[REL] Real Fleet Boat

[perisher]

I have been getting close and shooting on a fine angle, but no luck, maybe it's a statistical glitch, I'll give it one more patrol.

I often wonder how many failed torpedo shots were put down to dud torpedoes when in fact it was human error? There are a lot of things that can go wrong or be forgotten, even elite subs, like Unbroken, were capable of firing a torpedo with the propeller stop still in place!

[perisher]

Originally Posted by Beery

With the crew off the ship and with no damage control teams plugging leaks or closing watertight doors, sinking a ship would take just a few rounds.

If there is no one trying to stop you, ANY steamship can be sunk with only a pound or two of gun-cotton. Make sure at least a few of the w/t doors are open and then blow the condenser inlet pipes. Bubble, bubble, down she goes.

[Beery]

I get about 50% bad torpedoes in my tests so far. A few go wide, some go clunk on the ship's side, some go under the ship, the rest hit and go boom. When I first fired up the new mod I got a lot of duds, but it must have been just luck because since then it's calmed down.

What do people think of the new menu titles and the 'Roll of Honor'? Any comments?

By the way, in the next version I've rewritten the crew names file. It will have 2500 names, all based on the most common first and last names in the US, and no "Luke Skywalker" or "Brad Pitt".

[OlegM]

Originally Posted by Beery

In RFB I will never alter the deck gun based merely on player preferences. Only hard data is persuasive. Show me evidence of large merchants being sunk by a US sub's deck gun in the Pacific in WW2 and I'll alter RFB so that it's possible to do it.

Evidence is what I need. So many people are willing to criticize, but without evidence the criticism is worse than useless. Heck, your message gives me nothing at all on which to base a change. How can I, in good conscience, adjust the deck gun to do what you want if you don't prove to me that what you want is realistic? I can't.

OK, but on what evidence did you adjust the gun to be as weak as it is now?

As it is, I fire ALL my deck gun ammo (HE + AP) on any ship larger than say 3000 tons and most of them don't even begin to smoke. That I think is simply too much. Is there any evidence of the submarine that fired 200+ shells on a target without even producing visible damage (let alone sinking)?

[Beery]

Originally Posted by OlegM

OK, but on what evidence did you adjust the gun to be as weak as it is now?

I used evidence gathered from about twenty combat reports (where details of ammo use were given) of similar guns being fired against merchant ships - how many rounds they fired and what the result was. All adjustments I've made to the game have been based on real world evidence. I don't make a change in RFB unless some evidence can be found that supports it.

Find me solid evidence and I'll be glad to adjust the gun.

[tedhealy]

2 comments.

I like the new/redone training missions. Well done

Doing the artillery training mission, I sank a large sampan, 74 tons, with about 12 shots of HE. The 2nd shot started a fire, the 10th blew off a sail, and the 12th hit the ship as she was going down. Several misses that went right over or maybe even through the top of the ship, couldn't tell. Not a big deal though. The ship may have sunk after about 6 or 7 shots as it looked to be flooding.

I sank the small merchant, 2500 tons roughly, with about 50 to 60 shells nearly all below the water line. The scenario started at 11 am, and the merchant went down at 11:49. I spent about 10 minutes on the sampan, so about 40 minutes of firing on the merchant. The AI missed maybe 5 to 10 shots at close range. I took over firing for the last 20 minutes or so hitting the same spot over and over below the water line with AP shells. I noticed the merchant sinking right after when I took over. It slowly lowered in the water and then rolled over. I'm not sure if it would have eventually sunk from flooding if I had stopped firing, but it was a great sight to see the water line on the ship slowly rising until it started to roll over in the course of about 10 minutes.

[perisher]

Originally Posted by OlegM

OK, but on what evidence did you adjust the gun to be as weak as it is now?

As it is, I fire ALL my deck gun ammo (HE + AP) on any ship larger than say 3000 tons and most of them don't even begin to smoke. That I think is simply too much. Is there any evidence of the submarine that fired 200+ shells on a target without even producing visible damage (let alone sinking)?

