[TEC] Crew Below and Diesel cut-off depth - hard-coded or tweakable?

[panthercules]

Does anybody know whether the depth at which your crew leaves the bridge and/or the diesels cut off as you dive is hard coded or is something that can be tweaked? If the latter, can someone post what parameter(s) you need to tweak to change this depth? If possible, I need to lower this depth just a little - probably 5-10 feet - but I haven't been able to find anything that will do this yet and it's hanging me up trying to solve one more (and hopefully last) problem before I can release my Pitch mod.

Any clues?

[panthercules]

Nobody has any clues? The only parameter I've found so far that does this unfortunately also lowers the entire sub so it rides too low in the water. I've had to abandon a couple of otherwise very promising looking Pitch combos because of this one issue, so it would be really great if someone could find a painless way to tell the crew to stay on the bridge until a deeper depth was reached.

[Der Teddy Bar]

The appearance and dis-appearance of the crew from the bridge is controlled by the surface draught value.

The on/off of the diesel engine is controlled by the submerged draught value.

Adjusting these values has an affect on submerging to a ordered depth. For example, if you set the submerged depth to say 20 metres and order periscope depth, then it will not submerge, you will need to order depth of 21 metres.

The submerged draught also controls how the sea affects or does not affect the submarine. That is, if you were to set the submerged draught at say ~1 metre above the periscope depth, then at the periscope depth the submarine will now be affected by the waves

[399nkov]

Panther, I can't help you with the tweeks, but from experience, the first command from the officer of the deck would be...usually... conn..bridge...prepare to dive...then...Lookouts clear the bridge...Dive Dive, the lookouts would then ladder down to take over the dive and stern planes. The first officer off the bridge would hold the conn hatch rope while the OD locked it down. Everone had cleared the bridge very fast. The stock version of SH4 clears the bridge way too late. The OD, when in the conn, would then give the control room the depth he wanted. This would vary depending on the reason for the dive. But, this was peacetime.

Also I've been trying to get the subs to sit deeper in the water. I don't know if its the waves or the surface depth of the boats, but they seem to sit too high. We didn't cavatite that much. The stern seems a bit higher than the bow to me. We didn't roll as much as one might think. The pitch was the greatest in ruff weather.

[AVGWarhawk]

I do recall Dave/Leo looking into lowering the submarine in the water. I believe he said at a certain point of lowering the submarine, it would just sink for not reason other than he lowered the sub in the water.

Bump!

[Sailor Steve]

Shutting down the diesels is the very first thing that happens when the dive order is given.

When the diving alarm is given, the following procedure is observed (items marked with all asterisk are executed at once without further orders)

*a. Stop all engines, shift to battery, set annunciators on "All ahead standard," open engine room doors and air locks.

*b. Close outboard and inboard engine exhaust valves, close hull ventilation supply and exhaust valves, close inboard engine air induction flappers, and close conning tower hatch.

*c. Open bow buoyancy vents and all main ballast tank vents, except the group or tank designated to be kept closed until pressure in the ship indicates that all hull openings have been closed.
*d. Rig out bow planes and place on FULL DIVE. Use stern planes to control the angle on the ship.

*e. Diving officer checks hull opening indicator light panel for condition of hull openings. Air is bled into the ship when green lights show all hull openings closed. Watertight integrity is assured when the internal air pressure remains constant.

http://www.maritime.org/fleetsub/chap18.htm#18A

[panthercules]

Good info on the diving procedures etc. I'm not really trying to affect anything about the actual diving routine however. My problem is, my best candidate visually for my Pitch mod currently has one unfortunate side effect that I have not yet been able to get rid of - for the first few minutes after surfacing, the boat tends to rise and fall with the waves in a narrow band that just happens to be where it sinks down just barely lower (by only 2 or 3 feet it seems) than the cut-off depth where the game sends the crew below, and then back up to where they come back up top. The net effect is that the crew keeps disappearing and re-appearing 2 or 3 times a minute for the first few minutes.

The really frustrating part is that this only occurs right after surfacing - they stay up there just fine after a few minutes, once the boat picks up speed. If I could just drop the "crew goes below" depth by about 4-5 feet, without changing the boat's actual dynamics, it would solve this problem. As DTB points out, the surface draught value (which is the one I was referring to in my second post above) does affect this depth but it also screws up the boat's behavior too substantially to be a workable fix for this particular problem

It's really great that the devs gave us so many things to play around with - it's just too bad that so many of them seem to be multi-purpose things that affect several functions so it's hard to hone in on making the particular change (and only the particular change) that you really want to make.

