Interesting point. The whole idea of the magnetic pistol was to defeat belt armor. The fact that all you do is set shallow and sink everything is a big part of the problem in terms of tonnage excess. If you have a range of deep running, but you know ou need to actually aim low (even contact) to really hurt them, it changes attacks greatly.

tater

adding a belt is not possible. The way the damage system is designed is a little bit confusing it took me a while to understand how it works. One can remove all compartments from the layout and it will become unsinkable. Compartments are designed as "weakness spots" not as "armored bags".

ill try to explain.

The most important is to understand that dimensions of compartments and their bouyancy are not necessery connected. Meaning that the bouyancy is defined for each compartment type in zones.cfg, while their dimension and location is defined in vessel.zon.

When a torpedo strikes a ship it generates a min dmg and a max dmg bubble. The damage gradualy increases from the smaller max dmg bubble to the bigger min dmg bubble. Every compartment that is inside that bubbles get more or less damaged and starts flooding. The flooding parameters are defined not by the size of compartment but by its type. So if there are two compartments of type NFlotMain flooding they will flood up at same time (assumed they are equaly damaged) even if their size is different. The flooding parameters for each compartment type are defined in zones.cfg. The most important parameter is the floatability or if you want call it buoyancy. So if the "floatability" of that damaged compartments is set to 20. It will slowly reduce the total buoyancy of the vessel by 2x20 during a time period which is defined as the "flooding time". Simultaneously the physics engine will gradualy change the center of mass from the balanced center towards the center of mass of the damaged compartments, again during the flooding time period. This is the point where the size and location of compartments matters. Bigger compartments and those that are farther away from balance point will cause a greater change to center of mass. The vessel will start showing list towards damaged compartments. And finely the third important parameter comes into play "crush depth". This is the depth where undamaged compartments get damaged from water pressure and start flooding. The crush depth for both stock and NSM 2.6 was set way to high. That explains why the ships keep going with decks awash.

Now the hard thing about it is to balance all parameters and compartment dimensions together to realise most realistic sinking.

However a solution can be worked out. Making the lower compartments weaker then the upper ones. So basicly making the main compartment strong with low floatability and the keel weak with high floatability would have the same effect. I will try to realise it for capital warships.

That explains a lot. Warships of course have damage control crew (in Real life) so they can be made harder to sink artificially to get a realistic result.

I posted this in my making AAA dangerous to subs thread, and now it makes more sense to me, perhaps it might help in your studies of this:

tater

well this is not new to me tater.

There are also compartment parameters for sub compartments.

So when you get nailed by a 20mm gun some hitpoints from a certain compartment are consumed. It is damaged. Not enough to start flooding but when you get below crush depth it will get more damage until all hitpoints are lost then you will have flooding.

Yeah, your previous post, and other stuff I had read before, but not really understood became clear to me once I started testing this.

The hitpoints seem like a problem in general, don't they?

I think it became clear because unlike a torpedo, which I expect to possibly do very catostrophic damage, the 20mm is tiny pin-*****s. Setting up a situation to be SUNK by 20mm really puts the issue in relief.

maybe i have a solution for you.

If you make the AA guns do as low dmg as possible. Something that is so low that it wont hurt ships much. Then set the hitpoints for plane compartments (yes they have compartments too) to something like 0.00000015. That should make the flaks being only usefull agains planes. I warn you thats a lot of tweaking, restarting the game over and over :-)

Yeah, I know the restarting, lol.

(as an aside, I notice that after a CTD, the game reloads in a fraction of the time...)

As for the AAA, I'm not working on the AA vs planes, I'm working on the AA vs our SUBS.

If you surface your sub next to a small combatant with AAA guns, or even a CV, loaded with AAA, they will shoot and shoot and shoot at the sub---and do no damage* to the sub, and more importantly zero damage to the deck crew.

This makes surface actions very unrealistic. If a sampan or trawler fought back with machine guns or 25mm in RL, the sub would back off out of range. In game, you can safely ignore AAA.

