Mechanical Failure

keysersoze · 02-05-13, 12:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spydar1959

So what about,instead of having to go to port,an option on resupply? Throw the engine or mechanical breakdown into patrol. But have a 50/50 chance on a resupply that they have parts. Or meeting with another U-boat. Many U-boats had breakdowns and did not have to return to home port for repairs. Limiting top speed or dive depth for the duration of no parts would be nice.

This is exactly what I had in mind! I've been going through my U-boat books recently and writing down all the special missions and additional tasks U-boats were assigned, aside from simply patrolling and sinking merchants. One mission that appears again and again is the order to either deliver spare parts to a damaged U-boat, or to meet with another boat (often a milk cow) to receive parts.

If mechanical failure was implemented, would it be possible for BdU to direct a friendly U-boat to our position to deliver components? Seeing as TDW has already put wolfpacks in the game, perhaps we could use the same system to spawn a friendly U-boat that would try to meet us at a pre-determined point. Better yet—but probably harder to code—would be if BdU would also occasionally order us to help a "damaged" U-boat.

finchOU · 02-05-13, 01:13 PM

Begging for this since SH3. Not a big fan of the Sabotage aspect (thinking it would be a rare occasion). But the mechanical failure side should have been implemented a long long time ago. I've deployed twice on ships........even having to land on a ship dragging a screw. Stuff is broken ALL THE TIME. Constant upkeep and maintenance was required everyday to make sure things work...and things still break.

I like the idea of tactical decisions being limited because of things breaking... aka I can't make top speed while we need to take a couple of hours to repair one of the engines. At least give me a Daily report of repairs/maintenance from the chief. I do think running the engines hard should impact probability of breakdown (I want Scotty to yell at me when I'm pushing the boat too hard...and want him to be right when it breaks)

keysersoze · 02-05-13, 05:12 PM

I reread the the chapter of Steel Boat, Iron Hearts entitled "Sabotage" today to remind myself of the malfunctions U-505 encountered in the summer and fall of 1943. I had forgotten how demoralizing this extended period of mechanical breakdown/sabotage was to the crew.

U-505 put into Lorient on December 12, 1942 after suffering critical damage in a depth charge attack. She was finally ready for patrol on July 1, 1943. Things didn't go according to plan, and she had to abort her next five patrols due to a myriad of problems. Here are the pertinent failures for each attempted departure:

July 1: faulty propellor seal. FuMB Metox short-circuit, GHG hydrophones failure, radio direction finder antenna failure while in stowed position, fuel leak

August 1: pressure hull leak. Here's a revealing quote: "Shipyard engineers sheepishly reported that they had indeed found evidence of sabotage: hollow sweat seams in the newly repaired hull. Instead of solidly welded seams, they found strips of oakum...had been placed between the plate joints. The oakum was then covered with a thin cover of solder to hide the sabotage" (147).

August 14: pressure hull leak, crushed air intake duct

August 21: oil leak: "A closer inspection revealed that someone had drilled a small pencil-sized hole in one of the fuel bunkers" (155).

September 18: starboard diesel exhaust valve loose, direction finder failure, short-wave radio failure, main pump failure

October 10: piston #2 on port diesel frozen in cylinder. Repaired after eight hours and patrol finally continues.

Most of the above could be ascribed to simple mechanical failure, rather than sabotage, although the oakum seams and fuel tank hole are harder to explain. U-505 might be an exceptional case, but their extended experience with mechanical and electrical problems at least illustrates that this stuff happened all the time, as finchOU pointed out. Sabotage might be a little extreme, so perhaps it could be optional/moddable.

gap · 02-05-13, 08:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by keysersoze

This is exactly what I had in mind! I've been going through my U-boat books recently and writing down all the special missions and additional tasks U-boats were assigned, aside from simply patrolling and sinking merchants. One mission that appears again and again is the order to either deliver spare parts to a damaged U-boat, or to meet with another boat (often a milk cow) to receive parts.

