Surface ship "crash depth" (WIP)

[Sniper297]

To start gotta clear up a common misunderstanding about "crash depth";



In the CFG file for the sub "crash depth" is the depth that the crew will level off at when you hit C to order a crash dive. In the ZON file it's "The maximum depth this ship survives", I think they really meant CRUSH depth but somebody translated it wrong.

While poking around in surface ship ZON files I found they actually have a "crash" (crush) depth too;



So lemmee see if I got this straight, a submarine designed to go underwater can survive down to 150 meters and start taking damage lower than that, but a light cruiser can dive to 300 meters with no problems? That would explain this;



Dead in the water and sunk up to the smokestacks yet still firing at every US ship passing by. Tankers are even sillier;



This one has been hanging at that depth with two holes in him for over an hour, doesn't count as destroyed yet.

After some experimenting with a KONGO, I found the "crash depth" is not keel depth but depth below normal surface draft for surface ships. With a 990 foot deep crash depth before it starts taking hit points I can't figure out why they bothered, but I set originally for 30, no effect, then 10, then 5 4 3 2 etc. 2 or 3 is too shallow, normal wave action will sink a light cruiser in about half an hour or so, so I set the minimum at 4 for cruisers, 5 for CVs and BBs and 6 for Yamato. So far that works okay, no more half sunk battleships steaming off into the rising sun with 4 holes in the bottom and down by the bow with the number 1 turret completely submerged. Main thing it needs now is tweaking and testing, so a BB with so much flotation gone it's settled 20 feet deeper doesn't run off like there's nothing wrong, but we don't want one taking damage from settling 5-10 feet either.

[Den0]

Does not compute. Bad design? Missed coding? Why?

[TorpX]

I've noticed this in the files as well. Never played around with it.

You're idea sounds promising. One thing that might be a problem; ships taking damage in rough seas. The bigger ones, I mean; small coasters shouldn't be out in a storm anyway. They may have set the values very large, so they didn't have to worry about ships going down by themselves.

[Admiral Halsey]

Well this does explain all those time's i've hit a ship with my last torp only to see it go steaming over the horizon with the bow completely submerged.

[Sniper297]

Which of course brings us right back to the question why have it at all? Bad weather I'm working on, made a test mission with max wind speed therefore all the waves I'm gonna get. 1 fish each into a KONGO, HIRYU, and SHOKAKU, three fish in a YAMATO, all sank within 20 minutes plus a KUMA light cruiser I never fired a shot at. Numbers obviously have to be adjusted higher, what I'm aiming for is a battered wreck so low in the water that it LOOKS like it SHOULD sink with no further action, not one that settles a few feet with a 5 degree list sinking 15 minutes later. I would have done this with the flooding times in the zones.cfg file instead, but that thing is such a cluttered mishmash of who knows what does what and which values do nothing because they're leftovers from SH3, I'm afraid I'll make the player sub sink in 3 seconds after the lines from the pier are cast off. We've already had enough of that nonsense. Not looking for perfect kills every time either, there's always a random element of how much damage the initial torpedo explosion does. I removed Webster's enhanced torpedo mod and restored the original default fish, if the #8 I'm looking at is the Mark 14 that has min EF = 180 and max EF = 350, with a damage radius from 3.5 to 8 meters. Smack a Kongo with three of them and it could remove anywhere from 540 to 1050 of the 800 hit points, if it's high then down she goes, if it's 540 that leaves 260 to go. If it settles down from flooding to the critical depth it takes 0.5 hit points per second, so 30 per minute, and should lose the 260 remaining hit points in about 8 1/2 minutes. Once I get the depth tweaked I'll probably lower that to something like 0.2 so it loses 12 hit points per minute or something.
The general idea is you'll still wail and lament watching a BB or CV steaming away after shrugging off hits from your last torpedoes occasionally, but not every single time. Balance of gameplay. And of course it SHOULD be visually obvious that the ones that get away aren't that badly damaged, if it looks badly damaged then by all that's holy it should sink before getting far enough away that it's "removed from the game board" still unsunk.

[TorpX]

Originally Posted by Admiral Halsey

Well this does explain all those time's i've hit a ship with my last torp only to see it go steaming over the horizon with the bow completely submerged.

