Fires on ship

[Shadowblade]

Does causing more fires on ship (burning cargo, carried vehicles, warplanes, etc) do any extra damage over time to ship structure from fire?
Or is the fire just cosmetic effect there?


https://i.imgflip.com/6frcuq.jpg

[kaizerhund10]

anybody know the name of that soldier? any bio on him? his pic is shown alot on ww2 history stuff

[Shadowblade]

anybody know the name of that soldier? any bio on him? his pic is shown alot on ww2 history stuff


I found two possible names of this soldier:
- Hans Tragarsky
- Heinz Mäger (Maeger)

[kaizerhund10]

awesome i will look it up, wonder if he survived i will find out thanks

[Mister_M]

Does causing more fires on ship (burning cargo, carried vehicles, warplanes, etc) do any extra damage over time to ship structure from fire?
Or is the fire just cosmetic effect there?


Only cosmetic. But a modder managed to make the fire cause damage (his name was The Dark Wraith IIRC)...


Edit: oh yeah, here it is: https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=180921

[Shadowblade]

awesome i will look it up, wonder if he survived i will find out thanks


you are welcome

yes, he survived the war

[Shadowblade]

Only cosmetic. But a modder managed to make the fire cause damage (his name was The Dark Wraith IIRC)...


Edit: oh yeah, here it is: https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=180921


thank you, this mod looks very promising. I wish I knew about it sooner. I must try it.
Hope it works well with GWX mod.

[Captain Drastic]

I don't know about this, it seems to me that way you could sink a ship by shooting up deck cargo with the flak guns, which is a kind of cheesy way to get a kill. Still, it's just a small .Dat file for the Library. I'll probably just go ahead and put it in there while I do more testing. What can go wrong? Hahaha..

The Rbs_SH4_effects_GWX_30_71 mod has secondary explosions and fires which seem to show fire spreading below decks and it appears as if more damage is being done. Whenever I see the spreading fires, I'm pretty sure the ship is going down. They even go out one by one as the compartments flood.
Also, there's more damage effects which add a lot of realism, bodies and debris flying and landing in the water, etc.
Rbs_SH4_effects_GWX_30_71- A spectacular mod and a must have for GWX.

[Shadowblade]

@Captain Drastic (https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/member.php?u=242753) : I was more looking for a way how to speed up the sinking of the damaged ship by causing more fire onboard.

And it was usually strange sight on ships with raging fires, with holes below waterline which could burn forever just because the fire is just cosmetic effect....

[Fifi]

thank you, this mod looks very promising. I wish I knew about it sooner. I must try it.
Hope it works well with GWX mod.

I don’t know for GWX, but this mod by TDW has bad side effect on smokes in NYGM … it makes the smokes suddenly totally disappearing when ships are sinking below water level (instead of progressively vanished)
I had to delete the ships part of mod, and keep only the planes part… furthermore wasn’t really interested by a kill each time a ship is set on fire, even with a delay :yep:

:Kaleun_Salute:

[Kpt. Lehmann]

I don’t know for GWX, but this mod by TDW has bad side effect on smokes in NYGM … it makes the smokes suddenly totally disappearing when ships are sinking below water level (instead of progressively vanished)
I had to delete the ships part of mod, and keep only the planes part… furthermore wasn’t really interested by a kill each time a ship is set on fire, even with a delay :yep:


GWX does not use this mod, nor do we have plans to, especially because of the last reason you listed.

[Hebe Vollmaus]

'Problem' solved in jear 2017 by LGN1.
https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showpost.php?p=2509648&postcount=169

[Mister_M]

What can be done (with tweaked values):


https://youtu.be/LxFCGV3uKMY

[Mister_M]

wasn’t really interested by a kill each time a ship is set on fire, even with a delay

It would be possible to limit the extent of damage caused by the fire, to simulate the fact that the crew put out the fire.

But the problem is that it would be impossible to set the same zone on fire again...

[Shadowblade]

It would be possible to limit the extent of damage caused by the fire, to simulate the fact that the crew put out the fire.

