Wind speed and wave action

[swdw]

With some of the flying boat issues, I decided to load up a couple of the environment mods and take a look see.

After playing around, here's my feelings on this. In most of the stock and earlier versions of envronmental mods ,wave action is WAY overdone. Waiting to see krillers and W_clears latest.

In reality, 15 meters/second is only 33.6 mph / 54 kph. Got some videos of which mod I think had appropriate wave action for that speed. Will try to get one of them up on youtube Sunday

[LukeFF]

The Beaufort Scale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort_scale) defines 15 m/s winds as a Force 7 storm with waves 13.5-19 ft tall. Would be interesting to know how the various mods stack up against that stat.

[swdw]

Here are pics from a couple of maritime sites of beaufort or "sea state" waves up to at least 7

http://www.skippertipps.de/beaufort/beauskala.htm

http://www.uscg.mil/hq/g-m/risk/sea_state_2.htm

One of things to note is that the swells are not short with steep slopes but still fairly long. The smaller waves riding on top of the swells are more frequent though and sometimes give the impression of more "chop".

[Sailor Steve]

One of the problems is that 15 m/s is as high as the game will allow. In the early days of SH3 Timetraveller created his 'Big Waves' mod. He managed to increase the wind to 45 m/s, but found that when he reloaded the game it defaulted back to 15 m/s. His final solution was to double the wave size, so the player could double the wind speed in his head and all was good. This is still incorporated in JScones's SH3 Commander.

I tend to see this as the same as tweaking the horspower to give ships more realistic acceleration times. Just because the game calls it '15 m/s' doesn't mean it's really that fast, or that slow. If the waves correspond correctly to the listed wind speeds you won't ever encounter any real storms.

[399nkov]

Sorry I didn't see this thread before I posted on the dive-rate thread.

I installed Pacific Environment for Row after the latest RFB v1.4 031408 and that mod all but eliminated the flying boat issue for me in 15m wind and waves.