The "special abilities" that some crew have?
 

Hi all! :)
I hope someone can help me. I didn't find squat in the instruction manual about these abilities. I first discovered they existed in the mod "German Ultra Subs v1.0.
There are buttons on the panel to activate them. They are special abilities some crew members have that are above and beyond normal abilities. In the mod they are only on German crew members. So maybe they came with the 1.5 patch or maybe only the German crew can have them. I dunno.

What I would like to know:

#1 What are the special abilities available? A list of them and what they do would be awesome.
#2 Where in the SH files is the data on who has them?
#3 Are there any mods that can change/alter/add them?

Thanks in advance. Sure wish there was something in the documentation that described this.

Dep

You know, I've always HATED special abilities and the other arcade stuff the game developers added to SH4 with U-Boat Missions. They totally forgot that this is a simulation and got totally silly.

Then, not satisfied with ruining aspects of SH4, they doubled down on the silly stuff for SH5.

Personally, when in a campaign, one of my players sprouts special abilities, he's off my crew. As a result I've spent zero time trying to figure out what special abilities exist and how to develop them. I'll go play Borderlands 2 first.

I would think it would be better if the crew just got better as time went on, gaining experience made them better so to speak.
I said on another thread if someone wants it then it's on their PC and not anyone else's so no harm done.

It's been so long since I've messed with them to remember the files, but several mods use them, but many are not used. Some are activated by being in the right compartment, others have timers, you activate them and they last only so long, such as tweaking the engines for an extra knot of speed. I don't remember the list, but some that come to mind are ..better eyesight, quicker repair times, quicker tube loading, better gunner/aa shooter, faster engines, medic-quicker heal times, etc..

In Trav mod for TMO, I like the crew ratings, more for injured. I changed the settings some, but if a crew member became injured, ..I think he uses like 20%, like if their health becomes 80% they don't work. I think I switched it to about 50%, I used an older version of Trav's mod for TMO, didn't like the last one.

Well it appears they happen for US crews too. I'd just be happy if I could get my whole crew trained in one normal skill like I could in SH3. :)

Something else I noticed...the US subs all seem kinda inferior to the German subs. Germans have better guns, better torps, and more advanced subs. US subs almost feel like they are from WW1. I mean even the "normal" German subs like the Type IX are far better than the best US versions. I guess it was that way in WW2 too. Just we had more boats than them. Quantity over quality. Not saying US subs are garbage or anything. Just not as good as the German ones.

As some of you know I only recently returned to SH and I normally play single missions but to be honest I never noticed, do the crew still get fatigue and you have to swap them about?
I remember having to do that and it was a pain, some said it shouldn't be the captain's job to do so it should be automatic, has that changed in v1.5?

Actually, the German subs were barely advanced from World War I models and it was the American sub which was a vastly superior machine.

American subs were faster and quieter on the surface and submerged, had greater range, more torpedoes and torpedo tubes, better TDC systems, better sonar, superior diesel/electric systems (especially superior to the type XXI, which was going to be a disaster).

After the war, when the American subs were optimized for underwater speed like the Type XXI, they outperformed the Type XXI in all respects (they had longer range and were faster) and were also very dependable. During the war, the US purposely abandoned the underwater speed optimized design of the S-boats and went for a new and much more effective definition of what a submarine is: a surface raider, which, in case its miserable life depended on it, could submerge for the minimum possible time, then resurface to resume surface raiding duties.

The Americans realized that the much vaunted German ability to dive very deeply was very detrimental to the effectiveness of the submarine as a fighting unit. A hiding submarine might as well be a thousand miles away. It is entirely harmless. Foolproof strategy against U-boats: drive 'em deep where they'll take a long time to get to the surface, killing them if possible. But if you don't kill 'em, just drive away. They're too slow ever to see you again. You win. That's why about a third of U-boats were killed without hitting a single target with even one torpedo. What the Germans were good at did not contribute to the effectiveness of the weapon. It was if their guns were considered superior because of how shiny they were. Useless capability.