But the problem is that it would be impossible to set the same zone on fire again...


well, if it would be lone ship attacked by uboat which would start shelling her, ship crew would probably abandon ship so there would be nobody to put out the fire :03:

[Hooston]

I'm afraid the deck guns in silent hunter 3 are simply not realistic, and I cannot see a way to implement them properly in the game.
Directly sinking a reasonably sized merchant with an 88mm gun would be extremely difficult. The accuracy was very poor on a rolling uboat without a proper range finder. At the short ranges needed the shells would explode on hitting the water or skip from the surface of the sea, so making a hole exactly at the waterline with a 20lb bursting charge would be very difficult. A hole would then cause a relatively slow leak into one compartment. There are many examples of escorts with much heavier guns failing to finish off crippled ships with gunfire, most famously USS Hornet at Santa Cruz but also smaller merchant ships.

As pointed out in the comments above, the first effect of gunfire was to force the crew to abandon ship. This would be straightforward with unarmed lone merchants but far more difficult with armed ships while the guns were still working. A big reason why uboat deck guns became less useful.

The final mechanism would be to set the merchant on fire. This would more often than not eventually cause the ship to sink, especially if there was no crew on board, but it would normally take many hours to do this. There are lots of examples of crews returning to damaged merchants and sailing them home.
I've not really studied USN operations in the Pacific. USN submarines seem to have used their deck guns more, but I get the feeling their guns were bigger and their deck gun targets were generally much smaller.

So I think on the whole I prefer that the fires are cosmetic. In fact given the game's limitations I would try to introduce a mod that caused them to go out after a couple of hours.
I think the game uboat has more potential for capturing surfaced actions. All the features are there but it needs someone to come along and adjust the settings with a "realism" mod.

[Fifi]

I'm afraid the deck guns in silent hunter 3 are simply not realistic, and I cannot see a way to implement them properly in the game.
Directly sinking a reasonably sized merchant with an 88mm gun would be extremely difficult. The accuracy was very poor on a rolling uboat without a proper range finder. At the short ranges needed the shells would explode on hitting the water or skip from the surface of the sea, so making a hole exactly at the waterline with a 20lb bursting charge would be very difficult. A hole would then cause a relatively slow leak into one compartment. There are many examples of escorts with much heavier guns failing to finish off crippled ships with gunfire, most famously USS Hornet at Santa Cruz but also smaller merchant ships.

As pointed out in the comments above, the first effect of gunfire was to force the crew to abandon ship. This would be straightforward with unarmed lone merchants but far more difficult with armed ships while the guns were still working. A big reason why uboat deck guns became less useful.

The final mechanism would be to set the merchant on fire. This would more often than not eventually cause the ship to sink, especially if there was no crew on board, but it would normally take many hours to do this. There are lots of examples of crews returning to damaged merchants and sailing them home.
I've not really studied USN operations in the Pacific. USN submarines seem to have used their deck guns more, but I get the feeling their guns were bigger and their deck gun targets were generally much smaller.

So I think on the whole I prefer that the fires are cosmetic. In fact given the game's limitations I would try to introduce a mod that caused them to go out after a couple of hours.
I think the game uboat has more potential for capturing surfaced actions. All the features are there but it needs someone to come along and adjust the settings with a "realism" mod.

The easiest way to compromise your issue with deck gun, would be to reduce the power of 88/105 mm shells in shell.zon…
This way you would need more shells to sink any ship.
Also you could increase the hit points of ships zones boxes and their flooding time… but it’s quite difficult to find the perfect values, and needs ton of tests as it would interfere with torpedoes damages too.
It remains a game simulation, nothing can be perfect and we have to make compromises …

:Kaleun_Salute:

[Shadowblade]

using GWX and the deck gun is nerfed there already:


GWX manual:

Hits by deck guns cause about 50% less damage.

[Bilge_Rat]

The damage model in SH3-4-5 is very simple. The main file is the ZONE.CFG file in the data folder. Each ship has a set number of hitpoints and a number of flooding zones with flooding time.

When the number of hit points is reached, the ship will go down quickly. Also, if enough damage is caused to flooding zones, it will also go down quickly. In the stock game, it was fairly easy to sink merchants with torpedoes or the deck gun.

