I agree with the idea, but would like to point out that people here have been asking for British (and Dutch) subs for at least a year.

Yeah. me mostly I think, Lol. :D

I remember CB.. made an S class model about a year ago complette with crewmen.

That's like saying that the sim is fine because it's fine for online play. What about all those people who bought the sim who don't play online? I guess they're up a creek without a paddle, 'cos their game is porked and the devs made darned sure that modders can't do a thing about it.

With a sh....load of 3d editing and such, I think RN subs would be possible.
However, I am not sure wether one could implement the fire control procedures of the RN.
They did not have an american style TDC and the ranging system was different as well.
I think external unreloadable tubes would even be possible game wise.

Problem is, the RN made more sense for SH3 or a potential atlantic conversion of SH4.
The pacific was a side show for RN submarines. Ok, they sank the Ashigara and a few other major vessels but large by large the US submarines had left them without work by the time the RN subs were there in force.

Actually, dutch submarines would be better.
The dutch build dutch submarines were quite similar to U-Boats technically. No suprise as dutch sub building was started by germans to circumvent the Versailles treaty.
When spares (and german torpedoes) ran out, the dutch used british subs.

If I do try to start a mod, I doubt very much whether I would do any PTO operations at all. I would prefer to focus on the Med and Europe. There are a couple of reason why I think Sh4 is better for this than the first one and it is mainly to do with the way the campaign is set up. The fact that the Sh3 campaign was grid based and SH4 is objective based is the big difference. I've already knocked up brief Med Missions just using what is available in the stock game and it's perfect for the sort of patrols one could realisticaly expect. Plenty of deck gun action too! :up:

Aside from that, there is half a world map full of ports that is virtually unused and there are many possibilities.

For TDC, well. I haven't given any thought to it but I would probably keep it there regardless of whether it is realistic or not. But that is a discussion for the future. I seem to remember someone saying that external tubes ought to be possible.

Every weapon, regardless of gun or torpedo tube, has an "ammo bunker" entry in the .eqp file.
So if you leave that blank, you basically have a non reloadable torpedo tube :)

Every time one of those italian convoys passed me in the med in SH3 GWX, I wished I had a british sub instead of a VII;)

As I said, I have no idea about british subs other than basic technical data and the usual "greatest heroics" stuff.
I sofar have not found a serious operation british sub history, like some kind of british equivalent to "silent victory"

Information is certainly a lot patchier than for either the US or Germany. I think after the war several skippers released memoirs but I would imagine that they would all be well out of print now. The only first hand account I have right here is 'Crash Dive,' about HMS Safari. It's a great book that nicely illustrates the fact that the type of Sub warfare here seems to have been slightly different to the others. The Skipper of the Safari was a Gun specialist and he trained the crew to get from peri depth to first round loaded in twenty seconds...:o

Other than that, 'We come Unseen' by Jim Ring has a couple of chapters about WW2 subs although it is mostly about the cold war. There is more out there but these are the two I have read most recently.

Peter Padfield's War Beneath The Sea is not overly detailed, but does give a good accounting of British and Japanese submarine operations during the war; Britain's Norwegian and Malta operations especially. As for torpedo fire control, Padfield alleges that they had no TDC at all, and had to go by 'whiz wheel' and pencil and paper calculations alone.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book.

Come to think of it, I'm sure I bought a big book a cople of years ago about RN subs during the war. It was some sort of 'Military Classic' publication..I wonder where it went too? :hmm:

Paper and Is-was sounds a bit obsolete, as that is WW1 "technology".
On the other hand, the brits tended to fire more torps at individual targets than the germans or even the americans, with notable exceptions of "aces" like Wanklyn of the Upholder. A spread of six was commonplace for most larger targets, and their boats where certainly build for firing a lot of torpedoes at once.
With early T-class boats you could fire a spread of 10!

I always noted that british subs tended to be "ambush" weapons of some sort, lurking at choke points and waiting for targets to pass by. Some boats did agressive hunting, but normally they were more or less static.

Sigh, as usual people pick out what they want, you never read the link I posted or you would not keep saying the game is porked. Have you ever flown a plane? They guys on that thread have be sure.

I happily play offline because modders have fixed what was broken for offline play. The main thing is the built in dynamic campaign generator is very poor, and needs tweaking. Or replacing, with this:
http://www.lowengrin.com./news.php

It is a superior dynamic campaign generator, and this guy made one for CFS2 that was loads better than that built in generator. you can tweak all the factors, and is a wonderful peice of software. You can also make single missions for stand alone or as part of a static campaign with this:

http://www.uberdemon.com/main.html

Static campaigns, well written ones, can be very nice the first time played through, there are so many written that you will not lack for variety, just time. :rotfl:

Still waiting for the research ...

Last word from me...SH3 and 4 out of the box were far more arcade than Il-2, which is scalable.