The American torpedoes, on the other hand, were exact copies of captured German ones, so faithfully copied that even their DEFECTS were copied. Their explosive power was equal or better. All those great German homing torpedoes? Not one sinking due to them in the entire war. The on paper inferior American Cutie? Several sinkings during the war. Something dreadfully wrong with a simulation that inherently worships German engineering regardless of pitiful results. Das Boot is a clumsily heavy handed anti-war propaganda movie, not a documentary. The German submarines were a waste of the best men and materials the Germans had to offer. They couldn't afford to lose them. They lacked the capability to win their war theater. They guaranteed US entry into the war, along with most of the rest of the world against the Axis.

But the two most important aspects which made American submarines vastly superior to U-boats were crew usability: air conditioning and humanized control layouts that minimized errors and RADAR. Radar completely changed the game, making a marginal utility weapon into something of consequence, which was capable of winning and did win a war theater.

Now, in the game, if Germans have better guns it is because their simulation is badly done. In reality it would take more than a hundred hits to sink a medium sized freighter. The Type IX was slower, carrier fewer torpedoes, had fewer torpedo tubes, lousy crew accomodations, cumbersome and overyly complex control mechanisms--it was a World War I design slightly updated, just like the Type VII.

By the way, the Germans manufactured 1154 U-boats during the war. That means more than 1300 were operational at different times. Only 263 American submarines made patrols in WWII. Germans resoundingly lost the Battle of the Atlantic. American submarines inflicted the majority of Japanese ship losses in the war, resulting directly in the collapse of Japanese ability to aggressively prosecute the war. What does that tell you about the relative quality and efficiency of the submarines and their crews?

Well I guess the victors get to write the history and interpret it whatever way they want, no offense. I read reports of the Type XXI that was on patrol when the war ended. They were able to totally evade Allied destroyers with no problem.
From the Wiki:
"The design included a huge number of general improvements as well; much higher underwater speed through an improved hull design, greatly improved diving times, power assisted torpedo reloading, and greatly improved crew accommodations.
The design proved enormously influential in the post-war era. Several navies took XXIs on their lists and operated them for decades in various roles, and almost every navy introduced new submarine designs based on them. These include the Soviet Whisky , US Tang and the UK Porpoise, all of which were based on the XXI design to one degree or another. The basic design remains the basis for modern diesel-electric submarines to this day."

My my...if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Germans should be quite proud.

Also, their Me-262 jet design is still being used by US passenger jets. We brought over former SS Officer Werner von Braun and he got us on the Moon before the Russians, based on his V-2 research. Sorry, but I don't buy into the demonizing of the German war effort. Considering what they had to work with, and the whole world was against them, they did remarkably well. Almost won the dang war.

That's just not true. The GHG could detect targets out to far greater distance than the JT or WFA were capable of. In fact the Balkon setup was so superior that the USN fitted it with a bearing time recorder and it became the BQR-2 passive set used in all submarines until the Thresher class introduced the spherical array.

It is done automatically in SH4. They get fatigued and then they switch out with another shift. Pretty cool, actually. :up:

The type XXI was not the first submarine to be optimized for underwater speed. The American S-boat did that in 1918, THIRTY YEARS before. The concept was consciously abandoned when it made fleet type submarines impossible due to awful surface handling properties. The Type XXI of course had awful surface handling qualities.

The design of the Type XXI was frankly terrible. The unreliability of the diesel/electric mechanism of the boat would have crippled it, leaving many boats stranded in the middle of the Atlantic. I do not exaggerate. I read the Allied assessments of captured Type XXIs from after the war. The whole concept was built upon running diesels while submerged under the grandest blind radar reflector known to man. The Germans simply did not understand how to fight a submarine. They thought hiding was dangerous, and they were right, it was dangerous to THEM. Harmless to the enemy. To radar they were nearly as visible on snorkel as they were on the surface. In the meantime their main battle strategy was to talk on the radio like a bunch of schoolgirls so they could be triangulated and killed, a very large percentage of U-boats sunk before they had ever fired a single torpedo.

Admiral Daniel Gallery's jeep carrier hunter-killer groups would have killed the Type XXI the same way they killed all the other U-boats. Find a U-boat. Draw a circle around the sighting. Cover the circle and wait for the U-boat to pop up. Since the U-boat would do that on a snorkel, broadcasting its position to the radar equipped planes, but entirely blind to the danger, they never knew and never could communicate the cause of their sudden death.

Their crew accommodations, while great compared to their World War I designs the Type VII and Type IX, were great, they were worlds inferior to American boats. An American boat in 1938 had better.

