Concerning keel depths of ships:
We had two ideas.
1. To create separate mods for every merchant ship with five different degrees of loading. This idea was hastily abandoned when we realised how many bytes every user would have to download: five versions of every merchant ship! (Check out the size of the existing single files).
2. To adopt a German idea in the campaign files, to lower the ship depths a little when laden, and to raise them when returning empty. There was a big snag with this. You had to lower the depths simultaneously of *all* the units in a group. So if you created heavy-laden convoy merchant ships, you also lowered the escorts. Then they sank.
We could have adopted this idea for single merchants, but it seemed to be inconsistent to do it for some merchants sailing alone, but not for merchants in convoy. Also, there was no programmatic way we could work out which single ships should be travelling laden and which unladen. To do this manually for all single ships, when we couldn't apply it to the convoys, seemed to be an enormous and pointless labour. So we didn't do it.
Stiebler.
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