English subs ?

[joea]

Originally Posted by Beery

That's like saying that the sim is fine because it's fine for online play. What about all those people who bought the sim who don't play online? I guess they're up a creek without a paddle, 'cos their game is porked and the devs made darned sure that modders can't do a thing about it.

Sigh, as usual people pick out what they want, you never read the link I posted or you would not keep saying the game is porked. Have you ever flown a plane? They guys on that thread have be sure.

I happily play offline because modders have fixed what was broken for offline play. The main thing is the built in dynamic campaign generator is very poor, and needs tweaking. Or replacing, with this:
http://www.lowengrin.com./news.php

It is a superior dynamic campaign generator, and this guy made one for CFS2 that was loads better than that built in generator. you can tweak all the factors, and is a wonderful peice of software. You can also make single missions for stand alone or as part of a static campaign with this:

http://www.uberdemon.com/main.html

Static campaigns, well written ones, can be very nice the first time played through, there are so many written that you will not lack for variety, just time. :rotfl:

Still waiting for the research ...

Last word from me...SH3 and 4 out of the box were far more arcade than Il-2, which is scalable.

[DeerHunter UK]

Can you 2 please take your argument about IL-2 to private messaging or go visit UBI's IL-2 forums where you can discuss it length. Personally I love IL-2 and have been in a squad for over 4 and a half years but strangely enough have no urge to discuss the game on a subsim site or especially in a thread about English subs!

[joea]

Originally Posted by DeerHunter UK

Can you 2 please take your argument about IL-2 to private messaging or go visit UBI's IL-2 forums where you can discuss it length. Personally I love IL-2 and have been in a squad for over 4 and a half years but strangely enough have no urge to discuss the game on a subsim site or especially in a thread about English subs!

Sorry mate, I'll STFU now ...



HMS Venturer

What classes would you all like to see...

X-craft would be cool too...

[AntEater]

For Pacific there would be:
T Class
River Class
not sure about S Class being used in the PTO
U/V class definitely didnt have the range for the Pacific.

[DeerHunter UK]

No worries Joea, I like the picture BTW.
If my sources are correct, the V class were a modified U class but were designated V as the Royal Navy were running out of names beginning with U.
There were S class subs in the PTO but didn't arrive in the theatre until early '44. HMS Stonehenge was sunk in March '44 somewhere near Sumatra. HMS Strongbow was depth charged in shallow water and somehow managed to survive, she eventually had to return to Britain for repairs. The other S class subs that I'm aware of in the theatre were, Spiteful, Sea Rover, Surf, Storm, Sturdy, Stoic, Sirdar and Statesman who fired the last torpedo fired from a British sub in WW2.
The only other class of British sub I know of in in the PTO was HMS Porpoise, a minelayer and 1 of the 3 subs lost during the conflict.

[Egan]

I'm beginning to wonder whether we shouldn't ask one of the mods to move this to the modding forum.

[AntEater]

It is purely hypothetical, nobody has yet started work. For that matter, no one has yet done any new 3d object for SH4....
The mod forum is more technical. If someone started serious work on brit subs, mod forum would be the place.
But for Brit subs, we would need:
- Exterior models for subs
- interior models of control room and conning tower. Some british subs (U-Class) did not have a seperate conning tower and were entirely conned from the control room, but I suppose the larger ones had one.
- British sailors with beards and proper uniforms. Or we could take just the ugliest SH4 guys and pass them off as brits :rotflducks and runs away) but they would still need new uniforms.#
- A brand new voice pack with both southern fairies and northern bastids. And some scotts and whatever other strange people populate that island.
- I wonder wether SH4 actually would support the addition of a new playable nation with new awards, ranks, bases etc or wether one would have to replace the Americans with the British.

[ElAurens]

I'll make one post here about IL2, as I have played the sim from December 2001.

You cannot judge the IL2 series from a totally offline perspective. AI being AI, the only way to judge anything is by playing against another human being. The AI have simplified flight models, and always fly and shoot at the maximum performance level. they are computer controlled after all.

The FMs for the most part are quite good vs. real life aircraft, with some exceptions of course, but you must remember that flight dynamics, if fully and accurately modeled would not be able to run on a PC, so compromises are necessary. The real pilots in my "squad", the BlitzPigs (we prefer to call it a movement, ), have their issues with the aircraft dynamics for sure, but to a man they all say that it is by far the best thing going in terms of capturing flight on the PC. And these are not just guys pottering around in Cessna 172s. We have a former RAF Jaguar pilot, a commercial pilot, and a vintage aircraft aerobatics instructor in our ranks. I will take their word over the armchair experts on the UBI-Zoo forums, or here, any day of the week.

I would also venture to say that the AI in SH4 are every bit as bad as the AI in the IL2 series. And they are easier to defeat because ships are so slow, and hence even more predictable. But I will give credit where it is due, the SH4 offline experience is better than IL2's, by far. But difficult it is not. Only more time consuming.

And both SH4 and IL2, in the form of it's Pacific theater add on/expansion "Pacific Fighters" both suffer from a common problem. To wit:

European developers that do not have even a basic knowledge of the Pacific War, it's combatants, the tactics and equipment used, and it's importance.

