I'm sure everybody has seen the new SH3 Commander Release (no, I'm not going to try to remember the complete title. I'll just call it 'The New One!:rotfl: ).
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=147237
JScones makes reference to IABL's new Merchant Mod Pack, and to the work I've been doing on ship names. You may have also seen me refer to this from time to time. Now that 'The New One' is out, I can finally say this:
WELCOME TO THE WORLD'S MOST USELESS MOD!
USELESS!? WHY?
Well, it's useless because it doesn't do anything. You're not going to look at it and say "Wow! I've never seen a more beautiful sea or sky!". You're not going to look at it and say "Thanks Steve! Now I finally understand manual targetting!" In fact, you're never going to look at it at all (unless you like looking at boring lists).
SO WHY MAKE A USELESS MOD?
What happened was this: back when the original SH3 Commander was released I played my first patrol, and I sank a Coastal Merchant (now Tramp Steamer) for around 1960 tons. When I finished the patrol it was given the name 'S.S. President Jefferson'. Somehow that didn't sound right to me, so I did some research an found that there were two 'President Jeffersons'. One was a Liberty Ship of around 7176 tons, and the other was an American ocean liner of around 14,000 tons. Neither of these was a small tramp steamer plyingt the east coast of Britain in 1939.
I looked in Commander and found that the list was generic, and decided I wanted to change that. My original plan was to find the tonnage of each ship on the list and make a new list which would contain only ships of that size. As time went on and the research got deeper, people like AG124, Von Dos, AOTD MadMax and of course Iambecomelife were busy making new models, which both game me more leeway to assign ships to not only the proper size, but in more and more cases the proper appearance.
I was talking to JScones, Bigboywooly and IABL, and this led to IABL wanting the new features that Jaesen has added to Commander, and my finally getting some lists done. The Commander 'Generic' list has been reduced from 3500 names to less than 900, and every category in the list now has specific names applied, so any ship you sink will have a very similar tonnage to the actual ship with that name, and several (like T09A, the 'Arrow' tanker) will actually look just like the real ship.
What this all means is that from now on the ship you sink will get a name pretty close to the real one. And that's about it.
I'm not doing a separate release at this time, as the list is included in 'The New One', but my research is ongoing and I plan to release a new update every month or so, with 200-300 new names each time.
The first one will contain appropriate names for IABL's new release, and after that it will just be additional names for each ship class. I have about two years to go before I'm actually done, and the current list has about 9000 names on it.
Here's to realism! Have fun.
