[REL] Real Fleet Boat

[tedhealy]

Originally Posted by easterner9504

ROF on 3" & 4" was 8-9 per minute. ROF in RFB is 3 every 2 minutes.

http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_3-23_mk13.htm
http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_4-50_mk9.htm

Assuming 4-5 under normal conditions RFB is 1/3 the historical ROF.

If you search the thread, he's been over these links at least 2 times. Once in the past few days, and once several months ago. How do I know several months ago? Because I pointed out those same links earlier and promptly explained why they wouldn't be 100% accurate.

[Fearless]

Originally Posted by tedhealy

If you search the thread, he's been over these links at least 2 times. Once in the past few days, and once several months ago. How do I know several months ago? Because I pointed out those same links earlier and promptly explained why they wouldn't be 100% accurate.

Well said.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by easterner9504

ROF on 3" & 4" was 8-9 per minute. ROF in RFB is 3 every 2 minutes.

http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_3-23_mk13.htm
http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_4-50_mk9.htm

Assuming 4-5 under normal conditions RFB is 1/3 the historical ROF.

Dammit! Does anyone bother to read the numerous deck gun threads? Or is this meant to be a joke? I mean how many times must I show that the textbook ROF listings CAN'T BE USED TO APPROXIMATE THE COMBAT RATE OF FIRE? They have no relationship to the combat ROF and they're not meant to indicate how fast a gun could be fired in combat. There's no way they could possibly do that because a particular gun can have very different methods of being served that they'd have to have twenty different rates of fire - one for each platform. I mean PLEASE people, STOP posting textbook rates of fire in any RFB thread! They are meaningless for our requirements.

Textbook rates of fire are for THE GUN SYSTEM ONLY. They only measure how fast the gun can be fired if it is served perfectly, mounted on a motionless platform and aligned perfectly on an unmoving target - i.e. with shells right beside the breech, with the gun mounted nowhere near a boat or an ocean and firing at a fixed target - none of which are the case in submarine combat. Textbook rates of fire only indicate how fast the gun mechanism works. They don't take into account the distance from the ammo store to the gun, how the ammo is carried to the gun, rangefinding, pitch and roll of the sub, the need to re-align on a moving target, or the fact that there even IS a target. For these reasons these figures are almost completely irrelevant when it comes to figuring out how fast a gun mounted on a submarine could fire in a combat situation.

How many times must I say that we have reliable figures for combat rates of fire? We KNOW how fast sub guns fired. We have reports made by sub crews at the time the gun was fired. We know how many shells were fired and the number of minutes it took to fire them. We know these details straight from the pens of the guys who were there on the submarines recording individual actions and recording how many shells were fired during those actions. So it's not as if we need to approximate the info based on the gun mechanism's technical ROF from a textbook.

We also know - WITHOUT A DOUBT - that combat rates of fire for a WW2 US submarine were nowhere near the rates of fire listed in textbooks for the guns in question. So you can't just halve the ROF you find there and assume that's close. Often the sustainable ROF for a gun that's being fired under combat conditions is anywhere from three to twenty times slower (depending on the gun in question and the platform it's mounted on) than the listed ROF that can be found in the technical specs for the gun or in textbooks.

By the way, ROF in RFB is not three shells every two minutes. It's two shells every minute. If you're getting a lower ROF in RFB you're crewing the guns with poor or average crewmen. Just as in SH3, if you don't put well trained crewmen on a gun in SH4 the ROF will drop considerably.

Sorry to lose my cool over this, but AAAAARGH! - will this never end?

In future I think I'll just respond to each post that argues using textbook rates of fire with a big red

:rotfl: LOL! :rotfl:

[Palidian]

The gun on a German sub was a 105mm.


As for the rate of fire the crew may of been waiting to fire due to the rocking of the boat, I do this a lot in the Grey wolves expansion for SH3, however in SH4 the gun dose not roll with the ship, making hits easer.