Quote:

Originally Posted by finchOU

Begging for this since SH3. Not a big fan of the Sabotage aspect (thinking it would be a rare occasion). But the mechanical failure side should have been implemented a long long time ago. I've deployed twice on ships........even having to land on a ship dragging a screw. Stuff is broken ALL THE TIME. Constant upkeep and maintenance was required everyday to make sure things work...and things still break.

I agree. Delivering spare parts was a comon U-boat assignment, and indeed anyy sort of mechanical/electrical failure was a quite common evenience.

Quote:

Originally Posted by keysersoze

If mechanical failure was implemented, would it be possible for BdU to direct a friendly U-boat to our position to deliver components? Seeing as TDW has already put wolfpacks in the game, perhaps we could use the same system to spawn a friendly U-boat that would try to meet us at a pre-determined point. Better yet—but probably harder to code—would be if BdU would also occasionally order us to help a "damaged" U-boat.

Spare parts delivery missions are already possible in game. I think Trevally made a good use of this feature, at least in the Monsun Gruppe campaign.

In my opinion, having a wider variety of these side missions in campaign, and being randomly assigned to one of them once in a while (but not too often), would be a nice diversion, and would increase the immersion.

On the other hand, the closer we can get to being delivered spare parts ourselves, is when we are asking for refittings at sea. Trevally is for sure by far more informed than me on this subject, but there is a chance that we don't need for any patch in order to call in for "technical assistance" by nearby units.

Nonetheless, as far as I can remember, damages are not repaired during refittings at sea or from friendly ports. Only by docking at our base we can get our sub fully overhauled. So, a "random failure/spare parts delivery patch" should:

trigger various malfunctions, randomly and/or based on bad use of our equipment and damage we had previously incurred.
set a random chance that the normal repair routines for a damaged system are stopped and, in this evenience, prompting us with a message like "Captain, the X system can't be repaired: we need for spare parts".
reenabe the usual repair routines after a normal refitting.

spydar1959 · 02-05-13, 09:40 PM

For the historical aspect look at www.uboatarchive.net. They have a few KTB (Kriegstagebucher). Look at the one for the U-156 (Laconia incedent). About half way down the page you will read that the U-156 met up with U-125. The commander of the U-125 came across in a dingy and transferred 5 bridging sets (metal straps for connecting batteries) to the U-156. And that is out of their logbooks. So between fuel transfers and parts, the U-156 was going nowhere fast. So the option on time can be somewhat mapped out from them. And if wolfpacks are already in-game as a variable, couldn't you just drop all the u-boats but one? You would already have some parameters for the meeting set up by the game. Pardon the explainations, just doing it in case any new guys are following along.

THE_MASK · 02-05-13, 09:51 PM

What if there was something invisible that you could place on the water in locations with the terrain editor . When your sub hit them you would sustain slight damage or lets call it malfunctions .

keysersoze · 02-05-13, 10:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sober

What if there was something invisible that you could place on the water in locations with the terrain editor . When your sub hit them you would sustain slight damage or lets call it malfunctions .

That's a good idea, but would there be a way to direct the damage to a specific subsystem? Most malfunctions would occur only in a specific component, such as a diesel breaking down. If a sub "hit" an invisible object, that would just damage the hull. I could be wrong though.

Is there a way to code a timer that could record the amount of time a particular subsystem has been used? For example, a timer could start when the diesels fire up and, once x hours is reached, a malfunction script could add a random chance of mechanical failure for each hour the diesels are operated thereafter. It would be even more interesting if other variables could be added, such as time spent at flank speed increasing the chance of failure, or having the amount of time until the malfunction script is called raised or lowered. This last variable could be used to simulate poor shipyard work or sabotage (if that is included) by adding the malfunction chance almost immediately instead of waiting x hours.

Of course, I don't really know what I'm talking about, so this suggestion might be totally unrealistic.

