I'm WELL aware of that. The fact remains, that at below 300 meters, you are essentually invulnerable.

By default, all sensors are cut off at 300 meters. Sonar and hydrophones. So are all means of being able to damamge the player's sub. Now you could mod those to go deeper if you wanted to, but depth charges were hardcoded. Now ive tried to get depth charges to explode randomly by a certain depth. Unfortunatly it just wont work that way. Fiddle with the variables all you want, but if the AI thinks your at a certain depth, thats what it will set them at, an they have a chance to damage you - until you hit the 300 meter barrier.


You can change hedgehogs to explode randomly in a given depth range, but thats not quite the same thing. It does give a rather cool effect though. For kicks you can set all those hedge hog charges to act as mini depth charges and explode randomly within 50 meters after a 100 meter plunge if you wanted to. Kind of a shame depth charges aren't quite so cooperative.

Yea i was there for the pin point drop thread. Alot about the AI has been learned since then. Getting rid of pinpoint drops is so easy its childsplay. Ive spent countless hours over the last two years working with it off and on. Once you understand the variables, its easy to make the AI as aggressive or as passive, or as accurate or as not so accurate as you want.

That's my point - you should be. I think there's no way that any sub at 300m could be heard or attacked using 1940s equipment, unless the sub was doing something incredibly stupid, like running at full speed..

yeah but can you make it so all the subs in the game can goto 300 meters ?

I could. The question is, in SH4 why would I want to? No US sub could go that deep.

Well i would love to use it :) maybe others to ?

My overall point is, why would you want to? What fun is that? In SH3 i got a kick out of the notion of a VIIC/41 that could go that deep, but what ruined the fun to me, was the fact that it made the game too easy. WHen you have a predictable and reliable pattern of escape, (dive to 300 meters, go to ahead slow, and advance TC tell they go away) the game gets dull.

Im a firm beleiver in, "the payoff" :88)

yeah but for some it is fun to dive that deep, so i still hope someone can make it happen.

I agree; that's why I'm a big fan of TimeTraveller's "Crush Depth Randomizer" for SH3. I hope one shows up for SH4 sometime.

in the interim, you can use tt's sh3 inspector to acheive the same result (it also has a crush depth randomizer)... just copy the folder for the sub in question over to sh3's submarine directory, run inspector and randomize your crush depth, then copy the files back to sh4's directory structure.
et voila!

great job

thank you for your work

Just took your advice and used TT's Crush Depth Tool to take a look at the default and CCIP's modifications. I just use the Tambor as an example.

I think CCIP's value for the crush depth is showing 150 in TT's SH3 Crush Depth, now i'm not totally certain but I thought these values were in Meters. So I loaded up the Midway training mission and took the sub down to 350ft & sat there. I let 30 mins of accelerated time go by and no damage.

I then opened the files up again in TT's program and changed the crush depth to 76m, 250ft, which is what I believe the correct value is. Did the same thing again in the mission but this time at 240ft, still no damage. Then again at 270 ft, this time all hell breaks lose and my sub plummets to the sea bed.

Can someone confirm these values and see if i'm either right or weather I screwed up somewhere. The reason I started messing around with the values was i'm using the FTT mod which has the battery fix incorporated so I went back to compare the values. I think FTT has a value of 115 for the Tambor.

Thanks guys.

I think you are correct on the use of meters for crash depth.

For a test depth of 76 meters, ~115 would be correct for crash depth since test was about 2/3 of design, and design was usually very conservative.

Ideally, I would like to see 76m + (random between 76/5 - 76/2), with slow crash speed inflicted beyond that point.

Unfortunately, we have a hard number, but at least crash speed allows a slide from slow crush to instant implode.

No, I meant the depth at which the hull starts to implode. The original value I had was 115, which works out at 377.296588ft. The value I have for the Tambor now is 76, which equates more to the actual max dive depth of 250ft.

If the value in CCIP's mod is 150 and that value is in meters then the sub won't start to break up until it hits 492ft.

250 was NOT the max dive depth of the Tambor, it was the test depth, which was 2/3 of design depth, which was conservative if you happened to get a good quality hull ;) There are no known instances of undamaged hulls failing at test depth.

Which is why you have cases of some subs reaching almost double test depths. On the other hand, it is also probably why we never heard from some subs again.

Again, there is a pretty good basis for using 115 for the Tambor.

Ahhhhh, OK, makes sense now. Back to the drawing board to re-adjust the depths again.

Thanks for the info, just went back and tweaked all the subs from FTT for more accurate depths from this site http://www.fleetsubmarine.com/

Used TT's Tweaker to adjust the depths and noticed that the CFG files for the subs still had the depths set to default which were lower than the ZON files so I changed those as well.

Gonna go see what else I can mess with now.

On the use of test depth, keep in mind that the U.S. Navy was very conservative, for example the Balao class had a test depth of 400 feet, but according to Silent Victory could survive a dive of 800 feet or 2 times test depth.

In 1969, a Balao class, USS Chopper accidently dove to 1,000 feet or 2.5 times test depth and survived, but the hull was badly damaged and the boat was subsequently decommissioned.

http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Qu...8/deepdive.htm

I tested all the submarines and I came to the same conclusion. I posted in this thread earlier but no one else seemed worried about it. I haven't heard from CCIP in a while though - I think he may be on vacation. I guess we could PM him.

If I to get to crush depth on purpose using this mod, the only sub that has problems is the s18. All the other boats go to 450ft with no problems. If someone else could confirm this that would be great. Maybe all these boats could go to 450ft? Also, how can we get the boats lower than 450ft? I'd like to really test these crush depths.

You can always put planes on dive... and let the helmsman call out the depths below 450.

I've put the planes on dive. The boat stops at 450ft. It won't go lower.

Could that be to do with the CFG file? As I mentioned earlier, the values in there were set lower than in the ZON files and with TT's tool if you set the depth in the ZON it warns you that you still won't be able to dive past that depth as the CFG file has a lower value.

I've changed all the depths in mine now so i'm off to do some testing.

Beery: The crush depth for the S-18 is set at 115 meters - 377 feet in CCIP's mod.

EDIT: Here are the figures I have mine set at now in METERS:

Balao = 182m - 597 feet
Gato = 137m - 449 feet
Porpoise = 114m - 374 feet
S-18 = 91m - 298 feet
Salmon = 114m - 374 feet
Sargo = 114m - 374 feet
Tambor = 114m - 374 feet