I have not experienced an easy time sinking ships with gunfire, and I stated before it is taking 150-200 rounds to *hit* not fire to get a 100 to 200 ton ship to sink. 50 hits to sink a ship is reasonable for that size. Remember that merchant ship crews are not of military quality, and when the hits start coming in they suddenly remember that they have business elsewhere.


Remember the Nautilus had 6"\53 guns and they have a rate of fire of 6-7 rounds per minute. Did the Nautilus have both guns baring at all times?


A rate of fire of 25 seconds is better then the current 40 seconds. However I better simulation would be to allow a 15 to 20 second rate of fire, but have the gun roll with the ship.


The stock game became quite boring, when I stacked up 1 million tons by 1943 when I got a Belao and had to retire. Your mod is quite good, however there are some issues I have had, I have has a really hard time sinking ships, hitting a DD with 5 torps, and 150 rounds with the deck gun.


There are other issues, I get 100 yards away and start shooting, this is not quite reasonable, as a man with a rifle could start picking off my gun crew at that range, however the game does not cover that.

Originally Posted by Beery

Since a torpedo can sink a ship with one hit, such examples are not reliable, since the amount of damage done by the torpedo is unknown - it could be very little, making the gunfire all that was needed to sink the ship - or it could be enough to sink the ship on its own (after enough water entered the ship), making the gunfire superfluous.

We need to know what size the shells were in order to make a comparison with US WW2 subs. SS Carolina was 5,000 tons. She was sunk by gunfire from U-151's 105mm (just over 4") gun after the passengers and crew left the ship - making it impossible for the crew to do any counterflooding or damage repair. WW1 was very different from WW2 in this way and often a crew was allowed to abandon ship before a submarine attempted to sink it - this allowed gunfire to be much more effective because damage control was effectively removed from the equation - that's most often not the case in WW2. Still, U-151 still needed to fire 150 rounds to sink the liner - quite a lot, especially given that the liner had no damage control in effect. Also, I read a report on The History Channel that indicates that U-151 torpedoed the liner before using the gun to finish her off.

It depends on the size of the ship. Using my mod it's very simple to sink a ship with 40 rounds. Actually my rate of fire would pump 60 rounds into that ship in 30 minutes. That is enough to sink a small ship very effectively.

As for your assertion that RFB's ROF is 'unrealistic', where's your data? At this point I ask forum members to forgive me for getting a little annoyed when people say that my mod is unrealistic before they've done any research that proves that to be so. I have spent tens of hours researching this stuff and my figures are based on research that has been posted on these forums - research that has been called into question but never NEVER refuted. When people claim that there's a more realistic rate of fire they need to produce their evidence BEFORE they start badmouthing my work. Criticism I can take - in fact I rely on it to make a more realistic mod, but name-calling is not helpful. If you think my mod is unrealistic, prove it, THEN you can say that it's unrealistic.

People keep saying that, but the facts argue otherwise. RFB's deck gun is only broken, outrageously slow and weak if real guns were very weak, broken and slow. On March 25th 1943 USS Wahoo fired 80 shells in 39 minutes at a 1,000 ton freighter, 50 of those rounds hit and the freighter was sunk. 80 shells in 39 minutes is almost exactly RFB's rate of fire for its 4" guns (the type that Wahoo used). RFB will sink a 1,000 ton freighter with fewer shells than USS Wahoo used. Are you seriously suggesting that USS Wahoo was using a gun that was weak and slow? Are you saying Wahoo was 'broken'? Because in effect if you're saying those things about RFB you're saying it about all the subs on which RFB is modelled.

USS Nautilus had an even slower rate of fire. Here's an example from Nautilus' log:
"0703 M August 17, 1942, commenced firing on Ukiangong Point area on Makin Island. Covered area by shifting sights in range and deflection.
0711 M Checked fire.
0716 M August 17, 1942, commenced firing on ship anchorage area of Makin Island. Radio spotting circuit was jammed or ineffective. Covered area as thoroughly as possible by shifting sights in range and deflection as necessary.
0723 M Checked fire, a total of 65 rounds of ammunition having been expended."
That's 65 rounds in 15 minutes from two guns. That's 28 seconds per round per gun.