Yeah, no kidding.

I'm wondering what governs how much speed they lose when they suffer damage/flooding, or for that matter, how fast they can repair the damage.

Which of course brings us right back to the question why have it at all?

I don't know. Good question.

[Sniper297]

This is a common scenario with full realism, fire 4 fish at a carrier and three are duds. One hit does some damage;



Not really serious, but it should be easy to catch. Dodge depth charges, creep outside the five mile circle, surface to chase after the CV, do an end around and work in for another attack 6 to 8 hours later;



And somehow the damage control crew managed to do the equivalent of a complete 1 year yard overhaul in 8 hours. Not much can be done about that, once you let them pirates out of sight they're stacking the deck, marking the cards, slipping aces up their sleeves and loading the dice. No way to fix that, which is why realistic sinking times mods don't work very well.

[Sniper297]

Well, this is bizarre - didn't do more than glance at the hit points for each ship, Yamato has 1500, Fuso 800, Takao 500, Naka 2160. Wait, WHAT?! 1500 for a superbattleship, 800 for a regular battleship, 500 for a heavy cruiser so far so good but how did a LIGHT cruiser get over 2000 points? Light cruiser with 660 more hit points than Yamato? That would probably explain the light cruisers sinking down to the base of the funnels and still fighting, never occurred to me to check if they were all the same type.

Anyway gotta fix that while poking around in these, Agano has 500, Kuma has 400, if a heavy cruiser has 500 HP then 400 is probably closer to the mark for a light cruiser.

[ETR3(SS)]

IMHO what really happened with this game (and the reason there are so many bizarre instances) is the producers thought it would be a simple copy/paste of SH3 with fleet boats added. That resulted in a rushed product that did not properly go through a beta before moving to release. Ducimus has found quite a bit with the game and has said himself that he understands it so well that it has lost the fun to it, playing and modding.

[Sniper297]

Scuttlebutt is they celebrated the beginning of SH4 with a party (rum was involved) and made the quality control guy walk the plank, then forgot to hire a new one after they sobered up.

Made a new test mission with one of each type running around and around a 10 X 15 mile racetrack (no, I don't know how many furlongs that is) in rough seas. Reset all the damage points to 0.3, so 20 points per minute loss when below critical depth. Changed that NAKA to 400 hit points, reset critical ("crash") depth to 4 for CL, 4.5 for CA, 5 for CV and BB, 6 for Yamato. Had to convert into real money to visualize how much those are, so light cruisers sink 13.2 feet, heavies 14.85, BB and CV 16.5, Yamato 19.8. At this point it's mostly guesses based on TLAR engineering (T-L-A-R = That Looks About Right), difficult to tell how much freeboard has been lost while testing with no plimsoll marks. The random element is still there of course, one fish explodes under a turret and sets off a huge secondary in a magazine so down she goes, next one yields the minimum EF and minimum radius blast and the same ship settles 4 or 5 feet, not enough to trigger the new gadget. A Yamato gets four fish with holes big enough to stuff Rosie O'Donnell into, cruises around the circle (about 4 hours per circuit) and gets one more fish, sinks about 10 minutes later. TLAR, 10 minutes would be 200 hit points, out of 1500 would be 1300 divided by 5 Mark 14 hits, about 260 HP per torpedo. Obviously sugar boat drivers with their Mark 10s will need more fish, and of course the random element and the sea state could mean anywhere from 1 to 10 fish. Again I removed Webster's improved torpedo mod and am testing with the stock SH4 mark 14s.

[Sniper297]

And, after testing with the KONGO blockading the narrows south of Corregidor in the "Gone Asiatic" career mod, I bit the bullet and opened all the UStorpedoes ZON DAT SIM files to dope out which was the mark 14 and what the numbers were besides 0x8f346dcc43bfbcb2 which tells me nothing except what alphanumeric soup to look for in some other file. The one I THINK is the mark 14 has this;

EF (damage) 120-180
Radius 3-7

Closed to 700 yards and started shooting, he saw the wake after I fired #2 so he wound it up and popped the clutch. Waited until he hit 20 knots and fired the remaining two near the bow, which hit near the stern since he was still accelerating. 800 hit points for KONGO, so 2 hits = 240 to 360 - figure an average of 300, so 500 HP remaining. IF he settled to the critical depth then at 0.3 per second (20HP per minute) then all the hit points should be gone at around 25 minutes after the settling. Waited 30.



