When you read the annals of actual WWII subs, they are full of engagements in which the target was damaged but did not sink. Frustrating? Yep. Welcome to the real world, and to reasonable tonnage tallies.

Personally, I think warships in SH4 sink a bit too easily (although I did love that moment when a Kongo battleship anchored off Kobe keeled over with its propellers in the air).

I do think that there should be a big difference between hitting a loaded tanker vs. and unloaded one. There was in SH3, as I recall. If you hit a tanker heading to England, it usually blew sky high; hit one heading to America and it barely did anything. The same should be the case here with tankers heading to Japan vs. leaving Japan. The tankers I have met have unfortunately been empties, and I've learned not to even try to sink them. So I dunno if hitting a loaded one will make any difference in SH4 or not.

Yet another gamer who fails in history. How old are you dude? :know:

Hi Captain !

Into the files the angles is referint to "chances" from 1 to 100, i assume it is the chance to explode, not sure if it is a power reduction.... :hmm:



Dsicussed many times on SH III, i was thinking like you the max and min raduis are corresponding to min and max explosion power, but other mods think diferent, there is another affirmation, from other modders wich say the explosion as an unique raius and an unique power with is random between max an d min values...

Not sure, but testing depth charges using external camera, depth charge exploding a little far produce a samller damge.

Then it is posible a degradation of explosion power between min and max radius.


If the degradation of explosion power between min and max radius is true, i think so it is, then it is true too.

Any way, to enlarge radius has another problem or benefit... you reach more neightboard compartements, and this make the ships sink more easy.

I follow a diferent way... with the objective to not make the ships to sink too easy...

I increased the torpedo power... so well, but... i reduce the radius.

This make samller holes, more realistics, and do not spread the damage to vecinity compartements, but i make some of them critical.... engines rooms with boilers, and fuel stores.... plus cargo if it is ammo or fuel.

If you hit there, the explosion of the compartement spread the damage to adyacent compartements, not the torp.

If you hit a non critical compartement... ship do not explodes, start to flood, and you nedd to flood more compartements for the flood sinks the ship.

Or simply apply more torps to reach the ship max hitpoints.

Initially they become a littile bit hard to sink, ut balancing a little bit each setting, topedo power, radius, floodint times, ships hitpoints... i finally arrive to a poit where, for my taste i am satisfied,

Shps as many strange ways to sinks, some ones are so easy to sink with spectacular FX effects, another are hard to sinks and no FX effects, some remain floating for hours, some sinks more quickly..

Cargo ships in average are more easy to sink, and battleships and heavy cruiser even DDs, are a lot more hard to sink.

I still tweaking but like my settings now...

If you want to try... here you have, i will apreciate comments.

Download "Die Slowly Stage 11"

In this version, all conflictive large cargo ships was reduced to half hitpoints, and all conflictive medium cargo ships was reduced to 66% of original hitpoints.

Theoretically, it must make they be able to sink with a single torp, but the empty ships, wich appears often demand 4, and cargo demand 2, and fuel or ammo 1 or even in rare cases 2.

Yamato needs almost 6, and smaller battleships as Kongo needs 4, and heavy cruisers needs 2, and Dds needs 1 or 2.

Always talking about standardr MK 14, if you use weak MK 10 or 18, you need more torps.

Tiday i will test increasing conflictive ships hitpoints.... form 50% large 66% medium to 75% large and 100% medium.

I will prepare Stage 12 for tonight with choices :
No change in conflictive ships hitpoints
75% 100%
50% 66%



Download "Die Slowly Stage 11" from here.....

http://hosted.filefront.com/Redwine



.

I do not argue that realism is quaintessential in a simulator, nor do I argue that SH4 is trying to make a decent effort, nor that ships are in reality far sturdier than Hollywood or 'shoot-em-up' simulation mockups make them seem.

However, if the purpose of any game is to model a situation as close to reality as possible, then SH4 scores extremely low - at least for now.

Example:

Last night I was playing and tried to kill two ships:

One Huge European Liner, I was lined up with it coming at an AOB of 90 degs at 600 yds (as close to a dream shot in my book as ever) hit him with two torps on the bow, starts a small fire, quickly spreads out back, literally sunk in two minutes real time! Let's say that the ship was fully loaded with troops and ammo on the decks and hence the fire that spread in two minutes, but sink totally in 2 minutes? I am a little doubtful as to how.

One Large Old Composite Freighter in a convoy, coming at an AOB app.45% at about 700 yds. This one was hit with 4 torps admittedly at stern (miscalculated speed) and very close to propellers. Ship on minimal fire, moving at 2-3 kts (:doh:), now no matter how sturdy he is, or how 'far' my explosions were, 4 torps on propellers should have definitely left him dead in the water. Anyway, I do a 180 deg turn and fire off the remaining 4 aft torps on him, hit him from bow to stern. The damage model is identical, ship still moves (and leaves) at 2-3 kts, and I turn away and head for home in disgust...

Now, if you can convince me that this is realistic then I'll believe anything including that there were WMD in Iraq :p

I used to believe that long sinking times should be the norm - until I did some research. Most ships in real life were sunk in less than ten minutes after the final torpedo hit. Two minutes for a liner might be a bit extreme but the game is actually not too far off in general terms.