8-20 rounds per minute is possible and textbooks list the highest possible rate of fire, BUT such a rate of fire is not possible in combat, mainly for the simple reason that a gun in combat has to fire AT something and is trying to hit it. A test firing where the gun is being tested to see how fast it can fire uses no target and ammunition is already at the gun. That is not the case in combat. If RFB was a simulation of a gun firing in test conditions it would need to fire faster, but it isn't.

Also, 20 rounds per minute happens to be the rate of aimed fire that the Old Contemptibles (at the time the best trained infantry in the world) could maintain in combat during WW1 using the Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle, which had a magazine feed mechanism to aid in loading. To suggest that a submarine's manually-loaded 3" artillery shell could be loaded in combat at the same rate as a magazine-fed rifle round is quite simply ludicrous. Unless the shell travels from the ammo store (which is 10 yards or more away from the breech) to the gun at the speed of sound I just don't see how it would be possible.

Here are a few examples - a couple of them involve running out of ammo and disengaging or giving up and firing a torpedo:

Vogel in U-588 hit a 4,800 ton tanker with 2 torps and then spent 4 hours firing 200 rounds into it before claiming it sinking in flames - this ship actually survived.

Schacht in U-507 tried to sink a 6,800ton ship by gunfire after the crew had abandoned it but finally gave up and had to use a torpedo.

Wurdemann in U-506 used his gun on 7,000ton tanker and claimed it sunk in flames but the ship survived.

Rasch in U-106 hit a 5,000ton ship with 2 torps and then finished it off with his gun but it took 193 rounds.

Wiebe in U-516 sank a small 1,200ton coaster by gunfire - number of rounds is not given but it took him 20 minutes.

Examples of what a shell can do are not helpful. Of course a single shell 'could' sink a ship, given the right conditions, but a simulation cannot possibly simulate all possible conditions and SH4 imposes a set number of shells required to sink ships based on the area hit. This number has to relate to an average number of shells required to sink a ship of a certain size - RFB's deck guns achieve this.

Anyway, an 8" shell cannot possibly be equated to four 4" shells. Those 4" rounds don't have anywhere near the penetrating power of an 8" shell.

As for your destroyer, I've explained before why 5 torpedoes failing to sink a DD may be completely realistic - we have no idea how many actually impacted. As for the number of deck gun rounds, the first question it raises is 'Why on Earth is anyone duking it out with a DD on the surface?' It shouldn't even be possible to take on a DD with a deck gun. But even if somehow the DD is disarmed 150 shells is by no means beyond the realms of possibility if we assume that all those torpedoes were duds (which is quite possible in RFB - and was possible in reality).

As for rates of fire, what we need in order to get realistic rates of fire are actual combat experiences and all the ones I've found suggest a rate of fire of 25 seconds per round for sustained fire in combat conditions.

In short, if you don't like the guns in RFB don't use the mod. But don't claim RFB is unrealistic unless you can prove it.

[Palidian]

Well maybe it could e possible you might be wrong with your ROF, I have found nothing to support a 40 second ROF. There are many unanswered questions to historical ROF, like weather, and range.


I have found ROF ranges from 8-20 rounds per minute, this to me covers autoloader and manual loading.

Originally Posted by Beery

Dammit! Does anyone bother to read the numerous deck gun threads? Or is this meant to be a joke? I mean how many times must I show that the textbook ROF listings CAN'T BE USED TO APPROXIMATE THE COMBAT RATE OF FIRE? They have no relationship to the combat ROF and they're not meant to indicate how fast a gun could be fired in combat. There's no way they could possibly do that because a particular gun can have very different methods of being served that they'd have to have twenty different rates of fire - one for each platform. I mean PLEASE people, STOP posting textbook rates of fire in any RFB thread! They are meaningless for our requirements.

Textbook rates of fire are for THE GUN SYSTEM ONLY. They only measure how fast the gun can be fired if it is served perfectly, mounted on a motionless platform and aligned perfectly on an unmoving target - i.e. with shells right beside the breech, with the gun mounted nowhere near a boat or an ocean and firing at a fixed target - none of which are the case in submarine combat. Textbook rates of fire only indicate how fast the gun mechanism works. They don't take into account the distance from the ammo store to the gun, how the ammo is carried to the gun, rangefinding, pitch and roll of the sub, the need to re-align on a moving target, or the fact that there even IS a target. For these reasons these figures are almost completely irrelevant when it comes to figuring out how fast a gun mounted on a submarine could fire in a combat situation.

How many times must I say that we have reliable figures for combat rates of fire? We KNOW how fast sub guns fired. We have reports made by sub crews at the time the gun was fired. We know how many shells were fired and the number of minutes it took to fire them. We know these details straight from the pens of the guys who were there on the submarines recording individual actions and recording how many shells were fired during those actions. So it's not as if we need to approximate the info based on the gun mechanism's technical ROF from a textbook.

We also know - WITHOUT A DOUBT - that combat rates of fire for a WW2 US submarine were nowhere near the rates of fire listed in textbooks for the guns in question. So you can't just halve the ROF you find there and assume that's close. Often the sustainable ROF for a gun that's being fired under combat conditions is anywhere from three to twenty times slower (depending on the gun in question and the platform it's mounted on) than the listed ROF that can be found in the technical specs for the gun or in textbooks.

By the way, ROF in RFB is not three shells every two minutes. It's two shells every minute. If you're getting a lower ROF in RFB you're crewing the guns with poor or average crewmen. Just as in SH3, if you don't put well trained crewmen on a gun in SH4 the ROF will drop considerably.

Sorry to lose my cool over this, but AAAAARGH! - will this never end?

In future I think I'll just respond to each post that argues using textbook rates of fire with a big red

:rotfl: LOL! :rotfl:

[Palidian]

In short, if you don't like the guns in RFB don't use the mod. But don't claim RFB is unrealistic unless you can prove it.

I have proven it, however your do choose not to see the proof. What else can one do...

[Palidian]

A 4" shell has about 2.7 lbs of explosive, and a 8" has about 21 lbs of explosive. We are dealing with unarmored targets, so penetration is unimportant. Ships sink due to flooding, I can sink the Iowa with a .50 rifle, poke a hole at the waterline, and if no one starts the pumps, or closed the water tight doors, she will sink. 8, 4” shells will cause as much if not more damage then one 8”

Originally Posted by joea

Uhhh, sorry how do you figure one 8 inch round is the same as 8 four inchers??? HE or AP? The mass of one 8 inch shell is bound to do more damage from penetration even as HE than a 4 incher could. I don't say RFB is correct as I don't have SH4 installed ATM, but are you sure you actually hit a DD with 5 torps??? There have been plenty of logs posted on this thread with detailed DG information I suggest you read those.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Palidian

Remember the Nautilus had 6"\53 guns and they have a rate of fire of 6-7 rounds per minute. Did the Nautilus have both guns baring at all times?

Yes. It was giving area fire and was not under attack so the guns were bearing all the time.

A rate of fire of 25 seconds is better then the current 40 seconds.

There is no 40 second rate of fire. The guns are set to 30 seconds for the 3" and 4" guns and 25 for the 5" gun. If you're experiencing a slower ROF you're crewing the guns with poorly trained men.

However I better simulation would be to allow a 15 to 20 second rate of fire, but have the gun roll with the ship.

The only evidence we have for a 17 second ROF is when ready-use ammo was being used and SH4 does not allow us to make such a distinction. I may still decide to use this speed, but only if I have another piece of evidence that shows that a boat could fire more than 40 rounds at that speed.

[Palidian]

Well maybe if the ROF issue has been brought up so many times, maybe it is because that a lot of people have an issue with it, and maybe we are correct. You advertise this as a realistic mod, however in reality you even admit that it is not, you rely on other peoples mods that you have admitted are not quite right, maybe people feel that they spent time on hoping for a realistic mod, and feel that they wasted there time, time they will never get back. Some would call that fraud. You are correct if we don't like the mod we don't have to use it, however I would like to see something useful come out of it, it has some nice features or maybe we can go on to something else. However just laughing at people who dare to challenge your greatness shows contempt. You will find that people will not want to use your mod.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Palidian

Well maybe it could e possible you might be wrong with your ROF, I have found nothing to support a 40 second ROF.