View from astern, slight list to port and settled by the stern.



Up at the bow the dark stripe indicates the normal waterline.



Aft end seen from underwater.

BB is set for 5 meters (16.5 feet in real money) so the question is, what we see here more or less than 16.5 feet? Dunno, no idea what the normal freeboard would be for a KONGO, but my opinion the benchmark for any ship to start getting internal damage from bulkheads collapsing would be waves lapping over some part of the main deck, in other words all freeboard gone from some part of the ship - and this still has a little left at the extreme aft end, so not sinking is probably right.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Sniper297

Scuttlebutt is they celebrated the beginning of SH4 with a party (rum was involved) and made the quality control guy walk the plank, then forgot to hire a new one after they sobered up.

He served the wrong rum; I'd bet my sig on it! If your starting a tradition...ya gotta be traditional Not a few of my well-torpedoed victims have escaped, bows awash...very aggravating!

[Sniper297]

Any rum that gets the job done is the right rum, any port in a storm. Even if there's nothing left but port. Gonna need some before this is over, any critical depth less than 4 sinks a light cruiser just from moderate wave action, and 4 won't sink it when it settles from damage. Screwy part is I reset the BBs, CVs, and CAs to 3 - which comes out to 9.9 feet. I thought I could use 3.5 for a CA, which comes out to 11.55 feet, but it don't work.



Original inspiration for this, got a Maya with 8 eight inch guns getting hammered by three Northhamptons totalling 27 eight inch guns from the north;



With 9 more eight inch and 12 six inch guns pounding away from the south. By all that's holy 10 minutes of that should send this thing to the bottom, but it don't. While testing the career mod I had ONE MAYA versus TWELVE Northhamptons, after an hour there were four Northhamptons left floating and still firing, 30 minutes later all were sunk and the MAYA was still afloat. No reason I can find, same armor, same hit points for MAYA and NORTHHAMPTON. Eventually I gave up and replaced all but two of the enemy heavy cruisers with light cruisers, it was the only way I could get it close to balanced.



Using the guy standing up as a 5 foot yardstick, the freeboard on this thing looks like 13 to 14 feet, so if it settles to the deck edge that SHOULD be deep enough for 3.5 to trigger the cumulative damage effect. As we've seen other places they might have used Martian meters or some other measure unknown to the civilized world, so 3.0 whatever that is will be it. Until I find one sinking by itself in really heavy weather, which I can't have without running into it at random - the quick mission editor only allows a max of 29 knots of wind, meaning I can test in moderate seas but not heavy. Pass the rum.

[Sniper297]

Okay then, new theory. Already determined it's not the keel depth, which left the normal waterline as the next logical reference point. It ain't that either. Had battleships that were too easy to sink so I increased the critical depth, then found the large modern tanker (NOL_Nippon) and set that for the same depth as a BB - same draft, right? Except it promptly sank. Increased from 5 to 15 before it stopped sinking in moderate waves.

So. Model makers start with 3DCanvas or whatever with a reference plane and build the model around that, if several modelers were involved it's possible Larry starts with the keel, Moe starts with the main deck, Curly starts with the centerline between the main deck and the keel. Or something. Then Shep, who was in charge of the crash depth project, defected to England to make realistic birds crapping on windshields for a train simulator. So they scrapped the project and jacked the crash depth up to 300 feet so it wouldn't be used in the game. While testing the tanker the Yamato sank, so I had to increase the depth on that too.

I know this is not a dream, if it was a dream there would be rum.

[TorpX]

Had battleships that were too easy to sink so I increased the critical depth, then found the large modern tanker (NOL_Nippon) and set that for the same depth as a BB - same draft, right? Except it promptly sank.

I wonder if the difference there is that the BB's have crews that can repair damage faster. It could be hard to tell if the ships are taking damage, if the crews are repairing it almost as fast as it occurs.