rascal101,
The basic part of damage modeling is damage itself and they way the ships are destroyed / sunk, and also the most difficult and most consuming part. The way the SHIII works, there is a fine balance between sinking by flooding and structural integrity loss. This is where I worked the most. Also, in conjuction with the type of cargo carried.
Basic things that the GWX DM addressed include:
1)
That hitting a ship with a second torpedo in the same spot inflicted real damage. In real life there were many similar cases and such a hit resulted in even more damage, since the second torpedo had the chance to inflict even more "internal" damage. It might not enable additional flooding, but severe damage was sustained. This has been brought back through the GWX Damage Model. This way the player can be assured that even gargantuan size merchants can be destroyed with a reasonable amout of torpedoes. At the same time, GWX is moving away also from the stock damage model, through tweaks beyond the scope of this manual.
2)
That hitting a ship with the deck gun in places other than under the waterline inflicts damage. No one can argue that a hit in the command deck of a merchant ship would result in severe damage and loss of coordinated control (along with the command deck crew). Also multiple hits on the deck, the cargo or other parts of the superstructure and the hull above the waterline contributed to a real life damage and havoc that cannot be ignored, and in many cases to the loss of the structural indegrity of the ship. This has been modeled in the GWX model, retaining also the flooding by hits under the waterline.
3)
Flooding of the compartments takes place within a reasonable amout of time. In real life Uboat captains rarely stayed beside to their pray waiting for the ship to sink; their priority was to leave as soon as possible before Allied airplanes or warships appeared. In multiple cases, Uboat fired salvos,some explosions were heard while the Uboat tried to evade detection by escorts and the fate of the hit merchant ships was never known. Of course there were cases in real life where ships stayed afloat for days before sinking. These are the kind of stories the Allied WWII media loved, and that is why they are well known. It must be noted that these were the exceptions that confirmed the rule: Most ships received salvos of at least two torpedoes, in order to cover the possibility of a miss. Most of the ships did not require more than two torpedoes.
4) Also magnetic torpedos can break the keel of the ship more often (not so often like stock though)
Work was also done regarding effects. Now, more things explode and fly from the ship's deck
Lastly, a lot of tweaks and corrections were done to ships made from modders outside the GWX Dev team regarding their physics models (collision mesh).
Von