Ships taking damage in rough sea

[polyfiller]

Hi - am working hard on the surface warfare mod to improve the way the capital ships handle in rough seas. I've managed to make them appear to "ride" the waves more than they do in stock, but without increased side to side instability (in fact I've reduced the annoying instability) ... trouble is I'm having trouble with certain ships taking damage and sinking in rough seas. The settings I'm using in sim.cfg are;

Waves amplitude=0.8
Waves attenuation=0.75

The sea looks suitably rough and ships ride the waves well ... trouble is a number just sink - specifically any ship using the colarado model, plus some of the smaller ships. I've been playing around with submerged draught (I thought that if submerged draught value was too low, the ship would think it's submerged i.e. sinking when it goes down from a steep wave) .... I have the New Mexico and Colorado configured the same and the New Mexico survives my test mission and the Colorado sinks in just 15 minutes.

I've also got a potentially related issue with the Kent class cruiser - a fire breaks out on the starboard side in the region of the aft life boats - always in the same place and never results in a sinking. Most strange. Makes me think that maybe there is yet another "magic" damage zone ID which does not like being below the level of the water.

Does someone know exectly what causes a ship to take damage in rough sea ?

TIA.

[JREX53]

Polyfiller,

In regards to the draft - for surface ships the surface draft is what you really need to be concerned with. The submerged draft is more meaningful for the submarines then it is for surface craft. Submerged draft has little to no effect on surfaced ships.

As far as the rest, I am not sure of.

[polyfiller]

Think I've resolved this. More experienced modders may already know this, but in rougher seas, the ships dip below the mean water level. This causes certain zones to go below the crash depth defined in zones.cfg.

I have increased the crash depth for zones by 10 - 15 m and now ships don't take damage and sink in thr rough sea I am testing.

[polyfiller]

OK - so my above fix only partially resolves this issue. Looks like ships take damage to main hull (not any of the zones) - because I guess they believe they are submerged - even though their crush depth is set to 300 - they still take damage.

Does ANYONE know what causes a ship to believe it is submerged ?