In my research into ROF I found only one gun action against a ship of 3,000 tons or more. Grouper claims to have sunk a 3,200 ton troopship with 28 rounds of 4". (Ships operating as troopers often have a lot of unprotected small arms ammunition on deck which can be a considerable risk, even to an armoured vessel - See the Blucher in the attack on Oslo.)

On the other hand it took Wahoo 60 rounds to sink a 2,650 ton coaster and 50 rounds to sink a 1,000 ton ship. A 900 ton ship escaped damaged, after several 4" hits, 700 20mm hits and 4 Molotov Cocktails!!!

I found no evidence of any US sub carrying more than 200 rounds of 4". 95 rounds appears to have been the norm. Most ships engaged with gunfire were less than 700 tons, often a lot less.

Gunfire seems to have started fires in about 25% of the actions I read about.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by OlegM

Did you know that The most successful submariner of all times, tonnage wise, fired only 4 torpedos in his career? (One missed, three did hit.) He sunk 90% of his targets using the deck gun. Yes, it was WW1, and the guy was "old school", so he rarely gets mentioned, but hey. Using your mod the guy would die of old age before sinking 1/10th of his historic tonnage, not to mention wasting all deck gun ammo on one single ship (that's what I do with your mod).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothar_..._de_la_Periere

No, he didn't. That's an old myth, but only by a little bit. According to The Killing Time: The U-Boat War, 1914-1918, which chronicles each patrol, von Arnauld de la Periere fired many torpedoes during his career. The 'four torpedoes' were fired during his record patrol:

SM U-35's fourteenth patrol (26 July to 20 August1916) under de la Perière stands as the most successful submarine patrol of all time. During that period, 54 merchant ships totaling 90,350 GRT were sunk.

http://www.answers.com/topic/unterseeboot-35

Still a remarkable record. On the other hand he fired 900 rounds from his deck gun. I doubt it carried that many, which means that he had to replenish; does that still count as a single patrol?

[OlegM]

Originally Posted by perisher

In my research into ROF I found only one gun action against a ship of 3,000 tons or more. Grouper claims to have sunk a 3,200 ton troopship with 28 rounds of 4". (Ships operating as troopers often have a lot of unprotected small arms ammunition on deck which can be a considerable risk, even to an armoured vessel - See the Blucher in the attack on Oslo.)

On the other hand it took Wahoo 60 rounds to sink a 2,650 ton coaster and 50 rounds to sink a 1,000 ton ship. A 900 ton ship escaped damaged, after several 4" hits, 700 20mm hits and 4 Molotov Cocktails!!!

OK that's something.....

I really don't want this to be too easy (obviously, otherwise I would not be playing sub sims, let alone RFB mod) but expending ALL ammo on one target without even starting some smoke seems just too much. Since I don't hunt sampans and fishermen (mix of being too lazy and thinking that they are just inncoent civvies) I might as well remove the deck gun and trade it for some renown.

Besides, I think deck gun damage should be VERY variable. Say, if the ship is carrying ammo it should be much more vulnerable to gun shells. Can this be modded? Back with the stock "death ray" gun I remember killing ships in just a couple shots if there was right combination of cargo and hit placement, but since I started playing RFB it never happened.

[tedhealy]

Originally Posted by OlegM

OK that's something.....

I really don't want this to be too easy (obviously, otherwise I would not be playing sub sims, let alone RFB mod) but expending ALL ammo on one target without even starting some smoke seems just too much. Since I don't hunt sampans and fishermen (mix of being too lazy and thinking that they are just inncoent civvies) I might as well remove the deck gun and trade it for some renown.

Besides, I think deck gun damage should be VERY variable. Say, if the ship is carrying ammo it should be much more vulnerable to gun shells. Can this be modded? Back with the stock "death ray" gun I remember killing ships in just a couple shots if there was right combination of cargo and hit placement, but since I started playing RFB it never happened.

I personally don't think it's that bad. After doing the rfb artillery training missions, it seems you need to hit deck structures to start a fire. Using HE rounds and hitting structures on deck, I could get a fire started pretty quickly - within 10 hits on the smaller boats up to a fishing trawler. I sunk a 2500 ton small merchant in 40 minutes with AP hits below the waterline so the deck gun can sink ships.

