[REL] Real Fleet Boat

[Beery]

Originally Posted by tedhealy

Having done nearly all of my patrols in early 1942, I've never really messed around with boats with radar. I upgraded to the latest RFB mid career while in port and then upgraded my SD radar to an improved SD radar. I now have the a-scope and ppi stations, should this be? Is this how it worked with stock too?

It seems like those 2 stations should only become available after installing the SJ surface radar.

I must admit I don't have a clue. All I've done on radar was plug in Redwine's fix so that the radar works wherever the boat is pointed. I tried to keep up with the radar bug fix discussion but I never really got beyond the "What in God's name are they talking about?" and "Please for Heaven's sake just tell me what mod to use!" stages.

[panthercules]

@Beery - thanks for your lengthy and thoughtful reply - I don't have any real issue with your research or your implementation of the concepts of ROF or not being able to sink a 7,000 ton freighter outright with the deck gun - as I said, I didn't really expect to sink her, but I still have to wonder how a ship like that could absorb so many hits and not have her engines disabled. I just wouldn't have thought those engines would be quite that indestructible.

Is there any way to play around with the damage model of the ships so they don't sink too easily but they do suffer some systems/engine damage? I wasn't worried so much about the lack of "visible" damage textures, but rather the absence of any apparent effects of having been damaged (e.g., speed and/or maneuverability/control loss).

Given the trouble I was having hitting it with my torpedoes, I was just hoping/expecting to be able to slow or stop her with the gun and allow myself a better chance to finish her off with a torp or two. But instead she just kept sailing on completely unscathed. Still seems weird.

I could even live with missing with all 20 torps, since they were early war Type 14s and even that total a failure rate wasn't unheard of at the time. I assume that sort of thing would even out over time and I would eventually hit something, and I don't mind coming back from patrol with little or no tonnage if the experience of the journey has been realistic and immersive. But, as I said, it's just a little hard to take the realistic frustrations of the (modded) game in stride when after you do finally find a target it turns out to be some goofy stalled out convoy or industructible uber-freighter, especially when that starts to happen a lot.

Just venting - it's not like it's gonna stop me from loading up RFB 1.27 and trying again - keep up the great work

PS - I appreciate your putting the less essential functions on the buttons that get cut off at 1024x768, 'cause my game just runs and looks better at that resolution than it does on the higher ones and all my custom interface tweaks are designed to work at that resolution, so I'd hate to lose any essential function buttons by having them cut off like that.

[tedhealy]

Originally Posted by LukeFF

The improved SD radar, also known as SV radar, indeed was linked to the PPI display. The early SD radar should have an A-Scope display as well, but currently it's not working.

Ok cool, thank you for the info

[heartc]

PPI radar: Surface only
SD radar: Air only
In addition, the early SD radar was undirectional and could only indicate range to a contact, not bearing.

Aside from fixing the "southern hemisphere" bug, is it that what Redwine was able to achieve with his mod?

[tedhealy]

Originally Posted by Beery

In short, frustration is meant to be part of RFB's allure. Players choose RFB because they want to feel some measure of that frustration that real sub commanders felt. The thing is, after feeling that frustration, the victories taste even sweeter. That's the real fun of RFB - with vanilla SH4 tonnage is cheap, so the thrill fades after the first few ships you send to the bottom. With RFB even a 2,000 ton merchant (something vanilla SH4 players might sneer at) is a prize worth celebrating.

Amen to that. With the realistic trop mod now in RFB, even getting a hit that doesn't sink a ship is worth celebrating

Just had one of those patrols you go over in your mind as you are trying to go to sleep (I can't be the only one ). Late July '42, out in the USS Gato to the Marshalls. I decided to try and stay on the surface during the day more to 'be more aggressive.' Only thing I found was planes. Tons of crash dives, no damage, but a few close calls.

I get a new assignment to patrol the Carolines. I head there and run into more planes, not a single sniff of a ship anywhere. Everyone must be in the Solomons. At least Jack Benny on the radio is keeping me company. It's getting late into August and the fuel situation is putting my back against the wall. I start for home with zero fish fired and start thinking up excuses as to why my be more aggressive patrol produced zero results. About 250 miles south of Guam I run into a lone freighter a little after noon in perfect weather. I give it a fist pump in the air when I ID the flag as Japanese.

I absolutely nail the TDC solution. The PK and his acutal position are exact matches. Now it's time to fire some fish and try and restrain myself from cursing at the results. I launch 5 bow tubes from roughly 800 yards. First one veers off (I know it veered off because it also exploded prematurely way off target), 2nd one I'm told is a dud, 3rd hits under the funnel , 4th also is a dud, and the 5th is never heard from again.

Target slows to 1 knot or less. I swing around and launch 2 stern tubes. 1st one I set for 28 feet hoping for a magnetic detonation (yeah, fat chance), 2nd one is set for contact at 10 foot depth.
Torpedo number one actually works It doesn't break the ship's back, but I get the ship sinking notification right away. The 2nd torpedo never hits. The merchant goes under in 30 seconds, it's one of those that goes down stern first as the bow heads skyward. 3 life boats are launched as I surface and clear the area and head for home.

After another couple of visits from the jap air force and a damaged deck and AA gun, I decide riding at 150 feet during the day on the trip back won't hurt my pride. I make it back to Pearl on fumes.

I had a blast even though I only saw one enemy ship the whole patrol.

[NiKuTa]

070522: Added 'Follow nearest warship sound contact' and 'Report nearest warship sound contact' buttons to hydrophone station toolbar. Note: there is a bug in the standard game that makes the follow commands impossible to switch off, so use these with that in mind.

Maybe someone say this but you can turn off this follow commands. Add or change a cammand in a Commands.cfg like this one:

[Cmd484]
Name=Hydrophone_normal_sweep
Ctxt=1
MnID=0x3F270002
Str=2885
Key0=0x48,s,"Shift+H"

I use a Shift+H

[Beery]

Originally Posted by panthercules

@Beery - thanks for your lengthy and thoughtful reply - I don't have any real issue with your research or your implementation of the concepts of ROF or not being able to sink a 7,000 ton freighter outright with the deck gun - as I said, I didn't really expect to sink her, but I still have to wonder how a ship like that could absorb so many hits and not have her engines disabled. I just wouldn't have thought those engines would be quite that indestructible.

Is there any way to play around with the damage model of the ships so they don't sink too easily but they do suffer some systems/engine damage? I wasn't worried so much about the lack of "visible" damage textures, but rather the absence of any apparent effects of having been damaged (e.g., speed and/or maneuverability/control loss).

Given the trouble I was having hitting it with my torpedoes, I was just hoping/expecting to be able to slow or stop her with the gun and allow myself a better chance to finish her off with a torp or two. But instead she just kept sailing on completely unscathed. Still seems weird.

These ships were very sturdily made and the vital points were very small and you have to hit those points (which you can't see to aim at and which are often below the waterline) precisely with a 5" shell, first going through a couple of plates of hull steel. The other thing is the effect of water on shells and bullets, which was illustrated in a recent episode of Mythbusters - basically if you aim guns at propellers, prop shafts or the rudder you have to go through water first, and water reduces a bullet's velocity to virtually nothing within a few feet. Not that you're talking about that particular issue but it's something worth thinking about.

One of the examples I gave above - I think it was Topp's 10,000 ton freighter - returned to port after having 120 shells pumped into her and she reported 'minor' damage. Basically, with larger ships gunfire is usually only a minor inconvenience.

Having said that, it should be possible, on occasion, to hit those vital points. But I can't be sure if RFB permits that. All I can do is approximate the general effectiveness of shells and hope the details of shell damage stay within realistic bounds. When I reduced the guns' effectiveness they stopped making the holes in the hulls that they made before, so it's possible that critical damage was also affected, but testing for it is virtually impossible (as it's so rare to hit those points anyway). It may also be possible that in SH4 gunfire was never able to critically damage a ship. I'm not sure.

