[WIP] Destabilizing the deck gun, a workaround...

[kv29]

Its done.

Still a beta, advanced, but tell me what mod is not! I will release it in 2 flavors: stock reloading 4s and 25s. I tested it up to 4000 meters and achieved good hits. I need a few good men to test it in every imaginable condition so please post your feedbacks so I can tweak it as much as required

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by tater

^^^

in RL, the sight is not set vertically on the target.

Panther, you set the direction (bearing) you want to shoot, and you set the range (the gun does this in stock SH4).

Since range on a gun is a soley function of the elevation (assuming a cartridge gun, and not adjustable powder charges), you need to know that the deck is level (in both directions unless you are pointing exactly along an axis) because the elevation of the gun tube is the setting on the mount (the range value you see in the sight) plus/minus the roll of the deck.

If you need a 15 degree elevation to hit the target, and you shoot with the deck on a 30 degree roll, you just shot at 45 degrees.

So the sight was LEVEL with the deck. When the sight is level with the horizon line, you know the deck is level, and you shoot since the round will then land at the range you told it to.

tater

Tater - thanks for the explanation and for helping out with this. I probably wasn't thinking (or writing) as clearly as I might have the other night. Now that I think about it in light of your comments, perhaps a better way of expressing my point would be to say that, at any given elevation setting, both the gun and the sight should be "locked" to the deck (and therefore, to each other as well), since both the gun barrel and the sight should be pitching up and down in the same manner as the deck as the sub rolls (or pitches, for that matter, but that's an extra complication for another discussion). Thus, I was getting a little confused by the talk about de-coupling the gun and the sight in terms of their rolling action. Of course, the gun barrel needs to be able to move (elevate) independently of the sight/crosshairs when you change the elevation setting, but then once any given elevation has been selected, the gun barrel and the sight should pitch/roll together along with the deck.

Although I didn't have time to do much testing, it seemed to be working that way the other night - I could (and needed to) elevate the gun to hit at farther ranges but the crosshairs did not seem to go higher above the horizon when I did so (maybe I just didn't notice since I didn't try any very long ranges?). Yet, once I had set the range/elevation, both the crosshairs and the gun barrel seemed to rise and fall together with the roll of the boat about as you would expect (based upon the fall of the shells short and long).

Thus, I'm still puzzled a bit about what further "de-coupling" might be needed here.

[kv29]

Get it here!:

http://files.filefront.com/Destabili.../fileinfo.html


EDITED: btw, there seems to be a problem with 3"50 DG cameras, try this mod only with the 4"50 and 5"25 for now.

[tater]

Duh. Yes, panther, entirely correct. I just meant that the gun could elevate, and the sight picture wouldn't change. Once the gun tube stops moving (elevation) they are indeed both fixed to the deck.

[tater]

If you're going to make 2 reload speeds, the lowest time to reload should be the "spec" ROF of 8-9 rpm. Call it 8 seconds. That'd be interesting to test the reload time vs ROF...

[panthercules]

First indications are that this latest one has a problem The rolling/pitching action seemed pretty decent, but there's something not quite "right" about the horizontal crosshair behavior.

I set up a slight tweak on my test mission to have 3 stationary ships, at ranges of 1,000, 2,000 and 3,000 yards, to shoot at. On the 1,000 yard ship, the horizontal crosshair was consistently below the horizon when the sub was level (by about 1/8th inch, about the same as the last one I tested was above the horizon), and the shots consistently hit about 1/8th inch above the crosshair (i.e., if I fired as the crosshairs came level with the waterline of the ship, the shots all hit the top deck or superstructure or sailed just over, even when elevation was set to minimum of 500 yards.

Firing at the 2,000 yard ship, the horizontal crosshair was consistently about 1/8th inch above the horizon when the sub was level, and on the 3,000 yard ship it was even higher - maybe 1/4 inch or so. The horizontal crosshair appeared to be rising and descending as you changed the gun elevation, which I don't believe should be happening. It makes me wonder if I just wasn't using varied (long) enough ranges in my previous tests, since I probably only shot between 500 and 1,500 yards in that one, but I don't remember seeing any vertical movement of the crosshairs in that test - I'm going to have to re-load that other tweaked file set with my new test mission and see if I just missed it last time around.