Many mods tried to modify this, either playing with hit points inflicted by torps/deck gun, so it will only sink by flooding alone and/or increasing the flooding times and/or increasing the number of flooding zones. The problem with some mods is that if you take it too far, you get screwy results and/or ships which refuse to sink.

As I recall, what TDW did was treat fire as a weapon that would generate hit points so that a large enough fire would eventually sink the ship.

I spent a lot of time modding this in SH4 and 5, but at the end of the day, the file I use now just increases flooding time by 3-4x, as I recall, so ships will generally take longer to sink, but will still go down quickly if the critical number of hit points is reached.

[Jeff-Groves]

They screwed the pooch by not having a random effect setting.

[Captain Drastic]

I see that the Onealex mod 1.53 has the file TDW_Ship_Plane_Fire_Damage_v1_4_SH3 dated 2.9.2023 already included in the Library.

[JohnCarterOfMars]

I see that the Onealex mod 1.53 has the file TDW_Ship_Plane_Fire_Damage_v1_4_SH3 dated 2.9.2023 already included in the Library.

I just looked at this and realized that it had the same modification to it that I made in my own install.

The complaint about the fire on ships mod is that the smoke on the water goes away as soon as the ship sinks, instead of the smoke continuing to burn after the ship goes down.

This version of the mod that's preinstalled in the OneAlex version removed the ship fire nodes but kept the airplane fire nodes, so there is no ship fire damage in the OneAlex mod.

[Captain Drastic]

Thanks for the info, right now it's hard for me to run SH3DITOR because of my computer situation, so I didn't check that myself. I went ahead and renamed it TDW_Plane_Fire_Damage_v1_4_SH3 to make things easier, but I didn't notice the TDW_Ship_Plane_Fire_Damage_v1_4_SH3 from 2011 causing the smoke issue in my previous tests. So now I'm running more tests just to be sure...

OK, I did a single mission with no TDW_Plane_Fire_Damage Mod and set a ship on fire with a couple of torps. Then I saved the mission and waited for the ship to go down.
After that I loaded the saved game with the TDW_Plane_Fire_Damage Mod and watched the same thing. That's when I noticed what the complaint about the smoke was. I guess I never noticed before because I use the Rbs_SH4_effects_GWX_30_71 Mod which generates a lot of smoke both during and after the sinking.

[JohnCarterOfMars]

I guess I never noticed before because I use the Rbs_SH4_effects_GWX_30_71 Mod which generates a lot of smoke both during and after the sinking.

Are you saying that I should run the original TDW_Plane_Fire_Damage_v1_4_SH3 to get ship fire damage, and also run the Rbs_SH4_effects_GWX_30_71 Mod to restore ship smoke damage?

[Captain Drastic]

You can run them both because with the SH4 effects you don't notice the smoke going out immediately as much because there's a lot of other smoke being generated if there is a fire on the ship, including after the ship goes down. In fact, I had to use the Lite Option of the SH4 mod because sometimes I couldn't see the ship because of all the smoke. Right now I am running both mods, but Kpt. Lehmann says the GWX team doesn't like the fire damage mod, so users beware.

Also SH4 effects generates secondary explosions and debris on the ship. It's spectacular- a must have in my opinion. The Rbs_SH4_effects_GWX_30_71 Mod is by the same creator of the TDW_Plane_Fire_Damage_v1_4, Racerboy a.k.a The Dark Wraith.

I looked to see if Onealex uses SH4 effects and I can't tell, it doesn't say in the readme and I can't find any original RBS SH4 effects files in the Onealex collection. I don't play Onealex because I've done too much modding of regular GWX over the years, especially the .SCR file. If I was starting out, I would go with Onealex based on what I've seen and read, but I like my version better anyway. So I don't know if the Rbs_SH4_effects_GWX_30_71 Mod is compatible with Onealex.

[JohnCarterOfMars]

You can run them both because with the SH4 effects you don't notice the smoke going out immediately as much because there's a lot of other smoke being generated if there is a fire on the ship, including after the ship goes down.

Thanks!