RFB How to tell when a ship is mortally hit

[Longknife]

I wish I had a better understanding of the damage model.

Last night I made a Mush Morton "Up the skirt" shot on Victory freighter. 1 torp hit it in the rudder taking the screw with it & the other missed. The freighter was armed so I submerged & as I started to move around for the coup de grâce she went under.
To my way of understanding a single torp should not have brought her low.

[Hambone307]

I have had some interesting "incidents" as well. Using TMO last night I got lucky and came across two fleet carriers lightly escorted. And by lightly I mean only one cruiser. 15m/s winds and rough seas, I got into position and fired all 6 of my torpedos at the three of them. Just before the fish hit the cruiser, I got a ship sunk icon, but no credit. The other 4 were right on target hitting both carriers. one was a dud, and the other two detonated. I followed the carriers for a while trying to reload since their speed had dropped. As I was preparing another salvo on the two damaged flat tops, they sank.

This just left me scratching my head considering that I usually have to put at least four torps into one carrier to sink it, and had the one sink from one torpedo strike. I guess TMO models rough seas and some of the sinking mechanics...

[Sniper297]

Worst I ever run across was the large tanker;



I fully understand that a tanker has a lot of tanks (hence the name) that can be used for counterflooding and provide more buoyancy than the average merchant ship, but it's a little ridiculous when everything but the tops of the masts is underwater and it's still not "sunk".

Heavy cruisers are the worst though;



I should be able to sail off and chalk this one up as sunk, even if a rescue tug was nearby they would consider this too badly damaged to tow and would scuttle it themselves if it didn't go down. Which by all that's holy it should, this thing is a wreck.

[Scarredclown]

If i understand correctly, no mods and even the stock game have a very good sinking mechanics. I'm playing with RFB and the boat seems to be a bit tougher to sink.

[merc4ulfate]

How to tell when a ship is mortally hit ... they sink

There are mods that correct the sinking issue

[TorpX]

Originally Posted by merc4ulfate

How to tell when a ship is mortally hit ... they sink

Can't argue with that.

Worst I ever run across was the large tanker...

From my experience in RFB, the merchants seem to sink often enough, but like in the picture, they usually sink on an even keel. RFB made changes in the zones to change this, but they still have a tendency to stay on an even keel. There doesn't seem to be any modeling of free surface effects, or the like.

[merc4ulfate]

I've seen them go belly up. Partial sinking tail first sticking up out of the water. Stern First, Bow first, Keel even, saw one blow clean up to about 500 feet before it crashed down and sank (midget sub)

[TorpX]

Originally Posted by Longknife

I wish I had a better understanding of the damage model.

This is my understanding (admittedly limited):

Every ship/sub/plane has defined damage zones. These zones have different sizes, hit points, armor values, and 'floatability' values. They also have other factors, like 'critical chance' defined. Damage to these zones can result in flooding, fire, explosion, and smoke. Critical hits can occur. These are not guaranteed to destroy, but only to result in enhanced damage.

Weapons have defined damage points and armor penetration values. Damage is variable, so to will be the results of your hits.

The point being, there are a lot of variables to all this, and one cannot expect consistent results.

Watching ships sink in some tests I ran, it was clear that at a certain point in time, the game will 'write off' the ship, and it will start going down. I don't know how the game decides when this will happen. This would be nice to know.