[399nkov]

The only way I can think of to get the deck crew below decks or back to topside at the correct time would be with a voice command, and not with the depth. This may not be possible.

Its times like this I wish I knew more about the inner workings of the sim.

Sorry I can't help you more Panthercules...

[Sailor Steve]

Ah, my misunderstanding. In SH3 you have crew who stay topside when you dive, and now SH4 crew hide at every little wave. Are they saying the Germans are better sailors?:rotfl:

[Der Teddy Bar]

panthercules,
What you are seeing is that it takes a while for the main ballast tanks to empty.

The dive ballast tanks are done very quickly and have no affect.

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by Der Teddy Bar

panthercules,
What you are seeing is that it takes a while for the main ballast tanks to empty.

The dive ballast tanks are done very quickly and have no affect.

I wondered about that, and even tried blowing ballast/emergency surfacing to see if that would simulate blowing the tanks drier and thus riding higher in the water earlier, but it never seemed to have any effect when I tried it in my tests.

I still wish there was a simple way to get the crew to stay up top a little deeper without side effects. I've come up with yet another Pitch combo that gives a pretty decent visual effect, BUT now for some reason the battery life fixes I had working just fine for all the subs before have gotten all screwed up again (at least for my Salmon test bed), even though I didn't touch anything recently in the pitch tweaks that should have screwed up the batteries.

One potentially good side effect though - something I have done in this round has radically shortened the battery recharge time for the Salmon (down from a normal 10 hours to something like 2 1/2 hours). That's not good news in itself, of course, but if I can figure out what caused that to happen to the Salmon, then maybe there's a chance it could be adaptable to shorten up the S-class recharge rate to something more reasonable.

I'm getting really tired of getting this close to a workable set of tweaks only to discover at the last minute that yet one more thing has been broken and I have to start all over again. And I'm just playing around with a tiny little part of the game. Certainly reinforces my admiration for folks like Dave and the teams working on huge stuff like ROW, RFB, TM and NSM - [still looking for "hats off" smiley]

[Der Teddy Bar]

All the following values are based on the Salmon.

ManBT_flood_speed = Main Ballast = the value of Submerged displacement – Surfaced displacement. This is the value associated with the submarine submerging. The entire deck comes awash i.e. about 7metres at around 75% of total volume.

ManBT_flood_speed of 20000 takes ~ 75 seconds per 500 units on a normal dive order.
ManBT_flood_speed of 20000 takes ~ 45 seconds per 500 units on a crash dive order.


DiveBT_flood_speed = Dive Ballast = 10% of the value of Submerged displacement – Surfaced displacement. This is the value most associated with the submarine changing depth.
DiveBT_flood_speed of 8000 takes ~ 43 seconds per 100 units on a normal dive order.

When the submarine under normal conditions is hovering at depth the Dive Ballast equals 50% of the total and the Main Ballast is 100%.

When ordering the submarine under normal conditions (and default values) to ascend from 95 metres to 17 metres on the initial order the Dive Ballast is set to be 25% of the total and the Main Ballast is 75% and as the ascent gets closer to the ordered depth the values change to the Dive Ballast equals 50% of the total and the Main Ballast is 100%.

When ordering the submarine under normal conditions (and default values) to decent from 17 metres to 95 metres on the initial order the Dive Ballast is set to be 100% of the total and the Main Ballast stays at 100% and as the decent gets closer to the ordered depth the values change to the Dive Ballast equals 50% of the total and the Main Ballast stays at 100%.

The submarine under normal conditions and at all stop with default values the decent speed is 31 metres per minute and the ascent speed is 37metres per minute.

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by Der Teddy Bar

All the following values are based on the Salmon.

ManBT_flood_speed (29000) = Main Ballast = the value of Submerged displacement (2198) – Surfaced displacement (1435) (. This is the value associated with the submarine submerging. The entire deck comes awash i.e. about 7metres at around 75% of total volume.

ManBT_flood_speed of 20000 takes ~ 75 seconds per 500 units on a normal dive order.
ManBT_flood_speed of 20000 takes ~ 45 seconds per 500 units on a crash dive order.


