@ Poly filler , heres how the damage modeling works (to the best of my abilitys):
Firstly you have the zones.cfg file , this give infomation about various compartments such as hit points , and how they flood , and what effect this has on the ships sinking.
This if u like is the set of rules on how the damage model performs.
Important: If you are constructing a new damage model you will need to create new zones in the ZONES.CFG file for each new element , for example for each bulkhead or diesel engine you will need a new entry , if you use the same thing twice ie deck gun you would need a zone for each gun rather than just one zone with 3 different damage boxes.
Next you have the ships upc file , for example the northcarolina.UPC . In this file you chose the the structure of the main compartments on the ship ie engine room. And then choose what systems go into each compartment. For example the diesel engines into the engine room , or various radars into the deck watch.
Also contained within this file is what sub systems the overall systems are made up of , for example your propulsion system made be made up of a diesel engine and a propeller shaft.
This is very imporatant because for some systems to function you need all the subsystems present in this upc file. For example the radar will need the radar cabinet and a radar antenna subsystems for it to function properly.
Lastly is the number of crew slows which can be edited in this file (Ive forgoten how to do this so ill add about it later).
This .UPC file is then contected to the ships .ZON file each of the compartments in the .UPC should have its own corisponding damage box withing the .ZON file which will have 2 sets of x.y.z cords. At the moments there is no way to physically see these boxes so I used a rough approximation based on various nodes from the .DAT file. Each damage box is assigned a system and can be given and armor value -1 corisponds to the overall ship armor value given in the zone file collisionable object bit , or you can set lower values. This is useful in giving the ship acurate values for various systems rather than a blanket value.
One thing to note is that when ships are made playable they still have all the zone from when they where AI ships , which dont show up on the damage screen (these are what caused the ship to sink when no damage was shown) Ive found its best to remove these or they interfere with the sinking mechanics. However it maybe possible to use their damage boxes to model the compartments better , something that I need to try).
Something I have found is by default that ships armor is far too strong , and that using historical value does not give adiquate protections (this only holds for BB sized ships) As with around 37cm (historical value from the KGV your very suceptable to fire from low cal. weapons). I have found values around 50cm to give protection from Small Cal. weapons but not enough to always bounce BB shells.
Now when i built my damage model for the yamato if felt the method of hit points governing the ship wasnt very acurate to how a battle ship would fail in real life. I mean it would keep fighting till its weapons systems stopped working or it sank or abbandoned ship. So in my yamato I gave her a huge ammount of hit points (in the magnitude of billions) but made the crash depth very small (about 25 meters (this is the point where the ship has pretty much sunk) ) and made the crash speed very high so it loses HP very quickly once it sink below this depth.
This did lead to a very long time spent trying to balance the values controling the sinking and flooding but i felt it worked well in the end.
I hope this ramble helps you if you have any questions give me a pm
