small merchants in GWX: sturdy

[Keelbuster]

I'm using GWX 1.03 and I'm in the Med. I run into a lot of small merchants, and I've noticed that they are very strong, perhaps unrealistically so. I imagine that it would be very hard, or impossible, for a ship of that size to sustain a torpedo hit and keep steaming. IMHO, one hit - almost anywhere - should destroy the bastard 90% of the time, and otherwise leave it completely crippled. Most of the small merchants I clip with one torp just lean a bit, and keep steaming at the same speed. I almost never get an instant kill - on the lucky occasions, she sinks slowly through flooding. I usually have to hit the bulkhead between the middle and aft compartment to make this happen. I understand that HPs were raised on ships so that flood-sinking was more likely. But I feel that in the small merchant, tramp steamer, small cargo/passenger cases, they should be destroyed by the torpedo a lot of the time. Maybe I can lower the HPS for these ships? Could anyone point me to those lines?

[Kaleun Cook]

Aim for the bow. It'll take so much flooding that it'll get dragged down. Same for the big ones by the way, there are many one-hit-one-sunk-ships.

[Jimbuna]

Your contemplating adjusting the damage model...not adviseable because there could be a knock on effect for other files :nope:

[Henri II]

I had exactly the same "problem", what I did was reverting the flood times for the small ships back to stock and raising the critical chance for a keel hit to 50% in the zones.cfg. Now they almost always sink after one hit in a believable (for me) amount of time.

[Umfuld]

All the small merchants I've hit have gone down with one torp without exception. May take some time, but I just TC and wait them out.

[P_Funk]

I never have issues with sinking small merchants with one torpedo. In recent memory I can only think of one that didn't go down inside of 20 minutes and it was tail up barely floating.

[Keelbuster]

I had exactly the same "problem", what I did was reverting the flood times for the small ships back to stock and raising the critical chance for a keel hit to 50% in the zones.cfg. Now they almost always sink after one hit in a believable (for me) amount of time.
I've got to try this as soon as i get back to port. Too many small merchants sailing away happily with a gaping hole in the center. Though I've never done this, and don't know what the stock flood times were...

btw - i don't aim for bow because it's risky - aiming for the center gives me some lee-way on bad TMA.

thx

[P_Funk]

I almost never get an instant kill - on the lucky occasions, she sinks slowly through flooding.
Actually you'll pretty much never get an 'instant kill' in GWX, at least not with one torpedo.

The only time I've destroyed a small merchant instantly with big explosions is when I was fooling around in the torpedo school training mission and tried to fire a 3 torpedo spread under a small merchant at a medium cargo that was in line with him. I however forgot to set the depth up close to 10 m and therefore all 3 torpedoes hit the small mercahant. The ship blew up and broke in half and went down immediately. Three torpedo hits.

However if I hit with just one it starts to sink and that usually takes at least 10 minutes.

Though it does stop moving fairly quickly. But there seems to be two way that they become immobilized. The first is that you damage the propeller or the engine room so that the ship cannot sail. The other is that the ship sinks gradually until it can no longer sail.

Either way one torpedo almost ALWAYS gets it within an hour. Sometimes its longer but like I said that one time half the ship was underwater. A deck gun is enough to finish it at that point.

[Jimbuna]

All the small merchants I've hit have gone down with one torp without exception. May take some time, but I just TC and wait them out.

That is correct, :yep: Or (presuming the vessel is alone) you could surface and hurry the process along by pumping a few deck gun shells into her :arrgh!: