[panthercules]

I've been salivating over these lighted ships ever since seeing the first post from Anvart on this topic a while back. I've been on a long Drumbeat patrol anyway, so I haven't been in a huge hurry to see these in action, but I've really been hoping that somebody would do the work to include all these lighted ships in a mod that would work with one or both of GW and NYGM by the time I got back to port, when I plan to upgrade to the latest SH3 Commander and either GW or NYGM.

However, having just missed the 100K mark on my foray to the Gulf of Mexico (came back with about 94,800, though actually spread over 2 game patrols given that I took advantage of a handy milkcow), I have now returned to Lorient and am chomping at the bit to get these lighted ships into my soon-to-be-upgraded install.

Thus the big question - is there anyone who has already or will soon (real soon) be releasing a mod that folds all these great lighted ships into a campaign set up that works with the latest GW and/or NYGM (in a way that's reasonably realistic, which to me would mean only single neutrals or perhaps small groups of neutrals traveling by themselves would have lights and no ships in real convoys would have lights)? I want it so bad I'm even tempted to try it myself, although I know absolutely nothing about the mysteries of the rnd and scr layers/files and would almost certainly make a hash out of it (and be lucky to finish by Christmas, if ever).

Even though it might be fun to play around inside those rnd and scr thingies, and even assuming I could eventually figure it out, it seems to be a really inefficient use of time for me and a bunch of other folks to all be trying to do this just for ourselves. If people are waiting for Anvart to churn out even more of these great ships, I can certainly understand that, especially if you really have to add all of the ones you're going to add all at the same time. However, it seems like Anvart's been pumping these great things out for a while now and while I haven't really been keeping count it seems like there'd be enough already to make a real difference in a playable campaign, especially if the work to add the current ships wouldn't be wasted or have to be redone when more new ships become available.

If the work to get these into the campaign files is more repetitive/tedious/lengthy than it is tricky/creative/difficult, I'd be happy to take a chunk of the work and spend some time plowing through it if that would help and someone wouldn't mind explaining exactly what needs to be done to a rnd/scr noob like me.

Of course, thinking about these lighted ships has made me wonder - do you think any single allied ships ever ran at night with lights on (though presumably not on their flags) early in the war in an effort to fool any u-boats nearby into thinking that since they were lit up they must be neutrals so they wouldn't be attacked? Or maybe the allies might have had some Q-ships that would run with lights on at night to attract/fool u-boats into approaching the supposed neutral ship on the surface for inspection and then they could open fire? This might be an interesting way to introduce Q-ships into the game, if we could have some armed allied merchants running alone with lights on.

As you might guess, while I can't wait to see some of these lighted ships in the game, I'm also trying to think of some way to have some game-play reason not to simply ignore/sail away from every lighted merchant I see as soon as I see the lights - I'm thinking the rare possibility that it could be an enemy ship masquerading as a lighted neutral might inject some pretty cool uncertainty to go along with the really cool graphic effect of seeing the lighted ships - what do y'all think?