There is no 40 second ROF in RFB. While it could be possible that RFB's ROF is wrong, it is based on historical rates of fire taken directly from combat submarines' logs. As such, if it's wrong the submariners' reports are mistaken and more data will uncover the mistake. BUT we don't get to a correct rate of fire by just basing a ROF value on our opinion of what it might be. In order to get accurate info we have to do research and find ROF values that are most likely to be accurate. That's why I demand that any change to RFB's ROF is based on an actual WW2 US sub's timed gunnery during a combat patrol. Anything else is wide open to error.

There are many unanswered questions to historical ROF, like weather, and range.

But that doesn't mean we should discount compelling evidence when we find it. Weather and range would be as much of an issue in the sim as it was in reality.

I have found ROF ranges from 8-20 rounds per minute, this to me covers autoloader and manual loading.

Once again, textbook ROF listings CAN'T BE USED TO APPROXIMATE THE COMBAT RATE OF FIRE. They have no relationship to the combat ROF and they're not meant to indicate how fast a gun could be fired in combat. There's no way they could possibly do that because a particular gun can have very different methods of being served that they'd have to have twenty different rates of fire - one for each platform. I mean PLEASE people, STOP posting textbook rates of fire in any RFB thread! They are meaningless for our requirements.

Textbook rates of fire are for THE GUN SYSTEM ONLY. They only measure how fast the gun can be fired if it is served perfectly, mounted on a motionless platform and aligned perfectly on an unmoving target - i.e. with shells right beside the breech, with the gun mounted nowhere near a boat or an ocean and firing at a fixed target - none of which are the case in submarine combat. Textbook rates of fire only indicate how fast the gun mechanism works. They don't take into account the distance from the ammo store to the gun, how the ammo is carried to the gun, rangefinding, pitch and roll of the sub, the need to re-align on a moving target, or the fact that there even IS a target. For these reasons these figures are almost completely irrelevant when it comes to figuring out how fast a gun mounted on a submarine could fire in a combat situation.

How many times must I say that we have reliable figures for combat rates of fire? We KNOW how fast sub guns fired. We have reports made by sub crews at the time the gun was fired. We know how many shells were fired and the number of minutes it took to fire them. We know these details straight from the pens of the guys who were there on the submarines recording individual actions and recording how many shells were fired during those actions. So it's not as if we need to approximate the info based on the gun mechanism's technical ROF from a textbook.

We also know - WITHOUT A DOUBT - that combat rates of fire for a WW2 US submarine were nowhere near the rates of fire listed in textbooks for the guns in question. Often the sustainable ROF for a gun that's being fired under combat conditions is anywhere from three to twenty times slower (depending on the gun in question and the platform it's mounted on) than the listed ROF that can be found in the technical specs for the gun or in textbooks.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Palidian

Well maybe if the ROF issue has been brought up so many times, maybe it is because that a lot of people have an issue with it, and maybe we are correct.

Then PROVE IT! Complaining about it doesn't prove anything. Posting textbook ROFs proves nothing about combat ROF.

You advertise this as a realistic mod, however in reality you even admit that it is not, you rely on other peoples mods that you have admitted are not quite right...

It is a realistic mod. Realistic does not mean perfectly accurate. This is a simulation we're building, not a working U-boat, and a simulation cannot possibly be 100% accurate because all simulations are simplified to a great extent. That doesn't mean they can't be realistic. RFB is the most realistic mod for SH4 precisely because we don't just pull deck gun figures out of textbooks and apply them to the game (as you would have us do) without first checking that they're in context.

maybe people feel that they spent time on hoping for a realistic mod, and feel that they wasted there time, time they will never get back. Some would call that fraud.

