I tend to run them out of DCs, at least early in the war, since they don't have all that many.

One way to scale things a little closer to reality might be to not look at the number of patrols, but the tonnage sunk. Even with RSRDC on top of RFB I can sink more in a couple of patrols than most boats sank period. Clearly, I'm putting myself in more dangerous situations.

Actually, the very argument you just made was made by either beery, or someone else in an early RFB conversation I participated in here. I just remembered my take on it.

I think that you'd either need to eliminate all the patrols that did not meet ASW assets in battle (meaning the sub was prosecuted at all), or at the very least make sure you only compare the same % of such patrols that YOU had vs similar RL numbers.

I probably find myself on the receiving end of at least one DC attack on at least 50% of my patrols, for example. Of those 1600 patrols, how many never saw a japanese warship capable of attacking them underwater?

<EDIT> one other thing, you read a lot about subs being held down by serious DC attacks. This is tricky in SH4 since the IJN DCs are always set for the depth the AI thinks you are at. In RL, they'd be dropping a pattern on you, and only maybe 1/4-1/3 would be anywhere near your depth. They could be shacking you but shallow, or the one at the right depth was in the wrong place in the pattern. Impossible in SH4 right now. The only way to make the DC attacks less deadly is to make them less deadly. The down side of that is it might become impossible to sink you without a few hitting you right against the hull.

It's non-trivial.

Small changes in DC damage values can likely tweak this to whatever end you want, though I think that the prosecutions themselves are decent within the limits of SH4. AI any less capable and they'd never hit you at all.

Why would we eliminate them, when we have patrols that do not meet ASW assets in the game too?

In fact I prefer exactly those patrols. I try to avoid ASW altogether, not take any risks, playing as close to real life as possible, safety-wise.

Still I died at least four times more often than reality, and that was in the old Beery RFB that many of you think was too easy on the player.

Compare similar patrols is what I meant. If 50% of your patrols meet ASW, and in RL it was lower, then you need to filter out some of the RL ones to normalize your danger level.

Not sure what beery did with the number of DCs carried. I think nothing. In that case, the typical ASW asset you encountered in the old days would have been equal to multiple RL escorts.

Also, what campaign did you use witht hat old RFB? Stock? Mine?

No play with the stock campaign can be compared to RL stats at all IMO, the stock campaign is absurd. The convoys there have universally lame esocrts, and the TFs, in order to make up for other failings perhpas, were all escorted by "Elite" DDs, with a massive overrepresentation of the Akizuki type. In the stock game (and early RFB I think) she carried 240 DCs. She actually carried 72. Even if he toned down just the skill levels of the AI, the DC counts alone are a massive multiplier making comparison to RL ssort of useless, IMO.

RSRDC is really the benchmark for those sorts of comparisons, IMO.

I always use RSRD since it's first release. For some time before that I might have used your campaign mod.

Modding the campaign is actually more important than anything else, that's why I am happy that at least RSRD dude didn't feel the need to include enviroment, 3D, candy bars, harbor harlots and refrigerators in his mod, nor did he let everyone and his dog to add stuff to his work.

The trouble is, like everything else in SH4, that stuff starts to overlap.

Escorts.

The campaign decides what AI skill levels to set them to.

ASW capability is a complex interaction of sensors (actually reduced in capability vs stock for the most part in RFB I believe), the sensor rules (breaking contact time, weather effects, etc), AI ship skill level, DC lethality, etc.

Within the above, the sensor stuff is impacted by some of the environmental stuff. DC lethality requires changing sub DM (which was awful before, anyway, as anyone duking it out on the surface knew since their crew was invulnerable). DCs need to be tweaked so ships don't blow their sterns off, so ship DMs might come into play as well. The campaign of course is an issue because how the AI skill level changes things is hard-coded.

I'm certainly interested in having things be "about right," that said, there is usually a down side. In this case, it's really hard as I said above, because the DCs do not act as they should, and even if some ideas I have work, it will create other issues.

Since DCs blow at set-depth, plus an error factor, you can NEVER go under DCs in SH4. US subs frequently survived by being below the DC depth setting.

How do you address this? You want a 3.X% rate of death per patrol. The trouble is that in order to do this, you might well have to dumb down the DCs such that it would require numerous direct-hits to sink you, and anythign short of that might do nothing at all.

This is really the crux of IJN ASW lethality in SH4 vs RL. Really.

The only way to "get under" them is to have them break contact, which is not the same thing. It can help mitigate the problem a little, though.

I used to just sit at all stop at periscope depth in Beery's RFB. The escorts couldn't sink me. I really didn't know how to die and never did. I suppose you could have dove below crush depth or maybe collided at full speed with a DD. Their guns were undoubtedly nasty, but I never stuck around on the surface to find out. After all, under water I was invulnerable. Supersub! That chased me directly to Trigger Maru, which I was fully prepared to hate but loved and love to this day.

I captured the entire Ussubvetsofworldwarii.org site to my hard drive. It's vanished twice, and somebody has to preserve all those first-hand accounts from the Polaris and other sources. Losing the stories and the men is infinitely more tragic than losing the boats. Statistics lie. At best they can illuminate the truth, but they will never find the truth.