How many hits were you getting when you shot 200+ rounds? Where were you hitting? It seems like you need to concentrate on hitting one spot, but that may just be coincidence in the sinkings I've gotten in the training missions.

[OlegM]

This page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cod_(SS-224)

sayz:

Cod also destroyed another five ships, 24 junks and 11 floating mines as "sunk by gun fire".
Cod's deck guns fired 117 rounds of 4-inch, 50-caliber; 117 rounds of 5-inch, 25-caliber, 1,404 rounds of 40 mm, 200 rounds of 20 mm, and 1,450 rounds of .50-caliber machine gun ammo.

So, apparently, if we discount 40mm ammo and smaller vs ships, that's 234 rounds of deck gun ammo for "5 ships" (no exact tonnage is given) averaging ~45 shells per ship. We might reasonably assume some of those shells were used vs mentioned 24 junks which would put the average number of shells used to sink "5 ships" even lower.

[OlegM]

"Two days later, the hunter-killer group headed for the Yellow Sea. On 7 January 1945, Spot sank two small trawlers with her deck gun. Four days later, she destroyed a small freighter by gunfire. On the 13th off Shanghai, the submarine sank two trawlers by shellfire, and she repeated the feat the next day. In a night sweep through the Elliott Islands on 18 and 19 January, Spot torpedoed a cargo ship and a tanker."

If I count right this is six trawlers + small cargo ship, all sunk by gunfire on the same patrol. While the ships are not big, apparently they were all sunk by what ammo sub had on board.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by OlegM

"Two days later, the hunter-killer group headed for the Yellow Sea. On 7 January 1945, Spot sank two small trawlers with her deck gun. Four days later, she destroyed a small freighter by gunfire. On the 13th off Shanghai, the submarine sank two trawlers by shellfire, and she repeated the feat the next day. In a night sweep through the Elliott Islands on 18 and 19 January, Spot torpedoed a cargo ship and a tanker."

If I count right this is six trawlers + small cargo ship, all sunk by gunfire on the same patrol. While the ships are not big, apparently they were all sunk by what ammo sub had on board.

The large Japanese fishing boats (trawlers?) take between 16 and 26 shell hits to sink. A small cargo ship can be sunk with around 60 shells. This is easily doable.

However, according to 'Subs Against the Rising Sun' USS Spot only ever claimed four ships on that patrol and none were confirmed.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by OlegM

This page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cod_(SS-224)

sayz:

Cod also destroyed another five ships, 24 junks and 11 floating mines as "sunk by gun fire".
Cod's deck guns fired 117 rounds of 4-inch, 50-caliber; 117 rounds of 5-inch, 25-caliber, 1,404 rounds of 40 mm, 200 rounds of 20 mm, and 1,450 rounds of .50-caliber machine gun ammo.

So, apparently, if we discount 40mm ammo and smaller vs ships, that's 234 rounds of deck gun ammo for "5 ships" (no exact tonnage is given) averaging ~45 shells per ship. We might reasonably assume some of those shells were used vs mentioned 24 junks which would put the average number of shells used to sink "5 ships" even lower.

According to 'Subs Against the Rising Sun' Cod only claimed 13 vessels sunk and was only credited with 8. Wikipedia says Cod's skippers claimed 10 ships sunk by torpedo and 5 by deck gun. Either way, we have no tonnages and no details of rounds fired except a total for the boat's career. That total is incredibly small and it makes me wonder if the folks at wikipedia confused her ammo capacity with what she fired during her career. In fact I just looked again and I think that's the problem. Wikipedia says "Cod's deck guns fired 117 rounds of 4-inch, 50-caliber; 117 rounds of 5-inch, 25-caliber, 1,404 rounds of 40 mm, 200 rounds of 20 mm, and 1,450 rounds of .50-caliber machine gun ammo." It's not saying that that was all she fired - it's saying that amount is what she carried on patrol.

[Beery]

Hehe, here's an interesting post. Check this out: http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/t...065#5581046065

About the most perfect example of a guy who seemed to have a pretty good argument for fast deck gun reloads... but then again, maybe not.

Why do I feel like I'm constantly beating my head up against a brick wall on this issue?