Is "Height of Mast" to the deck or the waterline?

[DanielCoffey]

While creating ship silhouettes I was comparing the Length and Mast Height values given in the ship .cfg files to the dimensions of the model used in order to work out the Statimeter aiming point and I am confused about the Height of Mast value.


Is Height of Mast supposed to be the height just above the deck or the height all the way from the waterline?


I am finding with the FotRSU mod that some ships are off by as much as 50%. In fact if you were to board the NK Nagara Maru, take a chainsaw and climb the mast to the designated 20.2m mark above the waterline you would still have over 13 meters to chop off! A yellow scarf offense for sure!

[propbeanie]

FotRSU is a conglomeration of ships from almost as many authors, and as such, has quite an array of various mast heights that are listed as shorter or taller than they actually are. An attempt to correct some of those has been made with the addition of some of CapnScurvy's sil images, which are the ones with the red lines, and his corresponding cfg file for the same ships. However, even still, some of those might be off, due to the ship model being different from what OTC had for TMO... Some "slop" in the figures is desirable from a "fog of war" standpoint, but only in the realm of a ship having had 120 foot masts at the start of the war, had them cut down to 90 foot to help disguise the vessel and make targeting more difficult. However, as you have seen, some are off by quite a bit more than 10-25%... When a person uses the stadimeter, they use the waterline of the upper vessel image to touch the tip of the mast (in theory), so the "height" figure should (also in theory) be measured from that waterline... taking into consideration the "loading" of a vessel though, I would think that the use of "deck-to-tip" would yield a more accurate measure, but that's not the way the stadimeter is used... :salute:

[DanielCoffey]

Got it, thanks.


I will build a list of corrections for the FotRSU team of any egregious offenders. I will have to assume the Length of the vessel is correct but will offer a revised Height from waterline to top of mast for all ships.


The Heito Maru and Zimbu Maru are by far the worst offenders so far with the actual height being 60% more than the stated Height.


Speaking of the silhouettes, should I continue the convention of the red lines? Once corrected, the very large majority will be mast tips (with perhaps some of the larger warships being the tower or funnel).

[propbeanie]

I will say this: "If you make a mod, it is your mod. Do it how you want it to be. If others like it, fantastic. If they don't - tough cookies. It is your mod. If you want to consider special requests, that is your decision."

With that said, "consistency" is the main complaint. This is one of several areas we have not gotten to yet, and we had no immediate plans for the RecManual itself, only for better accuracy with the height figures. That was not going to occur though until after we did a few other more important sets of alterations in the mod.

As another little note, the "Length" figure may or may not be correct for each of the ships either. I have not checked them. We were in the process of doing menu_1024_768.ini file edits to add a "Length: xxx" field to the RecManual, which was accomplished... sort-of... It is NOT pretty, and not fit for human consumption, and we'll have to try a re-do, with the movement of other fields being involved. I haven't even drawn up the artwork for it yet. You have to find the longest "field" for each of the entries, and then try to lay them out "logically"... In the meantime, since you started working on this, I'll put the "Length" idea on hold and see what you are able to come up with in the mast height and images department... :salute:

[DanielCoffey]

In that case I will work on Mast Top being the default and only mark in red any exceptions.


I do need to assume the Length in the config is correct though otherwise the Height will still be off. One way of making absolutely sure is to find one of the well known ships and find its official Length. Then we can measure the length of the in-game model and that will give us one confirmed measurement to correct all the others from.


Progress on the silhouettes is slow (11 of 300 done so far) so I will concentrate on the Merchants first. I really wish the S3D export had a setting to "Apply Offset" to Objects because most of them appear at 0,0,0 and need manually putting into place in Blender.

[propbeanie]

There are several ways of measuring the length of ships, and I have no idea which they used in SH4, though surely something like the Iowa Class would be close on one way or the other... Those ships are still around, and surely they haven't performed any major surgery on them for length... :arrgh!: :salute:

[DanielCoffey]

Just an FYI - it is very easy to get the overall length and total height of a model in Blender. A few camera tricks then lets me slice it in Photoshop above and below the waterline so I can get the Height and Draft too.


At a quick glance, the vessels I have checked are pretty accurate in Length (1-3% error) but the Draft is a little iffy in places (5-10% error) . It is the Height that is way off for a large slice of ships by up to 60%.

[propbeanie]

Look in the ships' Sea folder, cfg file, and quite a few of them have a "DisplacementVariation" figure... by the way, if I remember correctly, if you set a vessel's Speed= to zero, then it does not "move" in the Museum... maybe... a mind is a terrible thing to let get old... lol :salute: