Lighted flag == neutral?
 

Lately, any contact I see travelling with a lighted flag, I ignore since it's probably neutral. I don't bother making an approach to check the nationality and simply sail on.

Is this is valid assumption or do the allies get tricky sometimes and light their flags?

Yup. If it has lights on, it's neutral. Note that not every ship with lights OUT is enemy.

But my policy is if I'm off the coast of England and it's dark, I sink it.

Steve

I'm a cautious, courteous kaleun captain. I always try to identify the flag.

Or maybe I'm just afraid of getting in trouble.:oops:

Speaking of which if something you sank is identified as "SS" Whatever in your patrol logs, does that mean it was American? Can you tell what country a ship belongs to by the "prefix" to the shipname in the logs? I've always assumed MV was British since everything I've sunk up to now has been MV for merchants and HMS for warships.

I know I sank a neutral (it was an ore carrier sailing unlit in an RN-escorted convoy heading directly for Britain, so... yeah) but I'm not sure which neutral country I just started my own private war with. :O:

In general terms SS=Steam Ship and MV=Motor Vessel, irrespective of country of origin.

Okay, cool... I was thinking MV meant (British) Merchant Vessel, to distiguish from HMS (RN vessel).

So I guess there's no way to determine from the patrol logs the nationality of whatever I sank. It kept switching from red to grey and back again on the map (I have Contact Color enabled) and I figured that was because the game considered it still too far away to identify nationality at the time.

Could've sworn it was red when I finally got near enough to fire on it but after it sank and I returned to the map the Sunk Ship icon was grey. Well, maybe it wasn't neutral, just not positively id'd at the time of sinking?

I think grey means it sank due to causes other than you.

As for SS and MV, it goes back to the sailing ship days. At that time British military vessels were separated by type: HMS was a ship, or 3-masted multi-deck war machine. A frigate was HMF, a smaller ship was specifically called HM Sloop. As late as the 1890s the the brand-new Torpedo Boat Destroyers were actually called HMTBD. Merchant ships of the sailing period used SS as sailing ship.

With the coming of steam SS became Steam Ship. MV actually mostly referred to smaller vessels, bigger ones being MS (Motor Ship). Sometimes in reference pages they are further divided into Motor Merchant, Steam Merchant, Motor Tanker etc. Then there are the non-English-speaking types. Norwegian steamships are D/S, for Dans Skib (Steam Ship).

And then there's the use of puctuation. Originally it was S.S., H.M.S., U.S.S. etc. In modern merchant parlance the '/' is sometimes also used: S/S, M/S, M/V and so on. When I started the Ship Names project the convention used in the files was S.S. and M/V. I decided that since it was considered the most common, I stuck with Steam Ship and Motor Vessel just to keep the confusion from becoming too great. Then, because the military versions had long been reduced to no punctuation at all (HMS, USS) I decided to do the same for the merchants, so what you have now is the simplest possible version.

I had several discussions with JScones when he demanded to know what the heck I was doing to his files when I sent him early versions. He was all :damn: and I was all :sunny: until we were both :rotfl2:.

Then there's the other problem: All British ships with 'Empire' in the name, and a few others besides, were owned by the Ministry of War Transport. I asked Jim, and he asked his dad for me, if they should be prefaced with MoWT. The answer was no, he only ever heard SS, and that a lot of the time in conjunction with Motor Ships as well. On the other hand a lot of ships were owned by the US Army as transports, and they are prefaced with USAT.

Confused yet? I know I am.

[edit] One of the things Iambecomelife and I are agreed on is how nice it would be to make all the ships nation-specific, so if you sink a ship with a Greek flag it gets a Greek name as well as being the right size and shape. Unfortunately in SH3 that means creating a new model and folders for each new nation for each ship, which means the loading times are going to get even worse. SH4 would be much easier to do that in, but SH4 has been mostly unmodded in those departments.

I have high hopes for SH5 in that realm. We might even be able to make IABL's dream of having them be registry-specific come true, which would mean that the ship you sank that said Lykes Lines on the side would actually be named 'Adabelle Lykes'.

Whatever Steve said.....sounds good to me :doh::DL

Then I'm still a bit confused as to why it kept changing from grey to red to grey to red on the map before I even attacked it. It was not the only ship icon doing this, either... which come to think of it, even the grey seems odd since I'm used to green/red/blue for neutral/enemy/friendly with Contact Color enabled. Does it make a difference if you're looking at ships in a potentially "mixed" convoy? I don't see why it would, I've had those before and this is the first time I remember seeing ships get greyed out like that.

Also it was calm weather and I hit it with 2 eels and it sank fairly quickly, I don't know what else could've caused it to go down. And I've seen ship icons for ships that I didn't attack at all, but which were definitely enemy ships, stay red after they sank. So the fact that I didn't sink them didn't change their color. And I never got close enough to make visual ID on them either so that shouldn't have anything to do with it.

So I'm still unsure about why the grey icon. Anyway, I already finished that patrol, I should be able to go back and see if I got or lost renown for that ship... provided I care enough to do the math, lol.

Well you know I wondered whether SS just = Steam Ship but then I thought, surely not every ship with SS on it is steam-powered, but then I wasn't sure about that either. And my thinking on the issue of steamships is further complicated by the fact that being from the Cincinnati area, "steamship" to me = riverboat paddlewheeler, lol, which I know is not right but inevitably that's the image that pops into my brain.

I asked the question about the gray shipwrecks a while back and got several different answers. I sunk two enemy ships travelling together over a time period of about an hour. One shipwreck was red, one was gray, but I got credit for both. The result of the discussion seemed to be "sometimes it just gets confused".

Lately it seems to occur when I damage a ship and it sinks sometime later. In that case, it's almost like it can't definitely tie the original damaged ship to that wreck in the water, so it makes the wreck gray. Although why it still knows I sunk it is anyone's guess. :-?

The contact colour mod is a little dated now....there have been many more ships added and the same work regarding the alpha channel has not been carried out on most of the new ones.

REMEMBER....we designed GWX3.0 in a way that ALL ships would be grey.

Soooooooo.....many of the above in GWX are newer than the contact colour mod, therefore they don't show colours like the original/old ships.

Ah, that would explain it then.

I love that line :har: