Dead bodies/debris

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by Darkcrow

I apologise if I offended or broke any rules. That wasn't my intention. I just figured since TMO features that already in a non-gory way, that it would be fine to see if that was included in the newest version of FOTRS.

BTW, I knew a USS Indianapolis survivor when I was a child. He was a neighbor and very nice. He told my dad some stories about it incident.



I'm looking forward to trying it out!
Do you have a rough idea of when you might release it?

I am aiming for Christmas/Late December 2025. Creating more detailed ship survivors was very easy to do, I'm kind of surprised that in about 15 years of Silent 3ditor being available, not much has been done.

The way I see it, survivors and victims was a fact of life, and should be included for realism purposes. Furthermore, you can already kill sailors in unmodded Silent Hunter 4 with deck gun fire. So my mod won't really be adding death to the Silent Hunter series for the first time.

Nevertheless, I totally understand the opinions of people who do not want to see such things, because all death is tragic. I will not judge anyone who does not want to use my mod.

Historically, floating people (alive and otherwise) were common during WWI and WWII. Although the oceans are vast, strategically important traffic routes are not - thus, lots of chance for encounters.

In a bad convoy battle, 20 or more ships could be sunk .... giving each ship a typical small freighter crew of just 30 men, that's still 600 men going into the water. Furthermore, by 1945 freighter crews could be up to 80 men. Not to mention, say, a troopship with thousands. Survivors could be at sea for hundreds of days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poon_Lim

Likewise, bodies could last for days - even if not supported by a life vest, they could naturally float under the right conditions.

Many days after the HX-229 convoy battle, a U-Boat reported finding one of the dead convoy sailors in a field of flotsam.

http://www.warsailors.com/convoys/hx229.html

It's interesting you mentioned the USS Indianapolis. When she went down, her men drifted for an extremely long time - long after the ~ 6 days it took to find the last survivor. Ships found hundreds of bodies for days in a field of debris, according to Raymond Lech in the book "All the Drowned Sailors". And this was the Pacific .... had it been the cold Atlantic, the deceased would have lasted for much longer.

When the retrieval ship SS Mackay Bennett recovered "Titanic" victims, the crew was surprised by how long they remained lifelike above the water.... up to about their waists they were almost perfectly preserved for a considerable time period. Although legs/feet had water damage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS_Mackay-Bennett

So, basically, all this is to say that encountering such things was almost unavoidable if you spent enough time in shipping lanes.

To stop sadistic players who think war crimes are funny, I can easily give a renown penalty for attacking survivors in SH4. Unfortunately I don't think it is possible for SH3, due to differences in how the game generates certain things.