The ONLY glitch in using the Nautilus is the weight of those 6" shells, and the gun's breech operation. The 6" gun has a slow operating screw style breech locking mechanism, and shells that weighed nearly triple what the 4' shells did. The guns are located 25 miles from me and we operated the breech once and its a bugger..plus the height of the breech is alot higher than the 3,4 or 5" gun.

ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NOT FLAMING HERE! (I know how sensitive some are) Just food for thought. Taking all this into consideration still wouldnt rate giving a 4" gun a ROF of 10 shells a min.


Frank
:cool:

I like RFB and it does what it is suppose to . Fixes some 1.2 bugs while making the game feel more realistic :up: .

How in gods name could that be labelled a "propaganda" movie!! It wouldn't get me to sign up!

The 6" shell is not so different when comparing it with the game's 5" shell. The Nautilus ROF was 3 seconds slower than RFB's. We're not comparing 6" shells with 3" or 4" shells, we're comparing 6" with 5". Anyway, considering that the 5" shell is supposedly faster to load than the 3" or 4" shell, weight of shells is not a great issue - a person can carry a 50lb shell as fast as a 25lb shell - it's not so much a matter of weight as of inertia.

But we can argue back and forth about weight of shells, distance from ammo stores to gun, the position of breeches and other such details all day, but the minutiae of the loading process is irrelevant when there's info out there detailing precise start and end times for gunnery engagements. This data is the only data I'll consider for RFB because it's the only data that represents direct and incontrovertible evidence of guns in action in a combat situation. I already have enough data on which I've based RFB's ROF but more is always good. Find such data and I'll include it in my calculations. Find other data about the minutiae of how a gun is loaded and I'll happily ignore it because it doesn't give us a definite answer - timed engagements do.

It's all well and good to criticize data and pick it apart, and to cherry pick data based on our personal preferences, but until we have more convincing evidence we don't need the data we do have to be picked apart and we don't need details that make us vaguely suspect that one particular detail of the loading process was faster for one type of gun than for another - those things can only cloud the issue and they won't get us closer to reality. After all, RFB's deck gun reload time is shorter than RUb's, due in large part to the data collected from the Nautilus info - prior to seeing it I was seriously considering going back to RUb's 50 second reload time based on evidence I'd found from a 3" US deck gun that took one minute to reload - personally, knowing that the Nautilus data exists I think that discounting it would be a retrograde step.

What we need is constructive discussion and more hard evidence. We don't need the evidence we already have to be ignored based on our preferences for a faster ROF. That's not how an investigation should work.

As I've said before, if anyone can find reliable info on which to base a change in the ROF I'll consider it. So far all I have to go on are the data I've seen and not a single example shows a submarine deck gun of any kind with a sustained combat rate of fire faster than 1 shell every 50 seconds. Nautilus is faster but at 33 rounds per gun it's hardly sustained beyond the influence of the ready-use ammo.

What we need are data showing a WW2 submarine firing a deck gun of a similar type to those in the game with at least 40 rounds fired and with start and end times for the engagement. If anyone provides that data I'll factor it in. So far I only have about seven to ten examples that I've posted in other deck gun discussions, but only two for US deck guns. At this point we need more data in order to refine the loading times. Personally I think RFB's ROF is about ten seconds too fast, but more data is needed to confirm that.

It's not meant to get anyone to sign up. It's meant to convey the idea that the German submarines were well-oiled fighting machines that were winning the war.

Per the USS Wahoo's 4th patrol report:


0444H; (FIRST GUN ATTACK). Battle surfaced. First 4
inch shot it target in after deck house at 3,800 yards range. Closed
in on target and raked him with 20mm. and holed him with almost 90
rounds of 4 inch. Target caught fire in several places. Her life
boat was dangling from the forward davit. Passed about twelve
survivors in the water all sort'a chattering. The crew yelled to the
survivors, "So Solly, Please".
0510H; (SECOND GUN ATTACK). Lookout reported ship on
the horizon. Proceeded at flank speed to investigate, leaving first
freighter on fire and listing. Upon closing found target to be a neat
little diesel driven freighter quite similar to HADACHI MARU, 1000
tons, but definitely a cargo ship.
0535H; Commenced firing on second freighter with 20mm.
and 4 inch. He caught fire several times, but the fire was
extinguished by her crew or it went out on its own accord. She
speeded up to about 13 knots and appeared to be trying to ram the
WAHOO. We had no trouble in keeping clear. A member of her crew was
in the foretop waving his arms - maybe he was conning ship. A few
20mm. hits in his vicinity caused him to slide down a guy wire like a
monkey.
0614H; After expending 170 rounds of 4 inch and about
2,000 rounds of 20mm. on these two freighters, proceeded on our course
for our patrol point off O TO Light

By my calculations:
1st gun attack = 90 rounds in 26 minutes (possible from ammo storage on deck)
2nd gun attack = 110 rounds in 40 minutes. No way they could have reloaded the deck storage in this amount of time.