Thanks for the appreciative comments. I don't mind people bringing up these subjects at all. I only mind when people call my figures BS or use similarly dismissive language, especially when they have no other argument but name-calling, but you haven't done that. Criticism is a good thing and people should be questioning and finding out more - apart from anything else there's a lot of Hollywood gobbledegook floating around that has to be combatted and the more we critically examine these subjects the more we learn. I'm learning too - sometimes I'll plug in a figure or remove a feature based on what I think I've learned and the next day I find out that what I learned was wrong - that happened yesterday with the 'deploy decoys' issue. For over a month I saw people saying that decoys weren't used on WWII US subs, so I removed the button that deployed them. The day after I did that I found out that at least some US subs DID use decoys, LOL.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by tedhealy

Just had one of those patrols you go over in your mind as you are trying to go to sleep (I can't be the only one ). Late July '42, out in the USS Gato to the Marshalls. I decided to try and stay on the surface during the day more to 'be more aggressive.' Only thing I found was planes. Tons of crash dives, no damage, but a few close calls.

I get a new assignment to patrol the Carolines. I head there and run into more planes, not a single sniff of a ship anywhere. Everyone must be in the Solomons. At least Jack Benny on the radio is keeping me company. It's getting late into August and the fuel situation is putting my back against the wall. I start for home with zero fish fired and start thinking up excuses as to why my be more aggressive patrol produced zero results. About 250 miles south of Guam I run into a lone freighter a little after noon in perfect weather. I give it a fist pump in the air when I ID the flag as Japanese.

I absolutely nail the TDC solution. The PK and his acutal position are exact matches. Now it's time to fire some fish and try and restrain myself from cursing at the results. I launch 5 bow tubes from roughly 800 yards. First one veers off (I know it veered off because it also exploded prematurely way off target), 2nd one I'm told is a dud, 3rd hits under the funnel , 4th also is a dud, and the 5th is never heard from again.

Target slows to 1 knot or less. I swing around and launch 2 stern tubes. 1st one I set for 28 feet hoping for a magnetic detonation (yeah, fat chance), 2nd one is set for contact at 10 foot depth.
Torpedo number one actually works It doesn't break the ship's back, but I get the ship sinking notification right away. The 2nd torpedo never hits. The merchant goes under in 30 seconds, it's one of those that goes down stern first as the bow heads skyward. 3 life boats are launched as I surface and clear the area and head for home.

After another couple of visits from the jap air force and a damaged deck and AA gun, I decide riding at 150 feet during the day on the trip back won't hurt my pride. I make it back to Pearl on fumes.

I had a blast even though I only saw one enemy ship the whole patrol.

Woohoo!

Great story. Stories like these are what let me know that the changes I'm making are on the right track. That patrol could have come from a history book. I doubt the same could be said of a patrol in vanilla SH4.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by NiKuTa

Maybe someone say this but you can turn off this follow commands. Add or change a cammand in a Commands.cfg like this one:

[Cmd484]
Name=Hydrophone_normal_sweep
Ctxt=1
MnID=0x3F270002
Str=2885
Key0=0x48,s,"Shift+H"

I use a Shift+H

Thanks for that info. Very useful. I'll see if I can put a taskbar button in for that.

[TripleDaddy]

Originally Posted by tedhealy

Just had one of those patrols you go over in your mind as you are trying to go to sleep (I can't be the only one ). Late July '42, out in the USS Gato to the Marshalls. I decided to try and stay on the surface during the day more to 'be more aggressive.' Only thing I found was planes. Tons of crash dives, no damage, but a few close calls.

I get a new assignment to patrol the Carolines. I head there and run into more planes, not a single sniff of a ship anywhere. Everyone must be in the Solomons. At least Jack Benny on the radio is keeping me company. It's getting late into August and the fuel situation is putting my back against the wall. I start for home with zero fish fired and start thinking up excuses as to why my be more aggressive patrol produced zero results. About 250 miles south of Guam I run into a lone freighter a little after noon in perfect weather. I give it a fist pump in the air when I ID the flag as Japanese.

I absolutely nail the TDC solution. The PK and his acutal position are exact matches. Now it's time to fire some fish and try and restrain myself from cursing at the results. I launch 5 bow tubes from roughly 800 yards. First one veers off (I know it veered off because it also exploded prematurely way off target), 2nd one I'm told is a dud, 3rd hits under the funnel , 4th also is a dud, and the 5th is never heard from again.

