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Jten
01-04-10, 10:57 AM
An OT mention of fishing boats and sampans in the RFB 2.0 thread has brought up some points and I did not want to hijack the RFB 2.0 thread so I will post my position here.


"Yes it should, but there are historical accounts from the patrol reports of sampans and other wooden vessels sucking up a lot of deck gun rounds and not sinking. The 3"/50, FWIW, is not a very powerful anti-ship weapon (it was designed as an AA gun)."

But since burning fire is only eye candy in the game and there is no credit given for foundering or killing all the crew and leaving the vessel adrift, that's why I modded them down in armor. Making them easier to sink is not my evil plan to achieve 100,000 tons by sinking 10 ton ships but to reflect that for those types of vessels sinking was not the only method to 'destroy' them.
Even a 3"/50 that passes thru the hull without exploding is equal to a cannonball and those sank wooden ships. I consider a burning wooden ship with no crew effectively destroyed. I also wanted the 20mm to have more effect because too often a sampan intercept in heavy seas means a player's only gun option is to man the deck gun in what would be unsafe situations while the more suitable 20's are not effective only because of game armor values.
In the game a Gato sub has armor values of ranging from 12 to .05 across all the boxes and zones, the small fishing craft have values of 20,12, and 6 throughout the entire model. While there are random values applied in a 'hit' situation, as I understand it, these armor rates mean a 3"/50 only has a good chance of damaging the '6' rated areas.
Shoot a sub with 3 rounds of 3"/50 and you've got problems. Shoot a junk with the same and even if you start fires and kill the crew, it will often just keep sailing. I modded mine down to 10,6 and 3 (half values) now 3-4 3"/50 above the water line will finish her and in heavy seas about 120-200 20mm rounds into the hull will cause a slow sink without my having to man the deck gun in unrealistic sea conditions.

My original inspiration for this change is based on my father-in-law who was on a DD in the pacific in WW2. he watched me playing SH4 a bit and said the sampans were too tough. His ship would often operate with PT boats in hunting small costal craft. They would sit off the islands while the PT boats would go in shallow to flush them out. He says the PT boats had no problems destroying them with their 20's and .50's but usually they burned to the waterline or were left crewless more than truly sinking but the PT's were still credited with a 'kill'.

BTW: Djanico I sent you a PM regarding your question. Did you receive it?

Hitman
01-04-10, 11:10 AM
Making mods in these games is all about making decissions and taking options ... because you can't unfortunately have everything :yep:

I agree with you in that those small craft seem to be too "armoured", but then again a real wooden ship is certainly difficult to sink, specially if loaded with more wood and similar, a cargo usually found on them! I suppose they are difficult to sink with a deck gun because of that, and easier to sink with fire. So, the RFB 2.0 mod is more realistic in terms of deck gun rounds needed, and less realistic in terms of how vulnerable to fire those ships really were.

I don't have many problems with the deck gun rounds they take, but I certainly would like to be able to knock down the masts easier :88)

Armistead
01-04-10, 03:22 PM
I've read about every sub book there is and many skippers had problems sinking these things, moreso when they were full of fish. Usually they were left wrecked and the crew shot up.

I can't remember who it was, probably Fluckley used molitive cocktails on them. He once shot one boat up forever and wouldn't sink, so he took a big load of these from then on and had no problems using them.

I agree, a wreck boat, shot up should be a kill. I just don't waste my time on them due to the point issue.

Webster
01-04-10, 05:01 PM
there in lies the "catch 22"

they were easy to kill but mostly unsinkable so as with many other things in the game you need to look at the big picture and i think RFB was being too concentrated on the "sinking" aspect to be realistic that they ended up with them being tougher than a BB to actually sink.

i agree with the OP in that its much more logical to look at it from a dead crew point of view, as far as i am concerned if the crew is dead then the boat should be dead and "that" should be the deciding factor as to how hard it is to sink the fishing boats. (dead should equal sunk)

RFB is a great mod and is accurate based on the "sinkings" data but the overall experience of indestructable fishing boats is a complete realism killer IMO.

as far as i am concerned if the crew is dead then that means the boat has been destryoyed/sunk weather it sinks or not in real life so if some aspect in the game needs to be represented in an unrealistic way to get a realistic result then i want to see it sink in the game at the point where the crew should be dead and it is IMO destroyed at that point.

so what if they sink sooner then they did in real life as long as they dont sink before they get a realistic amount of damage to say the crew is all dead and the boat is considered destroyed at that point

LukeFF
01-05-10, 02:40 AM
It's something I'll look at for a future revision of RFB. It really is a shame that fire is only a visual effect of damage already accrued by the ship and doesn't actually cause damage to a ship.

Webster
01-06-10, 04:05 PM
It's something I'll look at for a future revision of RFB. It really is a shame that fire is only a visual effect of damage already accrued by the ship and doesn't actually cause damage to a ship.

i really never looked into it much because i have very little time for modding anymore but i always wondered if there wasnt some way to link the fire trigger to cause flooding at the same time?

something like the trigger for fire also triggers a flooding damage so it could further damage the ship over time from the flooding which will cause damage since the fire wont cause damage.

since the fire has 3 triggers for 3 levels of fire (small, medium, and large) then you could equally have 3 different flooding rates sized equally to fit the amount of damage you want.

maybe you might be able to figure out if this idea could work.