Detailed Wake Island Mission

[Bramtyr]

Hi, still really new to the forums and SH4, but i'm totally hooked, especially on the modding aspect of the game.

As for mission editing, a quick readover the tutorials made me realise that it would be pretty damn sweet to do a sub mission of the defense of Wake Island in Dec '41. Both the USS Tambor and the USS Triton, both Tambor-class subs were present off Wake Island and actively participated in the island's defense, both trough the detection of Japanese forces and by direct confrontation at times.

I have a stack of literature on Wake (I would strongly reccomend A Magnificent Fight by Robert J. Cressman; the detail is unsurpassed) and am up to the challenge of making a Wake mission exteding from Dec 8th to the time of the island's surrender.

The three events of hostilities in the mission would be:

-Nearly daily bombing attacks from G3M2 medium bombers

-The first landing attempt on December 11th-12th

-The second, successful landing on December 23rd

As one of the two submarines, it'd basically be a goal to both detect the enemy (and warn Wake, which I believe you can do with what the game has to offer) as well as sink and disrupt enough of the second landing attempt that it as well has to be aborted. The element of both extreme defiance with limited resources (an unfinished garrison, 450 marines, a mere four Grumman F4Fs, gun emplacements lacking rangefinders, etc) little or no hope of reinforcement or relief, coupled with exceptional tenacious defence makes Wake Island a compelling story, and should be a fun environment to simulate. So who is onboard to help with this little Thermopylae in the Pacific?


I'm not sure whats been built so far in the community, locating things is difficult. I've catalogued everything through the second landing attempt, and whats needed for this project so far:

F4F Wildcat mods (i'm willing to skin this so it matches the VMF-211 paint applied in Nov 41)
PBY Catalina mods -- SH3 Had these, but i'm not sure yet how to go about moving them over and reskinnning. Probably a new model exists, right?

3-inch land-based gun
5-inch land-based gun- costal batteries exist in the game, so i just need to look into getting them to work inside the mission. [These guns on Wake sank one destroyer, and damaged several others demonstrating some exceptional gunnery skills]

Tambor Class - I think you can have AI subs in the missions, right? This class already exists in-game. Though i'm not at a position to check right this minute

For the Japanese side leading upto and during the first wave, and the ships in that class present:

G3M2 Bomber (Betty's would probably do fine standing in)
Daihatsu landing craft (the Allied landing craft included in the game is an easy substitute)

Ship classes [present vessels in brackets]

Yubari-class Light Cruiser [the Yubari]
Tenryu-class Light Cruiser [the Tenryu & its sister, Tatsuda, crusty WWI-era ships]
Mutsuki-class Destroyer [Kisaragi, Mutsuki, Yayoi, Mochizuki]
Kamikaze/Oite-class Destroyer [Oite, Hayate]

The submarines RO-65, RO-66, RO-67, all either L3 or L4-type submarines, need more research on that - am i totally crazy or did i remember seeing some japanese sub models in the game museum thingy?

Kongo Maru - Auxiliary Cruiser/Armed Merchant/Transport, 8,624 gross tonnage
Kinryu Maru - Auxiliary Cruiser/Armed Merchant/Transport, 9,310 gross tonnage

-Note that the Mutsuki-class was part of one big happy family of destroyer class, including Minekaze, Sawakaze, Kamikaze and the 'Late'-Kamikaze/Oite-Classes that basically only differed in armament - If my memory serves me correctly the Minekaze class model exists in the game, and the process of modding armament on a single hull to make several classes should be a relatively job to do.

i'm not sure what the best equivalent would be for each of these ships, but they would be a nice addition to get out there into the pacific, each sported something around 4 5.5"x50 guns and a couple of machine guns. The Japanese had about 2 dozen or so aux cruisers at the beginning of the war... actually modding them would be interesting. I'll need to go get some more research and visuals on the subject.

Aaaaanyways...

I haven't done any game modelling or skinning, or mission building yet; but am a graphic design student and am familiar with 3D tools and photoshop. Anyways, this is a huuuge post, as i'm not sure what exists already thats been modded, as it seems theres not exact comprehensive list of whats been made for the SH4 community (either that or i'm a newbie and haven't found it yet)

I think this would be a terrific and fun mission to both play and develop, using what the game is capable but never implimented in the vanilla release. So hopefully this post made sense of what I had in mind for the project, if you'd like to point me in the right direction of where to go, please by all means let me know!

-Bramtyr