So, will we see 6 men on deck at the deck gun station?

He also did the same thing for the u-boats and the special abilities have been modified to make the benefits more realistic based on feedback form the ex-submariners on the team.

At M Sarsfield. After making some of the changes with the radar, it revealed a couple of problems in the game engine that took extra feedback to discover. Trying to find a workable solution for this.

As for 6 men being on deck- adding them and have them move correctly is the issue. THere are no animations programmed for the extra men. Some things that would be nice to do are limited by the game engine.

Just sent AntEater a permission to use request

What sort of problems have you discovered?

It keeps shorting out from all the moisture just like the good'ol days.

LOL!

Maybe I'm just dumb, but I can't find the link on Filefront, all I can find is the latest beta for 1.5 which I don't have yet. Is it on there and I'm not finding it?

Are you looking for RFB 1.4 or 1.5? 1.5 is not ready to go as yet, but, it has rounded the corner and headed for home on release. The mega upload link on the first post should have 1.4 version for you.

M Sarsfield. Contacts were showing up on the map w/o being reported. I think sometimes visual contact ocurred first too.


stary_wars47
May be one of those filefront hiccups. Re uploading now. Give megaupload a try.

As AVG explained, I have invested a ton of time into getting the crew configs set up properly for each boat. The crew setups you see for each boat in the game are very, very much in line in reality. As was stated by AVG, here are some other things you will be seeing:

• Realistic crew configurations based on both the rate and job of the real-world sailors. Three crew rosters were used for this: for the S boats, USS S-44; for the older fleet boats (Porpoise, Salmon, Sargo), USS Swordfish; and for the Gato, Gar, Balao, and Tambor, USS Corvina.
• Realistic crew limits for officers and petty officers. Stuffing the boat full of noncoms and officers is no longer an option.
• The specialties for the officers have been adjusted to reflect their real-world jobs on the boats. What this means is your officers will have one of two specialties: Watch or Command. Of course, you can still put them in places where they wouldn't historically stand a watch (engine rooms or radar, for instance), but you will not be getting the most of out their skills.
• The bridge watch officer is now the officer in charge of the boat. It is from his leadership skills that other crewmen in the boat will recieve a skill bonus.
• Your damage control team now consists of crewmen that would not stand a watch in the compartments modeled in the game. These men are your cooks, stewards, and yeomen and can be spotted by them not having a speciality icon on their crew portrait. In this way, your damage control team has become a backup for your "real" damage control team, which is the crew in each compartment. This reflects a reality still present on submarines today: every person on a submarine has to know damage control. As such, you will get the most efficiency out of repairing damaged items by calling your crew to General Quarters and putting the "Damage Control Team" to work in the area they are needed the most.
• Submarines now have 1 or 2 Pharmacist's Mates on board, which was made possible by the addition of crew skills with 1.5. It has been modded that only they can have the Medic skill, i.e., you aren't suddenly going to see a torpedoman suddenly gain the Medic skill in the middle of a patrol.
• Crewmen on deck are now much, much, more vulnerable to damage from enemy fire. Crewman can and will be hit, and their efficiency will drop like a stone.

Some other things I've been working on:

• With Ducimus's help, I've adjusted the files so that the probability of receving a conning tower upgrade is much greater, yet still in line with reality.
• Equipment upgrades now better reflect the reality for each type of submarine. S-18 boats will get SJ radar in late 1942 but not SD radar; S-42s will get both SJ and SD radar but will have to wait until June 1943 to get it. This is part of a new feature with the S boats whereby the equipment availability is based on when the boats finished their modernization program, which was a lengthy process.
• Shell damage power has been adjusted for the 20 mm and 40 mm guns. They are still plenty powerful, but they (especially the 40 mm guns) are no longer the touch of death they were in the past.
• Ammo type and quantity has been adjusted for every gun, based on real-world records.

I don't know if you guys have seen this site before, but it talks about the firing rate and number of crewmen for the 5"/25 deck gun...

http://www.valoratsea.com/538.htm

Okay...

The guys who went to the best sources http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_5-25_mk10.htm show two miles less range and about a mile less elevation. The ROF is the same, but remember that is under ideal test condition. Actual rates of fire vary with platform and target speeds, weather conditions and wave height.

The key words in this are "capable of". That means under absolutely ideal conditions, with a dead rock stable platform. Numbers like this are misleading.

For example, the 5" inch guns on U.S. destroyers in WWII were capable of 25 rounds per minute:o

What that figure doesn't tell you is that was with a fire hose spraying the barrel to keep the temperature down at 18 shells/min or faster. These fire rates also do NOT include time for aiming and sighting.

Real life numbers were between 8 and 15. 8 when firing at a moving target, and 15 for shore bombardment. Keeping that in mind, the "real life" firing rate against an ocean going target was < 1/3 of what the gun was "capable of".

Beery's extensive research showed the fastest real life firing rate he could ever find was 3 rounds per minute. This was not the normal fring rate achieved by most sub deck gun crews.

Compare that number to the drop in firing rate for the destroyers in real life situations. If you use the same ratio for the sub deck gun as the destroyer guns, you get a firing rate of 3- 4 shells per minute. Yet the sub's real life firing rate would drop off more than the destroyer's did because the destroyer guns were aimed by a fire control system and the sub's deck guns were manually aimed.

Since the sub's roll could not be compensated for, they'd have to wait until the roll caused the crosshairs to cross the horizon and shoot. This required patience and timing. Since the deck guns in SH4 are rock solid, the reload rates for RFB are pretty realistic for allowing time for reload and aiming. In rougher seas, they are probably even too fast.

The deck gun can easily be destabilized in SH4, but not in a manner that gives you the ability to aim realistically. At least, no ones figured out how to do that yet. Tater tried, kv29 tried, and so did I. At best you wind up with a crap shoot on when to fire (this is the method "discovered" recently for SH3 that people got excited about, which btw, I tried and considered an unnacceptable alternative last November.)

Here's an analogy. For anyone that's ever fired a single shot bolt action rifle. How fast can you shoot at a stationary target with your rifle locked into position on a shooting bench so it can't move, and a bipod on the barrel? Basically your ROF would depend on how fast you could eject the shell and place a new one in the chamber. Now, how fast could you accurately shoot that same rifle hard mounted to a moving truck, on an uneven road, while shooting at a slowly moving target? This is similar what you are comparing with a deck gun between "capable of" and actual ROF.

So until the point where a realistic destabilization can be achieved, we'll go with the longer reload times.

To further the discussion and this has been discussed for years(concerning the game), the cannon is a secondary weapon to the torpedo. Castrating the cannon with reload times keeps the cannon as a secondary defensive weapon, not the main battery. If the player is allowed to reload a shell every 10 seconds, the cannon will soon enough become the primary weapon for that player. At that point you have a Destroyer simulation game. That was not to be in the Pacific and not to be in the game. I very rarely use my cannon. It is just boring and ineffective against larger ships. For sinking sampan and defense, I'm all for it. Other than that, I have no use for the cannon.

Well said AVG!:up: You have hit the nail on the head:yep: