UBER-Realism Thread

[onelifecrisis]

Interesting idea for a thread.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by onelifecrisis

Interesting idea for a thread.

I believe you're correct, ships do sink easier with EDE (and also with SH4 Effects for SH3) because the extra explosions do additional damage to them. Without using those mods, I'm finding that "one ship one (impact) torpedo" sinks about two out of three merchants, and dreadnaughts almost always take more than one torp. Using EDE I found that one torp sinks almost any ship, almost every time. I don't know if that's more realistic or not... maybe the extra damage from EDE actually increases realism!? If anyone knows how many torpedos would typically be required to sink a ship IRL, I'm all ears!

Hi!

There is a section in the GWX manual where "VonHelsching" briefly wrote up the GWX approach to damage modeling, and that may help answer some of your questions.

AFAIK the explosions you see in EDE are merely cosmetic, and don't cause additional damage, since the only files modified are the particles (which affect the visuals) and the zones.cfg, which causes explosion effects but (should) not cause additional damage.

If you are patient enough for a ship to flood, most of the merchant ships in GWX can be sunk with one or two torpedoes because, IIRC, most of the merchant ships that were lost IRL went down with one or two torpedo hits: once you put a hole in the big cargo spaces, it's just a question of whether your ship has enough reserve buoyancy to stay afloat with a large flooded compartment.

Large warships could (but did not always) survive a couple of hits provided the ship could retain power for the pumps, and if the ship's compartmentalization could limit the flooding to a small volume of the ship, but the explosion could buckle a ship's deck plates, hull plates, and bulkheads and thereby allow water to leak further into the ship. For example, HMS Barham rolled over just a few minutes after being hit by three torpedoes from U-331; HMS Malaya survived a hit from U-106, but HMS Ark Royal was lost to a single torpedo from U-81, described in detail here. A lot depended on the exact type and location of damage, as well as the design and layout of the ship in question.

Silent Hunter III does not allow modeling of a lot of important damage and damage control mechanisms that would affect the outcome IRL, so what we have is really just a rough approximation, regardless of which mods you use, if any.

Hope this helps!

Pablo

[onelifecrisis]

Thanks for the info, Pablo!