Hence the lack of proper Aircraft/Ships/Maps in IL2's Pacific Fighters, and the poorly depicted mission types, submarine performance/range parameters, and amazingly, aircraft utilization in SH4. (take a look at the fighters on the deck of a US carrier in 1944, and you will see Brewster Buffalos. Yeah, these guys know their stuff all right...

[perisher]

Originally Posted by AntEater

But for Brit subs, we would need:
- Exterior models for subs
- interior models of control room and conning tower. Some british subs (U-Class) did not have a seperate conning tower and were entirely conned from the control room, but I suppose the larger ones had one.
- British sailors with beards and proper uniforms. Or we could take just the ugliest SH4 guys and pass them off as brits :rotflducks and runs away) but they would still need new uniforms.#
- A brand new voice pack with both southern fairies and northern bastids. And some scotts and whatever other strange people populate that island.
- I wonder wether SH4 actually would support the addition of a new playable nation with new awards, ranks, bases etc or wether one would have to replace the Americans with the British.

All British subs of this era were conned from the control room, the conning tower was just a vertical tube with a hatch at each end. (The A Class had the captain's cabin in the tower, but they were not ready for service before the war ended.)

Uniforms would not be much of a problem, as Brit submariners didn't bother too much about correct uniform and would dress for comfort., no air con remember. Crews would sometimes "go native". (This was probably the cause of Admiral Christie's remarks about RN subs and their crews).

Someone mentioned X-Craft. They would be nice but the weapons system would be a sod to mod

[AntEater]

I only have a cutaway of a U-Class (in Bagnascos book), and so I assumed the lack of a conning tower was due to the U class' small size.

One thing hard to model would have been the fact that tubes 9 and 10 would have been only able to fire at targets not inside a 15 deg "red and green" sector across the bows or with a proper spread angle. But the Ts sent to east asia most likely had their midship external tubes "turned around" at that time.
Do you know wether british subs had an automated fan shot mode as germans?
I suppose so, given the british doctrine of firing large spreads.

[Egan]

Originally Posted by AntEater

- I wonder wether SH4 actually would support the addition of a new playable nation with new awards, ranks, bases etc or wether one would have to replace the Americans with the British.

Like I said, a total conversion would be the most sensible way to do this. Even a mod on this scale could be easily designed to work with Jscone's mod enabler so there is no real problem with that. As for models, CB.. did a model of an S-class about a year or so ago complete with new crew uniforms so that much is possible to do. Sound packs could be drawn from plenty of old Brit movies and a few of us forum members for anything we can't yank from audio.

Technical systems would, of course, be the hardest to do right. If the interior of one of the smaller US Boats has to be used (even if it is only to start with,) then fair enough. The Control room in 'We Dive at Dawn' (a real S-class as far as I know - they filmed a lot of it up by HMS Forth at Holyloch during the war. Other submariners thought they were a genuine crew until the skipper turned out to be John Mills..) Is not that different from the smaller US boats already in the game.

Adding a new campaign, shipping etc is more than easy enough to do. I've already started on this in fact although it is nothing more than a few notes on Squadron bases,( Holy Loch, Portsmouth, Gibralter, Malta and Beirut to start with,) and probable patrol areas. The Med could shape up to be great fun as could some of the possible historical events.

To be honest I'd be less interested in worrying that it can all be done to 110% historical accuracy than simply getting it done - no one has done a RN sub game so far and, for me, that would outweigh whether eery little system is modelled. At least to start with anyway.

[AntEater]

eery little systems?
What did they do? Scare the italians?
:rotfl:
I think you're right, and also the position keeper and other typical US equipemnt could simply be "put in the backround" by a different GUI.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

I'll make one post here about IL2, as I have played the sim from December 2001.

You cannot judge the IL2 series from a totally offline perspective.

I thought I just did, LOL.

Sorry, shutting up now.

[perisher]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Peter Padfield's War Beneath The Sea is not overly detailed, but does give a good accounting of British and Japanese submarine operations during the war; Britain's Norwegian and Malta operations especially. As for torpedo fire control, Padfield alleges that they had no TDC at all, and had to go by 'whiz wheel' and pencil and paper calculations alone.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book.

British subs did get a TDC sometime during the war, certainly by late 1941. Officially it was know as the Torpedo Director or Torpedo Control Calculator, but it was always called the "Fruit Machine" (See Unbroken by Alistair Mars). The main difference between the "Fruit Machine" and the TDC was that the "Fruit Machine" was not linked to the torpedo and all settings had to be passed by telephone and manually set. Despite this the Royal Navy achieved the highest "hits per torpedo fired" of all Allied Submarine Forces (see THE UNDERWATER WAR, 1939-45 by Richard Compton-Hall).

[AntEater]

No suprise as the british had torpedoes that actually exploded

And apart from the US, which allied actually fired torpedoes from subs?
- France? There were not much instances when french subs could fire torpedoes at the axis. Also the french had a problem with larger gyro angles, hence the trainable torpedo mounts
- USSR? according to their own history, almost every torpedo hit, of course, but actually their results were abmysal. The USSR also definitely lacked a TDC and other gadgets.
- Poland? Orzel was certainly heroic, but made only a few attacks.
Apart from that, the only other countries of the allies to use submarines in combat were Norway (norwegian manned british subs), Greece and the Netherlands.
I suppose Dutch subs were quite effective in the far east, but there were never many of them.