02-05-13, 09:40 PM	#5
spydar1959 Seaman Join Date: Jan 2013 Location: Directly above the center of the earth Posts: 36 Downloads: 126 Uploads: 0	Just for refferance For the historical aspect look at www.uboatarchive.net. They have a few KTB (Kriegstagebucher). Look at the one for the U-156 (Laconia incedent). About half way down the page you will read that the U-156 met up with U-125. The commander of the U-125 came across in a dingy and transferred 5 bridging sets (metal straps for connecting batteries) to the U-156. And that is out of their logbooks. So between fuel transfers and parts, the U-156 was going nowhere fast. So the option on time can be somewhat mapped out from them. And if wolfpacks are already in-game as a variable, couldn't you just drop all the u-boats but one? You would already have some parameters for the meeting set up by the game. Pardon the explainations, just doing it in case any new guys are following along. __________________ Women are like an Enigma machine, you try and figure one out..... Last edited by spydar1959; 02-05-13 at 10:06 PM.

02-05-13, 01:13 PM	#2
finchOU Samurai Navy Join Date: Jan 2004 Posts: 571 Downloads: 77 Uploads: 0	Begging for this since SH3. Not a big fan of the Sabotage aspect (thinking it would be a rare occasion). But the mechanical failure side should have been implemented a long long time ago. I've deployed twice on ships........even having to land on a ship dragging a screw. Stuff is broken ALL THE TIME. Constant upkeep and maintenance was required everyday to make sure things work...and things still break. I like the idea of tactical decisions being limited because of things breaking... aka I can't make top speed while we need to take a couple of hours to repair one of the engines. At least give me a Daily report of repairs/maintenance from the chief. I do think running the engines hard should impact probability of breakdown (I want Scotty to yell at me when I'm pushing the boat too hard...and want him to be right when it breaks) __________________ Intel i7-2700K-3.50GHz, 16 GB RAM, 2 xGTX 560,2GB,SLI,2 TB HD The Wolves of Steel 1.06 The Wolves of Steel 1.06 Update 05c

02-05-13, 05:12 PM	#3
keysersoze Ensign Join Date: Feb 2012 Location: USA Posts: 226 Downloads: 346 Uploads: 0	I reread the the chapter of Steel Boat, Iron Hearts entitled "Sabotage" today to remind myself of the malfunctions U-505 encountered in the summer and fall of 1943. I had forgotten how demoralizing this extended period of mechanical breakdown/sabotage was to the crew. U-505 put into Lorient on December 12, 1942 after suffering critical damage in a depth charge attack. She was finally ready for patrol on July 1, 1943. Things didn't go according to plan, and she had to abort her next five patrols due to a myriad of problems. Here are the pertinent failures for each attempted departure: July 1: faulty propellor seal. FuMB Metox short-circuit, GHG hydrophones failure, radio direction finder antenna failure while in stowed position, fuel leak August 1: pressure hull leak. Here's a revealing quote: "Shipyard engineers sheepishly reported that they had indeed found evidence of sabotage: hollow sweat seams in the newly repaired hull. Instead of solidly welded seams, they found strips of oakum...had been placed between the plate joints. The oakum was then covered with a thin cover of solder to hide the sabotage" (147). August 14: pressure hull leak, crushed air intake duct August 21: oil leak: "A closer inspection revealed that someone had drilled a small pencil-sized hole in one of the fuel bunkers" (155). September 18: starboard diesel exhaust valve loose, direction finder failure, short-wave radio failure, main pump failure October 10: piston #2 on port diesel frozen in cylinder. Repaired after eight hours and patrol finally continues. Most of the above could be ascribed to simple mechanical failure, rather than sabotage, although the oakum seams and fuel tank hole are harder to explain. U-505 might be an exceptional case, but their extended experience with mechanical and electrical problems at least illustrates that this stuff happened all the time, as finchOU pointed out. Sabotage might be a little extreme, so perhaps it could be optional/moddable.

02-05-13, 09:51 PM	#6
THE_MASK Ace of the deep . Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 9,226 Downloads: 901 Uploads: 73	What if there was something invisible that you could place on the water in locations with the terrain editor . When your sub hit them you would sustain slight damage or lets call it malfunctions .