Underwater range and endurance

[TorpX]

Originally Posted by Sniper297

Test I ran submerged to 100 feet while stationary, then ran ahead 1/3rd until the time acceleration went to 1 with the "battery down to 10%" warning. All the boats went about 40 miles....

I have seen the same thing with my tests. I didn't bother with all the sub classes; after getting nowhere with the S-class and Porpoise class, I figured I was wasting my time.


As far as why all this doesn't work, I have no idea. It doesn't make sense to me. I thought perhaps there was a hard coded limit according to what U-boat performance was, but you said they had similar endurance, so that can't be it. While the game ignores higher numbers, it is possible to reduce sub. range.

The only thing I have to add, is that the recharge times are also a function of the eng power and E eng power. The relationship didn't seem to be linear, however, and I didn't really try to pin it down. Messing with those, would screw up propulsion, and I had no intention of jacking up everything else, to improvise a fix for the batteries.

You would think they would have fixed this sort of thing, before getting to version 1.5 of the game.

[Sniper297]

Yeah, the one experiment I made years ago with the S class diesel horsepower worked, the batteries recharged in a reasonable time. It didn't change the top speed at all, but it changed the acceleration characteristics - IIRC from a dead stop to 12 knots took about a minute without the hack, 10 seconds with the hack. I'm wondering if SKWAS misread what did what to who (and who paid the bail if anyone got arrested) when he was programming S3D. Or possibly the original programmer of the subroutine put a comment in the wrong place.

[Sniper297]

Fun being senile, I was off in several places. It was about one year ago - this is 2014 or 2041? Never mind. Anyway it went 0-12 about 40 seconds in stock, 5 seconds with the horsepower hack, and only cut the charging time in half.

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...=200773&page=3

Since the range miles and speed numbers don't seem to have any effect on anything else, that's probably a better way to get close to realistic recharge times.

If we could find the recharge times, possibly THAT data would actually have nothing to do with recharge times but extend the range.

[Sailor Steve]

Don't forget that S-boats weren't a part of the original program. They were added at the last minute when potential players insisted, and people pointed out then that they weren't completed properly. Whether they can be properly fixed is a question no one has been able to answer yet.

[Sniper297]

Meantime try the improper fix and see what you think - change the numbers in the S boat SIM file to match the fleet boats, see if it affects anything other than the recharge time.

[TorpX]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Don't forget that S-boats weren't a part of the original program. They were added at the last minute when potential players insisted, and people pointed out then that they weren't completed properly. Whether they can be properly fixed is a question no one has been able to answer yet.

The battery problem seems to go across the board. I couldn't get the Porpoise batteries to proper spec, either.





I was wondering if S3D was somehow malfunctioning (not actually putting in the values we enter), but I guess that is unlikely.

[TG626]

I don't know much about the inner workings of these files, but I do know that as time went by in the world of flight simulator, there were variables that became ineffective. They were vestigal left over a from earlier versions that while they would appear in the config files of later versions, were ignored.

Perhaps that's what is going on here?

[Sniper297]

Hard to tell, SH4 was essentially SH3 version 2 with a few changes for the Pacific war. There's probably a few hundred megs of SH3 u-boat files that aren't used at all but were never removed because the programmers either didn't have time or were unsure which files weren't used.