Can you 2 please take your argument about IL-2 to private messaging or go visit UBI's IL-2 forums where you can discuss it length. Personally I love IL-2 and have been in a squad for over 4 and a half years but strangely enough have no urge to discuss the game on a subsim site or especially in a thread about English subs! :down:

Sorry mate, I'll STFU now ...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._004031%29.jpg

HMS Venturer

What classes would you all like to see...

X-craft would be cool too...:oops:

For Pacific there would be:
T Class
River Class
not sure about S Class being used in the PTO
U/V class definitely didnt have the range for the Pacific.

No worries Joea, I like the picture BTW. ;)
If my sources are correct, the V class were a modified U class but were designated V as the Royal Navy were running out of names beginning with U. :know:
There were S class subs in the PTO but didn't arrive in the theatre until early '44. HMS Stonehenge was sunk in March '44 somewhere near Sumatra. HMS Strongbow was depth charged in shallow water and somehow managed to survive, she eventually had to return to Britain for repairs. The other S class subs that I'm aware of in the theatre were, Spiteful, Sea Rover, Surf, Storm, Sturdy, Stoic, Sirdar and Statesman who fired the last torpedo fired from a British sub in WW2.
The only other class of British sub I know of in in the PTO was HMS Porpoise, a minelayer and 1 of the 3 subs lost during the conflict.

I'm beginning to wonder whether we shouldn't ask one of the mods to move this to the modding forum.

It is purely hypothetical, nobody has yet started work. For that matter, no one has yet done any new 3d object for SH4....
The mod forum is more technical. If someone started serious work on brit subs, mod forum would be the place.
But for Brit subs, we would need:
- Exterior models for subs
- interior models of control room and conning tower. Some british subs (U-Class) did not have a seperate conning tower and were entirely conned from the control room, but I suppose the larger ones had one.
- British sailors with beards and proper uniforms. Or we could take just the ugliest SH4 guys and pass them off as brits :rotfl:(ducks and runs away) but they would still need new uniforms.#
- A brand new voice pack with both southern fairies and northern bastids. And some scotts and whatever other strange people populate that island.
- I wonder wether SH4 actually would support the addition of a new playable nation with new awards, ranks, bases etc or wether one would have to replace the Americans with the British.

I'll make one post here about IL2, as I have played the sim from December 2001.

You cannot judge the IL2 series from a totally offline perspective. AI being AI, the only way to judge anything is by playing against another human being. The AI have simplified flight models, and always fly and shoot at the maximum performance level. they are computer controlled after all.

The FMs for the most part are quite good vs. real life aircraft, with some exceptions of course, but you must remember that flight dynamics, if fully and accurately modeled would not be able to run on a PC, so compromises are necessary. The real pilots in my "squad", the BlitzPigs (we prefer to call it a movement, :lol:), have their issues with the aircraft dynamics for sure, but to a man they all say that it is by far the best thing going in terms of capturing flight on the PC. And these are not just guys pottering around in Cessna 172s. We have a former RAF Jaguar pilot, a commercial pilot, and a vintage aircraft aerobatics instructor in our ranks. I will take their word over the armchair experts on the UBI-Zoo forums, or here, any day of the week.

I would also venture to say that the AI in SH4 are every bit as bad as the AI in the IL2 series. And they are easier to defeat because ships are so slow, and hence even more predictable. But I will give credit where it is due, the SH4 offline experience is better than IL2's, by far. But difficult it is not. Only more time consuming.

And both SH4 and IL2, in the form of it's Pacific theater add on/expansion "Pacific Fighters" both suffer from a common problem. To wit:

European developers that do not have even a basic knowledge of the Pacific War, it's combatants, the tactics and equipment used, and it's importance.

Hence the lack of proper Aircraft/Ships/Maps in IL2's Pacific Fighters, and the poorly depicted mission types, submarine performance/range parameters, and amazingly, aircraft utilization in SH4. (take a look at the fighters on the deck of a US carrier in 1944, and you will see Brewster Buffalos. Yeah, these guys know their stuff all right...

:damn:

All British subs of this era were conned from the control room, the conning tower was just a vertical tube with a hatch at each end. (The A Class had the captain's cabin in the tower, but they were not ready for service before the war ended.)

Uniforms would not be much of a problem, as Brit submariners didn't bother too much about correct uniform and would dress for comfort., no air con remember. Crews would sometimes "go native". (This was probably the cause of Admiral Christie's remarks about RN subs and their crews).

Someone mentioned X-Craft. They would be nice but the weapons system would be a sod to mod

I only have a cutaway of a U-Class (in Bagnascos book), and so I assumed the lack of a conning tower was due to the U class' small size.

One thing hard to model would have been the fact that tubes 9 and 10 would have been only able to fire at targets not inside a 15 deg "red and green" sector across the bows or with a proper spread angle. But the Ts sent to east asia most likely had their midship external tubes "turned around" at that time.
Do you know wether british subs had an automated fan shot mode as germans?
I suppose so, given the british doctrine of firing large spreads.