Target slows to 1 knot or less. I swing around and launch 2 stern tubes. 1st one I set for 28 feet hoping for a magnetic detonation (yeah, fat chance), 2nd one is set for contact at 10 foot depth.
Torpedo number one actually works It doesn't break the ship's back, but I get the ship sinking notification right away. The 2nd torpedo never hits. The merchant goes under in 30 seconds, it's one of those that goes down stern first as the bow heads skyward. 3 life boats are launched as I surface and clear the area and head for home.

After another couple of visits from the jap air force and a damaged deck and AA gun, I decide riding at 150 feet during the day on the trip back won't hurt my pride. I make it back to Pearl on fumes.

I had a blast even though I only saw one enemy ship the whole patrol.

And I'm having the opposite problem. I can't seem to throw a rock without hitting a task force. In my first 4 war patrols with the Asiatic Fleet, I have found 4 amphibious task forces, 1 battleship and 1 carrier task force, a 10 freighter convoy and a 5 freighter convoy. If I had enough torpedoes, I could have sent most of the Japanese fleet to the bottom. As it is, I've got 1 battleship, 1 fleet carrier, 1 heavy cruiser, 7 light cruisers and a destroyer to my credit.

[tedhealy]

Originally Posted by TripleDaddy

And I'm having the opposite problem. I can't seem to throw a rock without hitting a task force. In my first 4 war patrols with the Asiatic Fleet, I have found 4 amphibious task forces, 1 battleship and 1 carrier task force, a 10 freighter convoy and a 5 freighter convoy. If I had enough torpedoes, I could have sent most of the Japanese fleet to the bottom. As it is, I've got 1 battleship, 1 fleet carrier, 1 heavy cruiser, 7 light cruisers and a destroyer to my credit.

Interesting, in both my patrols out of Pearl, one to the East China Sea and one to the Marshall and Caroline Islands, I've seen very little. I've gotten some task force contacts by radio, but they've always been too far away and heading in the opposite direction. I've got 3 merchants sunk for something around 13,000 tons. Maybe I'll have to put in for a transfer to the Asiatic Fleet to see that kind of action :hmm:

[TripleDaddy]

Originally Posted by tedhealy

Interesting, in both my patrols out of Pearl, one to the East China Sea and one to the Marshall and Caroline Islands, I've seen very little. I've gotten some task force contacts by radio, but they've always been too far away and heading in the opposite direction. I've got 3 merchants sunk for something around 13,000 tons. Maybe I'll have to put in for a transfer to the Asiatic Fleet to see that kind of action :hmm:

It's almost more frustrating with more contacts, you just wish for more torpedoes. The carrier task force I stumbled upon in the Java Sea had 3 fleet carriers, 2 heavy cruisers, 1 light cruiser, 1 small tanker, 1 large tanker, 2 escort carriers and 5 destroyers. What was I driving? S-40.

The amphibious task forces like to anchor about 6 miles offshore - much closer to land than I think most people would patrol - of the Phillippines. You don't rack up much tonnage (Small Passenger Carriers are only worth about 1700 tons), but they are all lined up in nice neat rows poking along at 1 knot. Good secondary explosions.

And in case everybody hasn't heard, patch 1.3 is confirmed.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=115305

[tedhealy]

Originally Posted by TripleDaddy

It's almost more frustrating with more contacts, you just wish for more torpedoes. The carrier task force I stumbled upon in the Java Sea had 3 fleet carriers, 2 heavy cruisers, 1 light cruiser, 1 small tanker, 1 large tanker, 2 escort carriers and 5 destroyers. What was I driving? S-40.

Sounds like you did 'ok'. A battleship, carrier, 8 cruisers, and a destroyer sunk

[TripleDaddy]

Originally Posted by tedhealy

Sounds like you did 'ok'. A battleship, carrier, 8 cruisers, and a destroyer sunk

LOL. I guess I can't bitch too much with a quarter million tons sent to the bottom. I'm using RFB 1.24 so I can finish this career. I expect that kind of tonnage to be a distant memory with 1.27.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by TripleDaddy

LOL. I guess I can't bitch too much with a quarter million tons sent to the bottom. I'm using RFB 1.24 so I can finish this career. I expect that kind of tonnage to be a distant memory with 1.27.

Yeah. CCIP's torpedo mod should cut that in half.