[REL] Ship damage from fires

[Sniper297]

Here goes nuthin, FIRE IN THE HOLE!!

Fiddling with zones.cfg to try to reduce flooding times so the BBs and CAs sink faster, difficult to do because of the screwy way the file is formatted. "BB" is obviously battleship but most other files I can only guess. Flooding times for "uboat" and "flt" zones, is "flt" fleet sub? Flooding times for smokestacks, hydrophones, and godhelpus sampan masts?

Worst trouble with the fire damage mod is a fire has to start and spread for any effect at all, since torpedoes are underwater explosions luck is needed for a fire to start, then it takes a while for it to spread.

So I increased the radius numbers times 5, 20 to 50 meters. Fired my last fish at a Shokaku, snotty culprit heeled over about 10 degrees and kept on steaming away with no fire on deck. Got mad and surfaced, started hosing him with 40MM BOFORS HE shells. Hit one of the planes on deck, which blew up and started a chain reaction over the whole flight deck (which is realistic) then blew up the carrier which in turn blew ME up 500 yards away. Further testing (why yes, I AM crazy, why do you ask?) being submerged within 500 yards of any ship exploding breaks all the coffee cups and knocks over the piano, also damaging or destroying most of the stuff BuShips considers important for warships.

In summary I would say that increasing the damage radius too much is probably not a good idea.

[Den0]

I would like to see you release a tweaked version of this mod if Dark is ok with that. I like watching them cook lol just kidding but I am a fan of deckguns and if I can set one of fire dive and save a torp for the real show I would be a happy man. I know its not easy getting those numbers right but I do look forward to your final results.

[Leitender]

Not really sure about the workings of it

Hi gentlemen,

for the same reason, i did 2 tests with the SH3 version of this mod, experimenting with the gunnery exercise of the naval academy. Approx. 10 to 15 shots on the nearest small coastal merchant till it began to burn on 3 places, and then - i started to wait. During this first test, i set TC to 32 and reset it from time to time, to check if it was still burning (because smoke wasn´t generated at that TC). Well, at 1 o´clock, more than 8 hours later, it exploded and went down!

The second try i did without time compression at all. The exercise always starts at 16.50. I fired on that merchant till it began to burn again (this was at 16.55) and yes, at 17.07: neutral unit destroyed!

So this mod seems to work really fine for SH3 but the sinking time may be dependant on the time compression!

[Sniper297]

That's the part I'm trying to figure out, the timing. Blast EF and AP and radius are self explanatory, "virtual depth charges" exploding with tiny amounts of hit points per explosion. But what controls how often the fire causes explosions?

The only thing I see is in the virtual depth charges themselves;

amun_DepthCharge
Fall_speed=5.0
Detonate_Depth= -2000

If I'm understanding that correctly they're "virtually falling" at 5 feet (or meters) per second, and they have to fall 2000 feet (or meters) to trigger an explosion. Regardless of meters or feet, 2000 / 5 = 400 seconds between bangs. Divided by 60 comes out to 6.6 minutes between blasts. Something like a Mogami cruiser has 500 hit points, knock off 50 for the original damage that started the fire, 450 hit points left. Max EF for a large fire 8 hit points, something over 56 blasts, at one every 6.6 minutes it would take a bit over 6 hours for the cumulative damage to sink a Mogami. If you hit it with a torpedo that took off half the hit points leaving 250, still need 31 max explosions times 6.6 minutes = 206 minutes = 3 1/2 hours. About right for real life, but not for a game that removes ships from the playing board when they get X miles away. Or people who don't have such a large amount of leisure time that they can spend 3 to 6 hours of it to wait for a fire to sink a ship. Again we gotta be realistic about being realistic, 15 to 30 minutes is a more reasonable time limit for a game.

I'll try cutting the time down by setting the depth to -50, see if that gives me a small bang every 10 seconds. With max EF of 8 that would be 48 hit points per minute, so a ship with 480 hit points remaining should go down in about 10 minutes. Give or take, there's a random element in all of this wherever you set the numbers.

[TheDarkWraith]

Originally Posted by Sniper297

That's the part I'm trying to figure out, the timing. Blast EF and AP and radius are self explanatory, "virtual depth charges" exploding with tiny amounts of hit points per explosion. But what controls how often the fire causes explosions?