DiveBT_flood_speed (8000) = Dive Ballast = 10% of the value of Submerged displacement (2198) – Surfaced displacement (1435). This is the value most associated with the submarine changing depth.
DiveBT_flood_speed of 8000 takes ~ 43 seconds per 100 units on a normal dive order.

When the submarine under normal conditions is hovering at depth the Dive Ballast equals 50% of the total and the Main Ballast is 100%.

When ordering the submarine under normal conditions (and default values) to ascend from 95 metres to 17 metres on the initial order the Dive Ballast is set to be 25% of the total and the Main Ballast is 75% and as the ascent gets closer to the ordered depth the values change to the Dive Ballast equals 50% of the total and the Main Ballast is 100%.

When ordering the submarine under normal conditions (and default values) to decent from 17 metres to 95 metres on the initial order the Dive Ballast is set to be 100% of the total and the Main Ballast stays at 100% and as the decent gets closer to the ordered depth the values change to the Dive Ballast equals 50% of the total and the Main Ballast stays at 100%.

The submarine under normal conditions and at all stop with default values the decent speed is 31 metres per minute and the ascent speed is 37metres per minute.

hmmmm :hmm: - thanks for posting this info. This sounds fascinating, and I'd love to play around with this stuff once I either finish my Pitch tweaks or give up on them, but I must say I don't have a clue what any of the above actually means. I pasted in the numbers (in yellow) above that I found in my stock/ROW NSS_Salmon.sim file, but as you can see they don't seem to bear anything like the mathematical relationships to each other you described in your post.

I haven't messed with these numbers or factors at all in my Pitch tweaking so far - I have tried to be careful to watch for any unintended consequences on the boats' diving and surfacing behaviors as a result of my tweaks (especially after one of my earliest pitch tweak setups sent my boat plunging uncontrollably hundreds of fathoms to the sea floor as soon as I ordered a crash dive), but it's only been by comparing my tweaked boats' behaviors to those of the stock/ROW boats (row boats?) - as long as my boats performed the same as the stock/ROW ones, I've been OK with it. However, it has gotten me wondering whether some of the diving and surfacing times in stock/ROW are really correct, so I had thought that I might take a look at these sorts of issues once my Pitch tweaks were finished.

Of course, that was back when I thought I was almost ready to release my Pitch mod - now that I'm still mired in testing on that trying to correct the latest unforseen side effect, I'm not sure if I'll ever get to something like this, but if I do at some point I'll probably have to ask you to explain some of what you said above, as it's not getting through to me just yet.

Thanks for trying though

[Der Teddy Bar]

You were expressing frustration at the period between when the submarine first breaks the surface to the time that the submarine sits out of the water correctly and the detrimental affect this period has in regards to your mod.It is not until the main ballast is under 400 does the submarine sit at it's normal height.

The main ballast for the Salmon is Submerged Displacement - Surface Displacement i.e. 763.

When the submarine first breaks the surface from a normal surface order (depth of 45 metres) the main ballast is at around 750 and it takes around 8+ minutes to empty.

When the submarine first breaks the surface from a emergency surface order (depth of 45 metres) the main ballast is at around 570 and it takes around 5+ minutes to empty.

It takes around 5 minutes for the main ballastto go from 750 to <400.

I hope this helps.

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by Der Teddy Bar

You were expressing frustration at the period between when the submarine first breaks the surface to the time that the submarine sits out of the water correctly and the detrimental affect this period has in regards to your mod.It is not until the main ballast is under 400 does the submarine sit at it's normal height.

The main ballast for the Salmon is Submerged Displacement - Surface Displacement i.e. 763.

When the submarine first breaks the surface from a normal surface order (depth of 45 metres) the main ballast is at around 750 and it takes around 8+ minutes to empty.

When the submarine first breaks the surface from a emergency surface order (depth of 45 metres) the main ballast is at around 570 and it takes around 5+ minutes to empty.

It takes around 5 minutes for the main ballastto go from 750 to <400.

I hope this helps.

Ahhh - very interesting. Thanks for the explanation.

I don't suppose though that it would be possible to mess around with those numbers (e.g., decrease the time it takes to empty out the main ballast after surfacing) without really screwing up the diving/surfacing behavior of the boat generally, would it?. I may try that just for laughs, but I have this vision of the boat popping up to the surface from crash depth in about 3 seconds or something totally ridiculous like that.