Adding nations
 

For my TMO upgrade, have added the Red Cross as a neutral country and another country "United States". The United States will be defined as an Axis power. This will be used to place select units to provide the chance of "friendly fire" incidents for player sub, including depth charging from US DD's , planes etc. Will also be used in my revamp of the sea trials, including the in doctrinal depth charges but instead of coming from a ijn vessel, will come from a US DD.

Issue is need the United States to show the US flag. When I tried this previously it would not display and received an error when loading (would have to go back to desktop, click okay , then back to the sim which would then load. The Rec manual just showed a no flag. What am I missing?

1: The hostile "United States" assets will be strategically placed to simulate friendly fire incidents so they will not or are highly unlikely to encounter the "American " units, aside from the player. While placed at certain time and locations, they will be randomly generated with a fairly low chance of spawning since these incidents were pretty rare overall, chances will be low. One example would be early in the war when Japanese submarines routinely operated in Midway and Hawaiian waters, much more likely to get bombed by a patrol plane in case of mistaken identity than in later war when they had basically stopped and aircrews were not as trigger happy.

Following real life doctrine, I could in pre mission orders, provide cordinates of "safety lanes" approaching certain bases where unlikely to run into the issue, but even then it happened. See USS Dorado, lost to a friendly air attack when it was in a safety lane off Panama.


2:That is kind of the point of adding these units, the sub captain will see an Allied type DD, but knowing the potential for "Friendly fire" is there, will be best to avoid, as subs generally did in real life. Will not really know, until they fire. Subs still have the advantage you will most likely detect them before they detect you and can always dive. Far as Aircraft, well the sim will still recognize say a PBY assigned to the "United States" as an enemy plane and provide the "aircraft spotted!" alert and dialog box if player does not have SD radar. SD contact, probably best to dive and avoid. This will simulate the danger subs were pretty much always in and keep captains on their toes. Again, it'll be rare, but the one time, could be the end.



3: Since the game treats things without much gray area, there will be no way to identify as a friendly, so best option will be to avoid if possible, if find self being hunted, run silent, run deep. IF unable to shake loose, well it happened in reality, see the USS Seawolf story, sunk by US Destroyer Escorts via depth charges.

For the sea trials...which includes a "depth charge indoctrination" (which was part of training for US subs) , I will include a mod "training depth charges" for use during sea trials (if player desires) that will provide an extremely low risk of damage or destruction. Mod can be deactivated once out of training .

While the sim is not meant to put US v US, it overlooked a lot of key elements of the sim, one of them being the risk, that US subs faced in particular of being mistakenly being attacked by Allies. My original intent of creating this was for a more realistic set of sea trials, but friendly vessels in the sim will not depth charge player sub. Then I thought about friendly fire incidents and the element of danger, the challenge could present. SH 4 out of the box grows stale quickly, but the modders have kept it fresh and to some degree, each patrol experience has a high level of unpredictability, that is the point of adding this to my forthcoming TMO upgrade.

Perfect? No, because things must be done within the limitations of the sim itself, but will add an element of unpredictability to the sim.

Hey Bubblehead1980,
Show me whats been done so far for your "friendly Fire" and I will see what I can do...

I will send it to you, I actually resolved the issues on my own after several hours lol. One issue is the US flag (although renamed for the United States) will not show up on these vessels.

Just FYI, for a long time I have been able to add any flag I want to any ship, regardless of nationality, by simply extracting the flag object mesh from flag.dat with S3ditor, cloning it, importing into whatever unit I want, and then adding a .TGA/DDS with whatever flag skin I want in the .DAT file of parent unit.

Then use S3ditor to make the "real" flag node invisible.


Easy way to have ships under false flags, ships with as many signal flags as you want, or in your case flags for friendly fire incidents! Cruiser below utilizes small SH3 flags but the procedure for the big SH4 flag is the same. All flags fully animated; no crashes or problems!

https://i.postimg.cc/5ym7kXWH/pathfind.jpg