The recovery rate for bow and stern compartments is a positive number. The "recovery" part is hardcoded. Change the sign to negative and crew members will fatigue in rest compartments.


That sounds great. It's not possible with the model used in SH3. You get one fatigue rate per compartment, surfaced or submerged that applies equally to all ranks. This fatigue rate is exactly the same, all of the time, except in storms. That's all. It's a limitation of the system in which we work.


Torpedo load times work like this in SH3: (Assume the slowest reload time is 30 min)

Slowest time: 30 min
Middle time: 15 min
Fast time: 10 min

To put this in terms of an equation:

The only way to achieve the fastest torpedo load time is to have compartment efficiency at max. After compartment efficiency drops below max, you will load torpedoes at the middle time, until you drop below the middle (66%) compartment efficiency, then you will load torpedoes at the slow speed until you go below the low (33%) compartment efficiency.

The minimum compartment efficiency must allow crews at minimum morale the ability to load torpedoes. This set the low compartment efficiency value, and gives crews at min morale 1 hour of torpedo load time.

The NYGM CMM is designed to give full morale, full efficiency crews 1 hour of torpedo load time at the middle speed. The fast speed is not used, and the max compartment efficiency is set high enough to make it impossible to achieve. The crew may then continue to load torpedoes at the slow speed until going below the min compartment efficiency.

The rate of efficiency loss is the same for max morale and min morale crews. The goal was to get an average torpedo load time of about 15 minutes. As you can see, the bow torpedo room already has four cases (1. Max morale, max efficiency, 2. Min morale and max efficiency, 3. Max morale, min compartment efficiency, 4. min morale, min compartment efficiency), and four unknowns (33% compartment efficiency, 66% compartment efficiency, efficiency loss rate and crew configuration - there's actually a near infinite amount of crew configurations).

Oh and these values are also used for external torpedo loads, with the constraint being 10 crew members to load internal weapons and 14 to load external weapons.

As you can see, this is not an easy problem to solve. What you have in the NYGM CMM is the result of compromises with the existing system using the constraints outlined above. It may not be perfect, but it's as close as you are going to get to a reasonable average for a full set of reloads on a Type VII or IX. If you set the slow torpedo load time to 15 minutes, the middle load time will be half of that. I think 7 minutes is too fast to load torpedoes. Our values are based on the average time to load a full set of warshots in the bow tubes. It varies between 44 and 55 minutes depending on crew quality.

Oh and by the way, the stern torpedo room is more difficult because the requirements on this room are set by those of the engine room. This is because SH3 defines rooms based on the number of crew members in the room, therefore the Type VII stern torpedo room is the same as the Type II engine room and the Type IX stern torpedo room is the same as the Type VII/IX engine rooms.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the explanation of questions I raised. I knew there were certainly limitations on what could be done within SH3. looking forward to starting a new patrol.

Starting a new patrol/existing campaign. I get a "Too many sailors" warning. I am supposed to dismiss sailors and replace them with PO's? I have open slots for PO's.

Using a 7B, january 1940

Observer - why the crew limit? I'd noted that by late war, historical crew sizes tended to be larger (due to new equipment), with many type IX boats having as many as 56 men aboard. Isn't the mod a little too restrictive in this regard?

That said, it's quite easy to change the maximum limits in basic.cfg...

Two reasons. First, is the limited number of rest positions, which cannot be changed and makes excessively large crews more cumbersome to manage, even with the neutral zone which has its own quirks. In my opinion this cumbersomeness crosses the border between management and tedium. Second, the default crews were just a little too big compared to the historical records I looked at. We also tried to reconcile the number of Warrant officers and seamen to more historical proportions.

To help in this regard, we've changed the crew requirements for the engine rooms and the bow torpedo room. It really doesn't take 6 or 8 crew members to run a pair of marine diesels as the stock game would have you believe. We've reduced it to five, and set up the bow torpedo room so that only 10 crew members are needed to load internal torpedoes.

One more thought. It's possible to add in different crew configs for different times of the war, but only if using SH3 Commander. We haven't gotten that far yet, but it doesn't mean we won't in the future.