Okay, at this point you've shown you're not rational. I'm done with you.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Palidian

In short, if you don't like the guns in RFB don't use the mod. But don't claim RFB is unrealistic unless you can prove it.

I have proven it, however your do choose not to see the proof. What else can one do...

You have posted a gun engagement from WW1 that is poorly documented and for which I had to flesh out details of the size of gun and other details. We still don't know if that engagement involved a torpedo, which would invalidate the data. Even so this data only showed that a 5000 ton ship could be sunk by 150 105mm shells (maybe with a torpedo) - and it was in WW1 and there was no crew on board to perform damage control. This proves nothing.

You've posted an example of an 8" shell as if this remotely compares to the 3", 4" and 5" shells we're talking about. This is not the evidence we need and one 8" shell sinking a destroyer is a fluke and not something that ought to be used as a basis for a simulation.

You have also posted technical data for a gun that doesn't take into account how the gun was served or what it was mounted on. This is not proof, as I've repeatedly shown to you as well as the tens of people that have posted such statistics in these forums since RUb first modified a Silent Hunter deck gun in 2005.

In short, you've proved nothing that has any bearing on SH4, which is a submarine COMBAT simulation - not a simulation of deck gun ROF speed tests.

As I've said before, RFB needs examples of gunnery from combat patrols where the start and end times for an engagement are recorded, where the number of shells fired is recorded and where at least 40 shells were fired. We can talk about other things, but RFB will not incorporate data that doesn't at least come close to those criteria unless it's very persuasive indeed. The stuff you've posted doesn't come close to meeting these criteria, nor is it persuasive in other ways. In fact the 8-20 shells per minute to which you keep referring has been completely discounted because the people who came up with those numbers never intended for them to be used as rates of fire that apply to combat.

[Palidian]

Maybe the ships you stated had what the game would consider a green crew, and you are basing a max ROF on a green crew, and then adding the green crew modifier on that?



[quote=Beery][quote=Palidian]Remember the Nautilus had 6"\53 guns and they have a rate of fire of 6-7 rounds per minute. Did the Nautilus have both guns baring at all times?

Yes. It was giving area fire and was not under attack so the guns were bearing all the time.

There is no 40 second rate of fire. The guns are set to 30 seconds for the 3" and 4" guns and 25 for the 5" gun. If you're experiencing a slower ROF you're crewing the guns with poorly trained men.

The only evidence we have for a 17 second ROF is when ready-use ammo was being used and SH4 does not allow us to make such a distinction. I may still decide to use this speed, but only if I have another piece of evidence that shows that a boat could fire more than 40 rounds at that speed.

[XLjedi]

I just don't understand why anyone would attack Beery (and even suggest fraud ) for his willingness to work on free mods to enhance our gaming experience.

All I can see this accomplishing is driving Beery away from continuing the good work and very possibly discouraging others (like myself) who may be contemplating various future modding efforts.

If you don't like or agree with a setting... change it or roll it back.

[tater]

Accuracy is also important i looking at this calculation. If the typical player is grossly more accurate with the gyro-stabilized deck guns we have, the important outcome is the number of hits per unit time possible, not the number put down range.

I haven't tested it, but I bet the stock ROFs are not so terribly bad if you only allow the AI gun crews to fire since the number of hits per time interval is so poor. The problem is that the player fired guns are so much more accurate than the crew firing it.

My feeling is that ROF figures are for "fire for effect" type fire. the gun is locked down, and the rounds are rammed in and fired as fast as possible. If that is the case, such figures are onyl really useful in comparing 2 guns, not terribly useful for determining the ROF in combat situations.

Simulation in a game engine is pretty complex. I can mod the CV air groups to have the exact number of planes they should, for example. It doesn't produce a realistic outcome, however, since the game seems to assume the airgroups are in the air patroling all the time. A more accurate simulation would come not from having a perfectly accurate Hiryu airgroup, but by cutting said air group to maybe 3 planes. even then planes would be over represented since many times they didn't fly CAPs. Sometimes things must be specifically "wrong" to be generally "right."

tater