Just a little FYI for you, as the "RSRDC dude" I work "hand in glove" with RFB, and personally dislike your bent "s***can" attitude

I need ship lengths for an RFB Ships' Lengths Table
 

Here is a short version. The above link is to a PDF that is a table of ship lengths of IJN vessells. However, when I started looking at the Submarine Sighting Guide in RFB, I discovered there were over 40 additional boats in RFB compared to the stock game. Thus the tables I made, which cover boats in the stock game, are basically useless. Where can I find easy access to the lengths of all the ships in RFB, so I can make a table that I can use in the game? Someone must have had the information when they programmed the ships into the game.

Hitman's TSAC v2.1 mod requires a ship's length to enter the proper spread angle for torpedoes, and you also need it to calculate the aspect ratio if you choose to use that method to calculate the AoB and range for manual targeting. Hitman's TSAC v2.1 is incompatible with RFB as it overrides the nomograph, and may kill the deck gun as well. Even if you are planning to update the Submarine Sighting Guide, the table would be useful and even necessary until the update is ready for installation.

http://files.filefront.com/13342455</B>

Assuming you mean to make a perfectly accurate measure of the in-game ships, here is the easy way: open them in S3D, and look at the 3d models. One "unit" in SH4 (hence S3D) is 10m. If there are no nodes at the bow and stern, move some aroiund til they are there, and simply read 'em off. If the bow is at 2.3, and the stern is at 2.2, the ship is 75m long.

tater

Hey folks. Just started playing RFB with RSRDC.

First off, excellent work by all involved!

I have a question though. I have successfully completed 6 war patrols, each lasting about 1 month, and I have yet to see a single aircraft of any type. Is this normal?

tater
 

I am not planning on make a life's work of this project. There is no way I am going to fiddle with the editor as I have never used it, and do not plan to do so. Someone else can find the lengths and I will put them in Table form. That is as much as I will do. But thanks for the tip. If I totally lose my mind, perhaps one day I would try your suggestion, but don't count on it.

I'm goin' down, part of the intent of the RFB scheme is to introduce doubt and uncertainty into the targeting process. During World War II, the captain of the sub didn't know the height of the mast or the length of the boat, because his ONI manual didn't allow him to identify it properly! If he could, the Japanese had altered the profile of the ship with altered mast heights or a cut down funnel to make his range measurements wrong.

One of the problems with simulations is that there is too much certainty. And like normal people, when we see certainty mixed with uncertainty like wrong masthead heights in the game, we players demand MORE of what the problem is. One of my mottos as a manager is "if you treat the customer bad enough long enough, they will demand it!" I use it to make fun of somebody not getting the job done, but the nasty secret is that it is absolutely true.

In the real war, hundreds of ships were misidentified. A target identified as 1,000 tons might have turned out to be half that or less! Tater is the expert here, not me, but I think it's safe to say that correctly identifying targets, having the correct information on that target to find the range and sinking it using stadimeter information only was the exception, not the rule. The aspect ratio of measuring AoB? A complete fiction, and something not possible in World War II. (yes I know the Germans tried it on us. When you are fighting an open society information is easy to come by) They visually estimated AoB, almost exclusively. I have not found a single instance of the aspect ratio method. They knew their info wasn't good enough and the Mark I eyeball was a superior instrument.

I was reading one cruise report where the radar went out (was it Archerfish?) and the captain (Enright, I think) wrote in the report that he assumed that would mean half of his torpedoes from then on would be wasted! These guys took it for granted that their information was crap, so they were shooting 150% or 200% spreads, automatically wasting a third to half of their torpedoes just to get a hit.

We don't do that because we automatically adjust to the capabilities of the game. I find myself shooting 75% spreads, because I know I can hit 1/4 of the way back of the bow and 1/4 of the way forward from the stern. I have all the correct information, and that's wrong, if we want to call this game a simulation without busting out laughing while we do so.

Read the account of Batfish's hat trick, where they sank three Japanese submarines in a day. They didn't have any idea whether they were shooting at an I-Boat or one of the other varieties. They were dealing with a 100% uncertainty about what their target length was! What was the saying? "SNAFU, proceed as routine." They didn't expect perfect or even good information. They were going to sink the enemy anyway. They weren't going to waste time complaining about it.

It wasn't as if the USN could rent the Japanese merchant fleet, boat by boat and take measurements in Pearl Harbor for shooting purposes and then return them to the enemy so we could prosecute the war with perfect information, such as we have in Silent Hunter 4!:har:

RSRD handles the aircraft. Yes, I see very little of them. Then again, depends on where you are and what month/year. Just getting into my 4 patrol and spotted 2 aircraft. I did shoot down one. They are out there. When you get your aircraft detecting gear, you will detect more aircraft.

There is no candy bars but RFB added an ice cream machine:har: I see most of your posts really concern the enviro mod which would indicate to me your machine can not run the game well with it. But you blew this off a few posts back. I also see were you posted most mods offer an enviro mod as an option to use or not. I do not recall any major mod in it final stages offering this option. Furthermore, RSRD does and will continue to work closely with RFB to assure all can enjoy both mods without conflict. So, RSRD did not need to address enviro mods. It was already handled. So, really, what is the deal?

Excuse me Mr. AVGWarhawk sir, but this MOD does not do exactly what I want, therefore it is incumbent upon you and the RFB team to make it work that way for me.

Sorry scratch that, I went and did it myself, you don't need to bother.