[WIP] Mast Height and Draft Mod for RFB

[RFB Team]

This is something being worked on for the next RFB release: mast/funnel heights and draft values based on the ONI manuals. The draft value you see in the recognition manual is not necessarily what the ships' draft value is in-game. Be prepared for the fog of war to go up greatly for the next version of RFB. It will make getting good, accurate range estimates and magnetic detonation hits that much more challenging, but hey! - that's what the real skippers had to content with as well. So far, we've found that range estimates for merchants with good intelligence information are reasonably accurate, while ones with poorer data make it that much more important to get in as close as possible to your target before firing.

To give you an idea of how the mod is going to work, these are the reference points that will be used:

Merchants: top of the mast
Carriers: flight deck
All other warships: top of #1 funnel
It is being done like this, because while the ONI manuals give a mast height for every Japanese merchant, only general height information is given for their warships. To explain it further why I'm doing things like this:


Typical page for a Japanese merchant from the manual. The relevant ship for SH4 is the Haruna Maru, which is the Small Old Tanker in SH4. As you can see, we have mast height information for it. The "A" adjacent to the top-down view indicates the intelligence information on this particular ship is accurate and very reliable.


Typical warship page. From the gridlines shown, we can deduce that the Navy estimated the ship's funnel top to be about 85 feet.


Oh, the fog of war! We can estimate the flight deck height from this picture, but note the warning in big, bold print!

Now, the reason we are using the funnel height for all non-carrier warships is that all of the British vessels in ONI give data on funnel height and nothing on mast height, while the American vessels give data on both mast and funnel height. We don't want to confuse the player with warship range-finding by telling them they have to use one reference point for one nation's ships but to use a different one for another.