I'd like to answer this question if I may in two ways. Firstly in my normal voice and then in a kind of silly high-pitched whine...:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

I love it!

I have just read some 35 patrol reports in varying detail. All are USN fleet boats with 3, 4, or 5.25 inch guns and all, bar one, are in the Pacific. Very little detail is given about gun actions but the fastest ROF I can find is Wahoo which managed 9 rounds in 2 minutes on one occasion, but this quickly drops off and we get 15 rounds in 5 minutes on a second occasion and then 4 rounds in 11 minutes in a third action.

Standard load-out appears to have been 95 rounds for a 4" gun, but Wahoo carried at least 197 rounds.

No one lists the HE/AP mix, but there is evidence of star-shell. ( In his book Unbroken, Alistair Mars says that firing star-shell was often too risky as it could put the submarine at greater risk than the target.)

There are complaints that the flash-less powder isn't flash-less and that it is also unacceptably smoky. Morton claims the US powder is inferior to British and Japanese and can cut down the ROF.

Gun tactics and even size of gun crews seem to be very much an individual choice by skippers. There is no evidence of a high ROF being sustained beyond 5 minutes.

Sorry folks, but I'm going back on my word. I've added so much new stuff in the past couple of days that I've decided I couldn't hold out any longer. RFB Version 1.25 is now available - the link is in the first post of this thread as usual.

New features:

There are lots of mods by CaptainCox (sea bed plants, rocks, bow wave and conning tower spray mods) that I'm sure everyone will be happy to see; then there's Jungman's popular periscope depth hydrophone fix; last but by no means least - CCIP's hardcore torpedoes mod which should give us all an intensely frustrating experience with those Type 14 torpedoes.

In terms of my own tweaks, I've tweaked mast and fishing boat DMs a bit, adjusted the standard game's wildly incorrect size and displacement figures for smaller ships, tweaked the 40mm gun so it can't take down DEs, fixed the crush depth indicators for all subs and fixed a couple of problems with the standard game's video briefings.

I've also added a whole new set of tutorials that are meant to increase the feeling of being in training at the US Naval Submarine School. Along the same lines I've altered the main menu titles a bit and changed some bad English in the campaign briefings (e.g. the part where you're assigned "to THE Pearl Harbor"), which hopefully will increase immersion a little bit.

I hate it when people break their word.. ;)

Just in time to start a new campaign :up:

as of last night Robert Pain and crew sleeps with the fishes off the cost of the Philippines :nope:

done in by a lazy skipper asleep at the helm! :damn:

:rock::rock:

XX EMERGENCY ORDER FROM COMSUBPAC XX RETURN TO BASE IMMEDIATELY TO GET FAULTY TORPEDOES XX

I've found and fixed a tiny bug in one of the training missions that was causing it to terminate too early. So for those who want to try these missions I've released version 1.26 with the bug fix.

LOL :rotfl:

It's actually much more simple than you think. When you report your status to base, you get a new mission if you have enough torpedoes left and you're far enough away from a base. That's all there is to it. You only get new missions when you report status (or contacts).

If you fire off 20 torpedoes at the first convoy you come across, you won't get more missions unless you first go refit somewhere and then go back out.

I forgot to mention that RFB 1.25 and 1.26 now have a little commemorative list of lost boats in the credits (which is now called 'Roll of Honor'), followed by a snippet from a poem as a sort of eulogy. The devs are still listed, as are all RFB's contributors.

Beery, first of all I AM OK with your deck gun rate of fire!!! REALLY! :D

Having said that, I think you completely failed as regards the reduced deck gun damage. It SHOULD be possible, even easy, to sink even large ships using the deck gun firing at the waterline.

Did you know that The most successful submariner of all times, tonnage wise, fired only 4 torpedos in his career? (One missed, three did hit.) He sunk 90% of his targets using the deck gun. Yes, it was WW1, and the guy was "old school", so he rarely gets mentioned, but hey. Using your mod the guy would die of old age before sinking 1/10th of his historic tonnage, not to mention wasting all deck gun ammo on one single ship (that's what I do with your mod).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothar_..._de_la_Periere

Please, bring back the more damaging (but still slow) deck gun, or at least explain how can we mod this ourselves, thanks!

Based on what info. People say such things - it's easy to say such things - but we need proof, not opinion.

I know all about Arnaud de la Periere, but he is an anomaly in terms of sub skippers and his exploits took place at a time when there was no threat of air attack and little threat to his boat from merchant ships. His career successes in the Mediterranean were based on completely different environment to that of WW2 in the Pacific, giving him much more freedom to sink lots of tonnage and leading to a greater ability to target key points of a ship. Besides, his deck gun took LONGER to reload than RFB's.

WWI U-boat crews often boarded enemy ships, put the crews into lifeboats and sank the ships from within the ship without firing a shot or a torpedo. de la Periere is famous for allowing the crews of enemy merchant ships to board their lifeboats and giving them directions to the nearest port before sinking their ships. If that sort of thing was possible in WWII in the pacific I would imagine that lots of US skippers would have tonnage comparable to de la Periere's. With the crew off the ship and with no damage control teams plugging leaks or closing watertight doors, sinking a ship would take just a few rounds. To compare the WWI U-boat experience to that of WWII US submarines is simply wrong.

The info on how to adjust deck guns is available elsewhere on these forums. Look for threads about the shells.zon tweak file.

In RFB I will never alter the deck gun based merely on player preferences. Only hard data is persuasive. Show me evidence of large merchants being sunk by a US sub's deck gun in the Pacific in WW2 and I'll alter RFB so that it's possible to do it.

Evidence is what I need. So many people are willing to criticize, but without evidence the criticism is worse than useless. Heck, your message gives me nothing at all on which to base a change. How can I, in good conscience, adjust the deck gun to do what you want if you don't prove to me that what you want is realistic? I can't. RFB is a realism mod, so any changes made have to have some basis in real data. I want to make your experience with RFB a good one, but if you don't help me I can't help you. All I have is the data I've seen and the data others show me - I can't change anything to suit what people think is right unless they show me data that confirms their beliefs.

Yeah, the stuff I have read has skippers ordering battle surface for trawlers, sampans, etc, and frequently putting 10s of rounds out before they sink them.

In 3 patrols (Dec '41 - Feb '42) I have expended 60 Mk 14 torpedoes with a 100% failure rate, is this frustrating enough:damn:. In the first two patrols I used manual firing and in the third I let the computer do it. Not a single hit, all torpedoes ran wide and/or deep. I figure that out of 60, at least 8 should have worked okay.

In a similar time period, I've been doing all right. Maybe 50% are duds. Hard to know because it could be bad firing solutions on some of them, but I've gotten hits and a sinking here and there.

I've been trying to fire from well under 1500 yards, as close as 500 or 600 yards sometimes. Also I've been firing from an angle so the torps don't hit at 90 degrees as I thought the new mod took into account the faulty firing pin. Plus I've given up firing when the wind speed is at max. That seems to be a guaranteed premature detonation.