The worship of the immaculate Type XXI is purely the result of them never being in combat, where they would have had their weaknesses exposed. All we're left with is the wishful thinking of the German propaganda machine. Believing it is foolishness.

For imitating World War I American hull designs!

Wrong again. It was the British who designed and built the first axial flow jet engines, which actually made passenger jets possible. The Me-262 had one fatal flaw. The motor didn't make enough thrust for good acceleration. Taking way too long to get to speed, the 262's were killed by P-51s and P-47s before they could even get to piston speed. That took a long, long time. They had great top speed, once they finally got there. A jet engine built to the same principles as a Me-262 jet engine would take a runway ten miles long to get a passenger jet in the air.

And the Saturn V had no parts in common with the V-2, any more than a Prius has in common with a Ford Model T. Werner von Braun was a brilliant designer. But the V-2 did not make the Saturn V possible.

And the Germans did NOT almost win the war. They made a dozen fatal mistakes, any one of which would have made victory impossible. One of those mistakes was even considering the use of submarines in the Atlantic, an Allied lake. Every screw, every torpedo, every man, every drop of fuel put in U-boats was wasted effort. U-boats could not ever win the Battle of the Atlantic and were an inappropriate means to Axis war aims: the best weapons the Allies ever had.

This irrational worship of "superior German U-boats" is completely misplaced. The men were superb. But Germany wasted its best resources and best men to make artificial reefs. They were obsessed with undersupplying what they were good at and lavishing their best on what they could not win.

Giving up on this one. Just not worth the effort. Have a Merry Christmas. But be careful crossing the street with those blinders on. Could be dangerous. :yep:

Deputy, you just lack the specific knowledge beyond sweeping general statements to defend your position.

In general, German submarines were designed to perform interesting technical achievements: deep diving, fast dive times and they didn't hesitate to harm the combat effectiveness of their machines to achieve these technical achievements.

U-boats didn't carry enough weapons to justify their long traverse. Fifty U-boats against a thousand ship convoy could hardly make a scratch even if everything worked perfectly.

U-boats could dive deep, becoming entirely harmless. All that was necessary was to force them deep and then move the convoy on its way. Those subs could never be seen again. In the course of the entire war, U-boats sank less than 1% of Allied shipping.

They talked on the radio like schoolgirls in order to still fail to bring enough firepower to the party to have any strategic significance. This ensured the deaths of hundreds of U-boats, many before they ever had a chance to fire a single torpedo outside of a training exercise,

There was almost no part of the German U-boat strategy which was not fatally flawed. As such, the Type XXI, even if it were successful and it would not have been, could not have achieved anything more than being a fancier place for German sailors to die.

The German navy was built for only one purpose: to further the careers of Raeder and Doenitz. It achieved that at a terrible price to the nation.

American submarines, however, were built to carry enough weapons to the point of attack, to have the legs to get there and back with plenty of fuel for maneuvers, to support a crew under great stress with as much comfort as possible and to have the tools to make their torpedoes effective. Americans willingly gave up technical items of no strategic importance, such as the short dive times the Germans were so proud of, the ability to dive to 1000 meters. They purposely abandoned the advanced hull design of the S-boat to make the American submarine fast on the surface, where, with radar the American submarine could search 10 times the surface area a Nazi Sub could in a day. That means ten times the targets developed and attacked per submarine WITHOUT on-shore micromanaging and schoolgirl gossiping on the radio. American submarines and American tactics were built around results, not a list of cool things to make a submarine do. German subs were propaganda weapons first. Americans were silent but deadly. It wasn't until 10 years after the war that their story even started to emerge to the public.

But today, people continue to swallow the ridiculous German propaganda: U-boats were better. Well, they mostly sucked. The U-boat was an entirely inappropriate weapon to achieve Axis victory. It was using a wrench to extract a phillips head screw. It doesn't matter what cool features the wrench has, you'll never move the screw. The men were incredibly good and sacrificed in a foolish strategy that could never succeed.

Good plan. Constructing a flawed argument agaist someone who knows what they are talking about when you have no evidence of your own rarely is worth the effort...

RR I have a question for you though. How do you think the US subs would have gone against the allied ASW measures?

‘The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.’
Winston Churchill