*caveat, now I understand that each one of those hits removes hitpoints, weakening the hull.

tater

bad news: im stuck for two days already with the fuel bunker explosion under water. When the ship is sinking by flooding and the fuel bunker gets under water it explodes always. Then you have that stupid looking explosion sticking out of the water.
The problem is old you can see what i mean on page 4. There is a screenshot.

I dont know what triggers it. The game seems to ignore compartment parameters for fuel bunkers completely. It doesnt make sence but it ignores crush depth, hitpoints or any other parameter. When the game sees its a fuel bunker it ignores the other settings and just make it explode as soon its under water.

The only way out is to remove the fuel. Then they act like normal compartments. So there is also no explosion by a direct hit. Seems there is no other way to fix it.

So my question is: Whats better? No fuel explosions at all, or stupid looking fuel explosions every time the ship is half under water? I could also try to replace the fuel explosion by big fire. big fires do not trigger under water.

Treat it as if there were still air pockets in some compartments filled with fumes. There still could possibly be sparks going around even when the ship went down.

lol ok ive got a fix you wont believe.


I thought the last chance would be to use the backup files and see if that still happens with unmodded compartment layout and same compartment parameters. Guess what? It did not happen. So the problem was in compartment layout and i started looking at the diferences.

The first thing that jumped in my eyes was that fuel bunkers in original files are very small (smaller then lifeboats). Ive found it odd and increased their dimentions to a more realistic size. So now ive changed the fuel bunkers in my layouts back to original "small" size. The problem disappeared...

It realy doesnt make sence but it works.

Another interestning find. Ive been also looking into ship files from 1.1 to find out what they have changed and why and i remembered seing bigger fuel bunkers. I wondered why they have changed their size to some unrealistic value. Now i know hehe. Looks like Ubi have been working on that problem too and that was their fix. Maybe its a serious problem and that was the easiest way to fix it i dont know. The game seems to crush only those compartments that are bigger then lifeboats :-). Anyway i know how to fix it for my ships that matters...

I'm one who thinks the big explosion is pretty ugly. I guess that's why the small craft explode as well?

tater

hm i havent been looking into small crafts. Do they?

well the explosion effect can be easily changed for every single ship. Or could be completely removed for small ships like pt boats.

I was looking at fishing boats, etc. Sink a fishing boat and it looks like it's an ammo ship, lol.

BTW, there are some smaller ships worth looking into as well, some not japanese in the stock game but none the less very useful.

The trawler (and armed trawler). The tug, the NF_boat, and the fishing boats.

The sampans and junks also blow up. It seems like those would be the least likely do do so in the entire game. The catch on fire from AP hits, too.

well sofar ive been ignoring ships that are smaller then small old split merchant. I thought it was a waste of time because youre basicly trying to sink bigger stuff then sampans. Actualy i never sink them.

I always tried to avoid them because tweaking them would endanger the balance for small merchants since they were partly using same parameters. Of course now i could separate the parameters but thats to much work to be honest just for the sampan. Maybe in future release but for now i need to finish the merchants and all the warships. Thats realy lots of work. One ship takes me up to 6 hours.

Gotcha. Makes sense.

I guess I could go the "old" RSP way and up their hitpoints and force them to sink by flooding. Might be better than the Nth round making them explode when the hitpoints are zero.

Please leave the sampans alone. They are about the only boat you can sink with AA fire. And the only reason i ever use my AA ammo :lol:

They'd still sink, it's just absurd that they explode.

Leaving them wallowing or burning is perfectly fine. Read real reports, and they decided that the best thing was bombs. First they made molotov cocktails, then they got real charges, it was easier than using the deck gun.

tater

In-game, 20mm fire is unlikely to cause REAL damage to sampans & fishing boats. Also, ingame we have no grenade launchers.

Is that it? Just six hours? Where's your sense of dedication to the project???Grrr... Just kidding!

As far as I'm concerned, I'm nominating you for Medal of Honor!:up:

Bill
:lurk: