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Originally Posted by nvdrifter
And regarding the surfacing with heavy flooding and being able to stay afloat... that really bothers me, too. I have been looking at ways to fix this, but no success yet.
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I've only had two patrols using LRT in which I have had any really serious damage/flooding. In the first one, I managed to save the boat after about 36 hours of nail-biting effort, with my ship slowing drifting downward until I brought her up by blowing tanks, then slowly drifting downward again. During this battle, I noticed a definite reduction in flooding as I surfaced or (as I did most of the time) cruised at about 15-20m depth - I took this to be a very realistic implementation of the notion that reducing the pressure of the exterior water should reduce the speed of the flooding into the boat. (this was with an earlier version and GW1.0x)
One my second patrol, I was able to blow tanks and surface (and actually stay there without being attacked again), but the flooding never really slowed down noticeably and eventually (several hours later) proved to be unrecoverable. (this was with LRT 1.31 and GWX)
As to whether the flooding should completely stop while you're on the surface, I guess it should depend on where the hole/damage is - if it's above the surfaced water-line then it should stop, but if it's below that water-line it would presumably continue even when you are surfaced (though at a somewhat slower rate than at depth, I assume). I don't have any idea whether SH3 (or LRT) models the exact location of the damage or takes that into account when determining the flooding experience.
After these two experiences I can say I'm still not sure I understand the dynamics of the LRT system and what the optimum repair strategy is. For example, are you better off leaving the repair team in place in one compartment till it's completely fixed, or moving them from place to place to try to stem the worst of the flooding? IRL, I assume that you would send your guys to the various compartments to stop the biggest leaks first, then come back and get the smaller ones later. Does the game or LRT model any notion of partial repairs in one compartment slowing the rate of flooding in that compartment even if/after the team leaves that compartment, or is the flooding rate treated as a constant until it's fully stopped.
Put another way - assume a compartment would take 1 hour to completely flood if not repaired at all, and would be completely repaired (leaks stopped) if the team worked at it for 30 minutes. If the team works in that compartment for 15 minutes and then leaves, would the water still be coming into that compartment at the original rate or at a slower rate reflecting the time the team spent in there before they left?
One thing that's been bugging me from the beginning about the damage repair mechanism in SH3 is the fact that you can only have 1 repair team and can't send them to multiple locations - although this is somewhat countered by being able to put "regular" crew into the compartments to also work some on repairs, the oddities about this not working in the crew rest compartments and some of the compartments being smaller than others (especialy the sound room) still seem to make it hard to recover from damage to these compartments. I remember in something (perhaps an early version of NYGM) a while back something was done to reduce the number of men you could "normally" put in the engine rooms (you could actually put more in there, but if you used those extra slots they'd be wierdly highlighted like they didn't belong).
That has got me wondering whether perhaps it might be possible to increase the number of slots for crew in some or all the compartments (maybe all but the resting quarters), but make the extra slots these sort of 'phantom" slots that you wouldn't normally use - however, they would be available to be used in a crisis so you could put extra men into that compartment to aid in doing repairs when the "real" repair team is occupied elsewhere. Anybody tried this or think it might be able to work?