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Originally Posted by Keelbuster
For those of us who have always played with realistic sink times ON, what is an 'interesting' sinking?
Here's what I see in order of likelihood:
1) break in half (fuel bunker), sink instantly (of course)
- my favourite is when it has sunk to one end, and then you break it in half, and the sunk end sinks first, and the buoyant end bounces up, released from the downward drag! so dramatic!
2) explode starting at one end (i.e. ammo bunker) and sink by that end
3) to bow or stern - usually slow, following a keel shot to that end (i find that if you select keel in the rec manual, it aims for keel near stern).
4) Capsize - this usually follows a 1-sided shallow torpedoing, followed by deck gun work on the same side. When I say 'capsize', it doesn't remain upside down, but rather passes through that position on its way down.
5) Sink straight down with no bias to either end or either side. This is very rare for me - sometimes with a centered keel shot...
What else have you guys seen?
kb
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-Roll completely over, floating for some minutes before sinking by the bow or stern. This has only happened with my heavily-modded zones.cfg.
-Split in half, with the bow sinking in maybe 20 minutes and the stern floating for several hours. Again, I modded the flooding rates for the bow and stern objects to get this effect for my personal install.
It would be nice if we could mod in some new cargoes for the ships in order to affect sinking rates. I've read accounts of vessels carrying iron ore sinking in less than a minute, regardless of tonnage. At the other end of the spectrum are ships loaded with lumber or cork, which would float for days or possibly even weeks after being hit and abandoned. It would also be fascinating if we could have mixed cargoes, so that damage depended on which cargo hold you struck. Hit a hold filled with oil drums and spark a fire. Hit a hold of general cargo and cause average flooding. Strike an explosives-filled hold and have the hull fracture along any nearby hull frames, instead of the default midships break we always get. Internal fires could blow out portholes, and loose vehicles belowdecks could cause bulkheads to collapse. Oil tankers should take longer to sink, even if completely destroyed, because their cargo gives them substantial buoyancy. I don't know much about the mechanics of explosions, but I think that refined fuels would usually ignite and gut the ship, instead of causing massive hull damage like TNT or ordnance.
Hulls could warp and twist, instead of being patched with a few canned damage decals. These are all things to think about for any future subsims. Given that flight and racing sims today have excellent damage/system failure modeling despite having to deal with complex high-speed physics engines, a subsim where the players' unit rarely tops 20 kts should be able to devote a lot of time to improving DM. Plus, plenty of older games like Nascar Racing 2 featured impressive visual indications of damage; a modern game should be able to manage this. Again, just suggestions; no criticism of the devs' efforts is intended.
