could end up with some really monster waves and one helluva flying boat.

On top of that, it screws visual sensors. The wave factor in the sim.cfg for AI visuals must be toned down, or the AI will become limited in what it can visually detect.

[DavyJonesFootlocker]

If he's using TMO that may happen. That happened to me too with two DDs escorting Cruisers. They suddenly caught fire and sank. LBO seemed to lessen the chances of this happening it seems.

[Ducimus]

If he's using TMO that may happen. That happened to me too with two DDs escorting Cruisers. They suddenly caught fire and sank. LBO seemed to lessen the chances of this happening it seems.

LOL Yup!

Its very hard to get those amplitude adjustments to behave right. You can for instance tune it, and have nothing happen right away, and you'll think its fine. Only later to have the same ship explode for 20 or 30 minutes or so after it spawned. Its very hard to test for this. One more reason why i dropped it.

I try to warn people to be careful about making such adjustments, its a huge can of worms, one best left unopened unless you have a lot of time to devote to it, but i guess they don't believe me. *shrug* It's their game, not mine.

[waldopbarnstormer]

I am using TMO 1.4 with RSDRC v370 plus patch. The ships which sank were the small sub hunter type and the local sampans.

[DavyJonesFootlocker]

Well, there you go. I haven't had any mysterious explosions lately so I guess my adding the Living Breathing Ocean worked somehow. Keeping fingers crossed for this one.

[Dignan]

I have also experienced this. I rolled up on a large TF of BBs DDs and what I think were Cruisers. Didn't have time to positively ID the possible cruisers because all three of them sank in the rough sea. What was strange is that the DDs did not sink. I'm running TMO1.4, environmental mod and NSM4. Not sure if this is a side effect of any of these mods but I've only seen it that one time so am not too concerned about it at this point.

[gimpy117]

yeah ive had waves come clear over my peri sheers before.

[Ducimus]

Well, like ive said, ive dropped this mechanic. Its back to stock. Frankly, while using some of the newer enviormental mods, ive found its really not neccessary to increase amplitude to get rid of the "sub on rails" effect.

[Buffalo9]

On stock I had a freighter go down in shallow water, at first i thought maybe another sub got him, but most likely he bottomed out.
Possibly your ships went down due to taking waves and driving the bow under??
You'd think that they wouldn't go to flank in that kind of weather and drive into the wind.
If they turned and took large waves over the stern that's a recipe for disaster.
Just a thought..

[-Pv-]

"Did it give you credit? I didn't know weather could down ships in SH4, but hopefully it didn't. No cheating, the navy is watching"

I seem to recall in the early days of the 1st patch or two, I had read reports here of people seeing weather damaged ships go down occasionally in the largest sea state (5?) I saw one or two myself in the stock game. This feature in the stock game seems greatly reduced in 1.4. The closest to it is some docked ships I saw go down for no other apparent reason than weather rocking them around in tight quarters.

Since 1.4, I've not seen any open water ships damaged or destroyed by the largest sea state (water over the sub's surfaced bridge) although I've had ample opportunity to observe ships in these conditions.
-Pv-

[Khourieat]

Since 1.4, I've not seen any open water ships damaged or destroyed by the largest sea state (water over the sub's surfaced bridge) although I've had ample opportunity to observe ships in these conditions.
-Pv-

It's really funny standing on the bridge and watching your crew standing there under water...I guess they don't mind the 20 foot waves...

[-Pv-]

If you keep watching you see the effect of on of the major bugs which is part of the odd wave riding "feature."

Watch your text readout of your depth in the lower right corner. When you see the boat reach the bottom of a trough and the keel is out of the water, you'll see depth 20 ft. It's at this point the deck crew abandons station (while the boat "appears" to be high and dry.) When the boat is riding the peak of a wave and one crashes over the bridge, the depth indicator will read "13 ft" and the deck crew are happy as clams with their salt water bath. It's time like this I watch the interior crew managment station closely for a while. If I see the deck crew popping off and on frequently, I will pull the plug for 8-12 hours. If I don't do this, the crew which are not on station do not rest. They are forced to "wake up" every time the active crew pops up and down the hatch.

It's behaviour like this that causes me to believe there is some reverse code in the weather feature which makes itself most known at max sea state. Most of the other times, the wave riding appears acceptable enough I'm not bothered by it. Probably one of the reasons the devs don't want to mess with it because so many of the game's features are triggerd by various sea states and vessel depths.
-Pv-

[Khourieat]

Didn't know that. So if the crew on shift are going in and out of the bridge, the crew scheduled for sleep won't?

Speaking of, kind of in line with this question but out of line with thread, are the shifts of the gunners and damage control personnel tied to one of the specific shifts, or do they just rest off on their own after being "deactivated"?

[-Pv-]

Since you mention Crew Management...

Just like the DC crew, the gunners have their own schedule based on how tired they get. I pull my gunners out of a full-packed DC crew, so if I know the gunners are not needed but I might get into some dangerous action, I can fill the DC crew and the whole DC crew will rest when the average fatigue for the whole crew gets tired enough. I can throw a full rested and competant DC crew into action when damaged.

On a similar note, the mouseover for SILENT RUNNING icon states there will be no repair when SR is engaged. This is not correct. The dedicated compartment crew will repair their station (including flooding) at a reduced rate. Apparently, the dedicated DC crew do not help out (or do so slowly it's hard to tell.) Deactivate SR and you get the full repair speed your expertise ratings will permit. The risk of course is all the banging and scraping may tell the enemy just where you are. You have to weigh the amount of damage you're taking against the risk of getting even a heavier beating.

Read this post to get an idea how this concept worked in the real world:
One of the most severe depth charging experienced (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=134662)

-Pv-