On the other issue I agree fully. I wish we could adjust these things because the devs probably will not (they didn't in SH3).

Beery, do you have any links to your research? Sounds interesting to me, sometimes I get obessed by the most arcane stuff when I'm wrapped up in a sim. Average sinking times and torps needed to sink targets seem to appeal to me at the moment.

I think it's a question of preconceptions, that I should really balance against real world facts. For example, Kongo only took two fish to go under, but if that was to happen in the game I'd probably quit in disgust!

Well, I know from reading Clear the Bridge! and Thunder Below! that ship sinkings were indeed quite fast... if they weren't down in a couple of minutes they weren't going down, and the sub would only claim "damaged" or go back
in for a coup de grace.

Four specific instances I remember from reading the Japanese Merchant Shipping documents:

1) Merchant requires three separate attacks and six torpedoes over an eight hour period to put it down. Actually 10 torpedoes were needed, but four were misses. This attack was also documented in United States Submarine Operations Of World War Two.

2) Merchant carrying steel is torpedoed and sinks in less than one minute.

3) Merchant is hit by torpedo in the engine room. Taken under tow, they are almost to a friendly port several hours later when it suddenly breaks in half. The stern sinks, the forward half is towed to shallow water where it is grounded and the surviving cargo is offloaded to other ships.

4) Merchant is hit in the bow by a dud torpedo. Hull plates are ruptured, damage control is awful, ship fills up with water and sinks.

You never know what you're going to get. Still, I agree, ten seems like a lot, even for a tanker.

If i not remember bad, this is commented by Terence Robertson when wrote memories of Cap Otto Krestchmer... captain tells some ships go down in few seconds, half minute, others has no same bahaviour, and demand more torps to sink.

I think so the game do not modellates all the real life posibilities, then we must to arrive to a point where we feel satisfied, may be a "blend" between reality and gameplay. :up:

If a ship is carrying something as heavy as steel I would expect it to go under pretty quickly. Sinking times for the heavy cruiser in the training mission is a bit off though. I put two fish in her and its sunk in about 30 seconds if that, totally unrealistic. If you think about the Hood that sunk in about 3 minutes with its entire magazine gone up in smoke...so 30 seconds for a cruiser is waayyyy off. I would like to see sinking times extended to what they are in GWX personally but thats not going to happen for the time being.

Bit OT I know, but are there any known plans for a supermod for SHIV?

Sadly, i think, we have not how to adjust difrent sinking times for diferent ships cargos, we can adjust the same flooding time for all same group of cargo ships disregardig what are they carring as load up.

The diferences will be in damaged cause, queantity of compartements damged, and damage added by the cargo explosion, then we will have diferent sinking times but sadly we cant adjust in example, oil, flooding time #1, steell floding time #2...

That is what we have...

In my last test, i am launching torps with low angle and from the bow... to test fail in detonation, a torp explodes, and any kind of damaged was showed, but, the ship start to flood, and its bow down, his speed become slow hour by hour, i follow it al evening, all night and all morning... finally after near one day later, the ships stops completelly to speed zero.

I finish it with 10 rounds of my deck gun.

About megamod... i dont know, but i dont like them too much, they touch too much things, and not all changes are of my pleasure, i preffer a pack of small mods.

:up::up:

I wish I'd kept it. But I did it back in 2005. Basically I just did a search online for something like "ship sink hours torpedo", "ship sink days torpedo" and "ship sink minutes torpedo" and collated all the info. I think I also went through the U-boat info at Uboat.com and in my patrol data for U-boats that I have here at home. It turned out that smaller cargo ships would often sink in under two minutes while larger cargo vessels usually took ten minutes. I was shocked because I would never have thought a larger ship could sink that fast. A few ships took longer - some took days, but most of the data fell in the half-hour or less timescale, and most of those were ten minutes or less.

The Real Fleet Boat supermod has been around since March.

:o Wow, yea I recall something like that...didn't give much time for folks to escape. Mind this was battle damage, a lot fo folks might have got impressions from ships sinking from Hollywood, thinking of Titanic here.

Very interesting information submitted by all in this thread (perhaps somehow rename it to describe more accurately the interesting discussion?:hmm:)...

However, I would like to get back to my original question re the modelling of torpedo damage in SH4.

War is indeed the definition of unpredictability when staff plans, weapon specs and tests sometimes go literally out the window.

Exceptions to rules abound (I remind everyone how a German anti-air gun became the deadliest anti-tank weapon ;)) and I am sure that this applies even more to undersea warfare with so many X-factors defining the environment.

However, I believe that when attempting to model such an environment though in a simulation game, it ought to be more 'biased' towards the side of the original weapon specs rather than the unpredictability of wartime.

Otherwise, given the computing and programming restraints in the year 2007, any game sim risks becoming the butt end of forum jokes and bitter messages by creating considerably absurd situations.

Although, in fairness, I am sure that this torpedo unpredictability should probably be attributed not to the programmers' goals but rather to sloppy beta testing and rushing the game to retail stores, counting perhaps on the fact that the online community will finish what the dev team at Ubi started ;).