The only thing I see is in the virtual depth charges themselves;

amun_DepthCharge
Fall_speed=5.0
Detonate_Depth= -2000

If I'm understanding that correctly they're "virtually falling" at 5 feet (or meters) per second, and they have to fall 2000 feet (or meters) to trigger an explosion. Regardless of meters or feet, 2000 / 5 = 400 seconds between bangs. Divided by 60 comes out to 6.6 minutes between blasts. Something like a Mogami cruiser has 500 hit points, knock off 50 for the original damage that started the fire, 450 hit points left. Max EF for a large fire 8 hit points, something over 56 blasts, at one every 6.6 minutes it would take a bit over 6 hours for the cumulative damage to sink a Mogami. If you hit it with a torpedo that took off half the hit points leaving 250, still need 31 max explosions times 6.6 minutes = 206 minutes = 3 1/2 hours. About right for real life, but not for a game that removes ships from the playing board when they get X miles away. Or people who don't have such a large amount of leisure time that they can spend 3 to 6 hours of it to wait for a fire to sink a ship. Again we gotta be realistic about being realistic, 15 to 30 minutes is a more reasonable time limit for a game.

I'll try cutting the time down by setting the depth to -50, see if that gives me a small bang every 10 seconds. With max EF of 8 that would be 48 hit points per minute, so a ship with 480 hit points remaining should go down in about 10 minutes. Give or take, there's a random element in all of this wherever you set the numbers.

Don't mess with those, they will not do anything that you are wanting. In order to adjust the 'timing' as you call it you have to play with the ParticleGenerators.

[TorpX]

Originally Posted by TheDarkWraith

Don't mess with those, they will not do anything that you are wanting. In order to adjust the 'timing' as you call it you have to play with the ParticleGenerators.

Ah, I think I see. They cannot detonate more frequently than they are created. Makes sense.

[Sniper297]

Well, I don't see. Two problems; (1) if he gave a concise explanation of how it works and what sections in which files have what effect, then it would no longer be a MYSTERY. If it wasn't so mysterious we might be able to tweak it so it's actually useful, then where would we be?

(2) you have to have a fire for it to work even if it was tweaked enough to be useful, if you have a badly damaged BB or CV steaming off over the horizon with no fire you're out of luck.

Think I'll have better luck adjusting the "crash depth" in assorted BB, CV, and CA zon files, fire or no fire all that's needed is enough flooding to make it sink a little deeper and it will start taking "crash damage" losing 1 hitpoint every couple seconds. For some screwy reason they added that to all the surface ships and set it at 300. A surface ship at a 990 foot depth taking 0.5 hitpoints of damage per second that it remained below that depth would be somewhat pointless, I think it's already sunk. Someplace around 4 to 8 meters actually does something useful, a cruiser with waves lapping over the deck is 4-5 meters deeper than usual so starts taking hit points, sinks about 20-30 minutes later.

[LGN1]

Originally Posted by Leitender

Hi gentlemen,

for the same reason, i did 2 tests with the SH3 version of this mod, experimenting with the gunnery exercise of the naval academy. Approx. 10 to 15 shots on the nearest small coastal merchant till it began to burn on 3 places, and then - i started to wait. During this first test, i set TC to 32 and reset it from time to time, to check if it was still burning (because smoke wasn´t generated at that TC). Well, at 1 o´clock, more than 8 hours later, it exploded and went down!

The second try i did without time compression at all. The exercise always starts at 16.50. I fired on that merchant till it began to burn again (this was at 16.55) and yes, at 17.07: neutral unit destroyed!

So this mod seems to work really fine for SH3 but the sinking time may be dependant on the time compression!

Hi Leitender,

I guess that makes sense. At higher TC some particle generators stop working (e.g., the fire and funnel smoke). Thus, no depth charges are created anymore and no damage happens.

Regards, LGN1

[Leitender]

Hi LGN1,

nice to see you around here! And thanks to your "confirmation". I stumbled upon it when I was reading TDW´s statement:

I hook onto two specific effects defined in particles.dat (for sea units). If those two effects are not defined in the unit's .zon file then this mod will not be 'active'.

The two effects from your (SH4) particles.dat are (for sea units):
- #Fire_small
- #Fire_big

Normally, smoke isn´t to be generated at a TC of 32 and above (at least in SH3, controllable by SH3 Commander). That´s why I had to slow down the TC because I couldn´t see if the fire was still burning. For me it seems to explain why some players couldn´t see significant results when testing that mod.

So it may be useful to test the mod at first without any time compression at all - with all that original values TDW´s has chosen and after that, we may talk about the balancing of the "burn down rate" and, e.g., the repair rate.

Regards,

Leitender