That equates out to:
on deck storage ROF = 1 round ~20 seconds
Below deck storage ROF = 1 round ~30 seconds.

Unless my math is off, which is possible cause I'm dumb.

Chuck

Edit- Added the next entry in the log as this states definitively 170 rounds.

While your math may be solid there is that pesky little word 'almost' doest that mean 80 rounds ? 85 ?

Is it possible he may have 'exagerated' a bit ?

Only thing I know for sure is that took a hellua lotta shells in real life. No matter the rate of fire.

Which they actually were early in the war. Fortunatly bad management of their fleet and technological advances caught up with them.

Im sure your familiar with Churchils qoute about the U-Boat being the most frightning thread of the war.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SteamWake Is it possible he may have 'exaggerated' a bit?

Nah, the mere thought of that happening is unthinkable. :p

:damn:

http://www.atourhouse.net/sh4/beating_a_dead_horse.jpg

So that's 90 rounds with an average ROF of 17.3 seconds. Twenty of these would definitely have been ready-use ammo.

The second engagement gives an average ROF of 29.25 seconds per round.

This is great info. Just what we've been looking for.

Now the question is, should we reduce the rate of fire to about 20 seconds per round to match the first rate of fire that includes ready-use ammo? I'm not sure. While smaller ships would take less than 90 shells to sink, medium ships would require more. It seems from this info that 30 seconds per round is about right after the ready-use ammo is used up, but the rate of fire must decrease quickly due to fatigue or something because firing the 70 non-ready-use ammo rounds at the later rate of 30 seconds per round would take longer than the 26 minutes in which Wahoo shot her first 90 rounds.

The whole engagement (deducting the time taken to change position) took 66 minutes and 170 shells were fired - so that's a ROF of a round per 23 seconds. Maybe this should be the figure we use, as it covers 170 rounds which is nearly all that a sub carries.

Actually I'm going to assume that fatigue is an issue and I'll add in a bit to cover preparing the gun to fire. 25 seconds per round sounds good to me. I'll adjust the smaller guns to match the 25 second ROF of the 5" gun and I'll leave the 5" alone based on the info from Nautilus.

This info was great! If we can get more details like this we can really zoom in on a ROF that's pretty darn close to reality (or as close as we can get given the limits of the sim - I'm still annoyed that ready-use ammo isn't modelled).

I have the logbook for Wahoo and it's clear that according to their report they shot 90 shells in that time. In the summary of attacks they claim to have hit with 60 shots so I guess that's where the 'almost' comes from. The interesting thing from our perspective is that (according to the confirmation of this sinking) this was apparently a ship of only 827 tons - it took 60 hits to sink a 827 ton ship - that's probably quite a bit more than it takes in RFB, so that just about puts paid to the complaints that RFB shells are too weak.

That is in addition to the 2000 rounds of 20mm also.

@Beery,
I would like to say that I really enjoy the RFB mod and I appreciate all the effort you put into making it as real as possible.

Chuck

you can allways remove the gun filesfrom the mod and stick to stock sh4 guns.
or there is plenty of gun mods out there you could install one over rfb.
I allso found the gun mod in RFB not to my taste , though its good that I could try out historically correct loading times.
I congratulate the poeple who did all the research but I dont think it adds to the games playability.
if you start going down that road you have to make a decision where to split.
if you know what I mean. its like removing the time compression because its unrealistic but that wouldnt make for a verry interesting game. would it

Playability is only a goal in RFB as long as it doesn't impede realism. So far I haven't experienced any playability issues since for me the most realistic experience is by nature the most playable. I find it hard to play simulations that give an arcade style experience.

As for time compression, the idea that time compression is unrealistic is a fallacy. It's not unrealistic because all of the crew and every other part of the simulation experiences time at 1:1 no matter what level of compression is used. The player gains no special abilities by using TC - he has the exact same ability as a commander has. If it has any effect at all it's an adverse effect on the player in that it hinders a player's ability to respond quickly to emergencies, but even then, this simulates a commander responding slowly due to being woken from sleep. In short, the integrity of the simulation is completely unaffected by time compression.

Games that place playability above realism are more fun (at least superficially) because they're usually fantasy or arcade-style. Basically, if players have as much fun playing RFB as they would playing an arcade game I'm doing something wrong. RFB is not meant to be a game - it's a tool for learning what WW2 submarining was all about and it's an interactive tribute to WW2 submariners. People who use RFB are not looking to be entertained in the same way that arcade games entertain - they are looking to get an experience similar to watching a good documentary. People looking for a playable 'game' are not the target audience for RFB - they won't get anything from it because RFB is not meant to entertain in that way.