[Dogfish40]

Originally Posted by Armistead

Many of the lifeboats will fill, but when the deck crosses the water line, they're empty. If you watch the crew on deck when a ship sinks, when water covers their bodies, they vanish, somehow it has the same effect on men in the lifeboats, they also vanish when the deck goes under.

Not sure what decides how many lifeboat and living characters make it. I've sunk the same ship type and seen over 50 lifeboat, other times just a few. It may be related to damage and when the ship is considered sunk.
Often you will get the sunk message, but a ships deck will be above water, so you'll get more lifeboats.

Yes, I've noticed that most of the empty lifeboats have a good deal of water inside, as if they are sinking. So it would be a bug. I just noticed on a sinking the very thing you described. Crewmen on deck disappearing as the water came up to meet them. Same as the deck watch on the sub when submerging.

Originally Posted by Daniel Prates

I don't discard the possibility of this being just a bug - or less then a bug, a simple in-game calculation gone wrong. I've seen some weird things, for instance, crewmen moving around inside a burning bridge as the ship went down, which was pretty cool to see (in a creepy kind of way) bur hardly something planned by the programmers.

So it would appear that this would be something that could be modded to correct it. If the lifeboats stay on top of the water, we should see a lot more survivors. I'm also wondering if this isn't caused by the ship sinking, causing the lifeboats to fill, much the same way as liferafts capsize on insertion missions. It might be fixable

Originally Posted by Flaxpants

Ok, so it's not only me- I was beginning to wonder if they were a mod, obviously not. It might be worth mentioning that I used the deck gun on a couple of those targets, so in those cases the whole boat had taken loads of damage all over before going down, maybe I got the crew before I got the boat.... I have resorted to the deck gun a couple of times as my torpedos have gone south, having trouble hitting the broadside of a barn at the moment. All good though, am loving SH4

Yeah, that deck gun is great! Although, I shot three fish at a big tanker yesterday and was surprised to find them firing at my periscope! I got pretty close...anyway, the sound EFX of the passing shells was awesome, so much so that I let them fire a few extra times before lowering the scope. My point being, those merchants will sting sometimes. Watch out for those merchant deck guns.
Good Hunting all!
D40