[EDIT] - LOL - never mind - just checked my test mission set up and, although I told it to put in a Gato figuring it would have at least a 4" gun, it seems to have given me a Gar with only a 3" gun, which the post above indicated still had some problems in the new test download. I'll have to figure out how to get the right gun on my sub and try again

[panthercules]

Ok - I give up (for now, anyway)

Apparently, I just suck at this mission editor stuff - you wouldn't think it would be that hard, but I can't find any way to tell the mission editor to give me a 4" gun. I tried the Gato, Gar and Balao - also tried starting the mission with a Gato in mid 1945 and checking "evolve from entry date" or whatever that check box says, hoping it would upgrade me to a late-war, larger gun, but Noooooooo - every thing I tried gave me a 3" gun to shoot There doesn't seem to be any settings/properties sheet or mechanism to tell the editor what sort of equipment you want your player sub to have, at least that I can find.

I guess I'll have to wait to test this until either the files for the 3" gun get fixed or someone can clue me in to how to get a 4" gun on my test mission sub.

[tater]

S boats have a 4" as the standard gun.

[Palidian]

I know this will open up a can of worms, but the rate of fire of this gun according to the US Navy is 8-10 rounds a minute. If you get your model to work properly then it will lower the rate of fire on its own. But the 30 second limit makes the gun fire about 40-50 seconds.

Originally Posted by kv29

I was fiddling with the gun tweak when I thought "ok, we can´t turn off the DG estabilization system because we don´t know where the hell is hidden, but what about if we could tie its hands? what would happen if I set the elevation speed to a minimum? would the estabilization system keep up with the sub roll?"...

Nope, it can´t :p

I set mine from 5 to 0.5 and guess what, the DG barely tries to estabilize at that speed, it goes up and down with the deck. You can still move the crosshair at the same speed as before BUT once the gun reachs the right angle, it will move along with the deck if the sub roll is strong enough, so if you fire at the wrong moment you will miss, you have to keep an eye at the gun barrell for the right moment.

Of course, at 0.5 speed it takes some time for the gun to move up and down, it doesn´t bother me at all.

I would really appreciate some feedbacks!

[tater]

So you're saying the time between rounds goes up by 10-20 seconds due to the unstable gun platform? The 8-9 rpm figure is around 8 second per round. So with the spec value (determined at a factory range someplace) is 8, and you add 10-20 seconds you get... 18-28 seconds as an average ROF---just like RL logs.

Interesting (I suggested doing a "spec" reload in this mod of 8 seconds a round). If that's true you just got values between the best recorded over time we have seen yet in a log (17 seconds average) to what the RFB mod already is (closer to 30 seconds).

I tried a pigboat. Seems to work pretty well, it it seems OK, I'd dump the external gun view altogether, or at least eliminate the cross hairs.

<S> This is looking very good!

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by tater

S boats have a 4" as the standard gun.

Righto - worked like a charm - swapped out to an S-boat and Voila! 4" gun to play with.

AND MAN IS THIS AWESOME!!!!

It worked incredibly well with the 4" gun files - I tried it at both zoom levels and on all 3 boats (1.000, 2,000 and 3,000 yard ranges). In 8m/s winds, the boat and the gun were rolling pretty dramatically, and I really had to pay attention to when I fired in order to get any hits, but if I managed to fire at the right point, as the horizontal crosshair was on the horizon, I could pretty consistently hit all 3 of the targets when elevation was set to their known/fixed range. Had plenty of misses though, due to bad timing, and I'm sure it will be worse in real game conditions when both sub and target are moving and you don't really know the exact range to target like I did in my test.

As you can see from the screenshots below, there was a pretty incredible amount of swing up and down in high zoom at 3,000 yards in such heavy seas (probably as bad as you would reasonably be able to use the gun at any rate):

From this:



To this:



Now - if you can get the 3" gun fixed like this, I think you can declare victory and sit back and bask in the glory

[CaptainCox]

As this thread is getting pretty big, and the discussion is going back and forth (basically not so easy to get an overview)...is there a chance of a release of this soonish?

[tater]

Originally Posted by kv29

Get it here!:

http://files.filefront.com/Destabili.../fileinfo.html


EDITED: btw, there seems to be a problem with 3"50 DG cameras, try this mod only with the 4"50 and 5"25 for now.

This was just a few posts up if you want to play with it, Captaincox.

[CaptainCox]

Man sorry I guess i was even to lazy to look
Cheers !

[CaptainCox]

Was this the only changes done to the Cam.dat?

Originally Posted by kv29
Sure:

For the zoomed cam destabilization:

File: cameras.dat
Category: Deckgunzoom
Changed: Added missing name&value "Look at horizon=4.664923E-42" (hex 5398)
Changed value=0

I am only asking as I have other stuff in my cam file and have to add it manually.

Cheers!