Was IJN Tone ever been properly created for SH4?

I found a SH3 Tone by Rowi58, but it's a Takao with 4 fwd turrets. I believe this is the one used in FOTRS Ultimate. But that mega-bridge makes it a poor substitute of Tone in my opinion.

Also found references to someone making one long ago here, but apparently nothing came out of it (or at least I couldn't find anything).

If there is no proper Tone available, the stock Mogami can be made to reasonably resemble a Tone with a few changes. I was working on doing that, but if anybody else knows of any other versions I could check before putting some extra effort, he could spare me some time.

[propbeanie]

I'm not sure if you would get a response from them, but you could try contacting via PM noshiro or ZUIKAKU1944, and see if either of them know of anyone. They did the Isuzu and Katori CL in FotRSU, and have contact with several folks that helped them.

Thanks Propbeanie.

Well, It didn't take me too long to make a Mogami look a bit like a Tone:



Far from perfect, but enough for me .

[propbeanie]

Very nice! I'm going to guess that you started with the Mogami2 and did some heavy editing on the flight deck, superstructure and gun mounts?

Yes, the original Mogami with some editing, but not too much. Hull, bridge, masts etc are all still the original ones.

[cdrsubron7]

IJN Tone, circa 1942

Another cruiser I couldn't find in SH4: the conversion of Kuma class cruisers Kitakami and Oi into Torpedo cruisers:



A conversion of the original Kuma in SH4.

[noshiro]

It's wonderful!

[cdrsubron7]

Nice work, sir. Well Done.

Here is a link to a test version of the Mogami-Tone.

SH4_CA_Tone_TEST.rar

If any problems arise, please let me know in this thread.

[propbeanie]

Time permitting, I'll be trying this out this evening, say about six hours from this post's time stamp.

[propbeanie]

Comparing two pictures:


The Tone in RL, 1942


The Tone in FotRSU, 2019

Now, the one "easy" improvement would be the "neutral" position of the #3 & #4 turrets, have the barrels raised. It does appear that the 2 & 3 turrets are a pinch forward on the real ship, closer to #1 and each other. Notice also that turrets #2 & 4 appear to have rangefinders, while 1 & 3 do not. Did the turrets work in pairs maybe?... Also, there are a few sailors that walk through walls & levitate, but I do realize that this is just a test, aka: proof-of-concept. I think it will work. Comparison video link below should go "active" by about 0130 hours Eastern time US, which would be 2 and one half hours from the time stamp of this posting.




If it happens to show up in FotRSU mod, with proper credit, would you mind, JapLance?

Edit: Finally got it to go "Active"... Sorry about how "dark" everything looks in my video again. I'm thinking that ToobYu doesn't like my pre-upload "adjustments", and pulls back the lighting. Very frustrating to get something that isn't looking like early morning or evening lighting, instead of the high-noon of what the vid actually is...

Hi Propbeanie,

Compared to the RL life ship there are many differences. I just didn't want to spend 3 months working on this!. Here you can see a comparison of the hull model (which is really a Mogami) with a Tone profile:



Reworking the hull to make it a real Tone would have taken me too long, and probably was easier to make it from scratch (something I considered at first when I found out a couple of points of the stock ship hull I don't really like). But as I said in an earlier post, that's good enough for me.

The turrets are stock ones, which have the rangefinder added. I don't think it would take me long to create a library with the same turret with the rangefinder removed. I'll see what can I do about it.

Sailors walking in the air ... Yeah, I didn't check it at all. Moved the nodes in S3D and didn't look back.

Also the AA suite is the one of the stock Mogami. I don't consider it too important in a submarine game. I'll try to improve it if I can find any reliable source of information, but unlike Allied ships, wartime photo evidence is hard to find for Japanese ships. A 1942 suite is easy to find as it is basically a prewar arrangement, but in 1944... 25mm mounts added everywhere. I know it well because I did search for info on the Japanese destroyers AA evolution during the war and it drove me nuts. Sometimes changes are so extensive (extra platforms, wells, changes in superstructures) that you need a new hull model.

And of course you can use it in FOTRSU if you feel like . but please wait for the final version.

PS: Couldn't watch the video. Not available yet.

[propbeanie]

I had to re-do the video upload twice. You know what they say about "the third time is a charm"... I gave up on the third start and just went to bed last night, and let the system sit. Anytime the humidity gets up a little bit around the area here, we lose our good connectivity to the ISP. Oh well... The video is active finally. Edit: Now that I've looked at it, I forgot to include the "footage" of the FotRSU Tone!... sheesh... oldmanitis strikes again!

I realize and appreciate all the work needed to do just the "little" test mod you did, and by "little", I mean, there is a LOT of work involved. Folks don't realize how much there is to do, just to do little tweaks to a ship. Great work there JapLance! I'm satisfied with it as it stands now, but if you do some improvements, that would be fantastic. ZUIKAKU1944 and noshiro did the Katori and the Nagara / Isuszu a while back, and I remember their discussions concerning hull shape and superstructure components. Nice detailing on ships that are also included in FotRSU. Like you mention though, most submarine skippers won't notice the AA battery, nor the differences between a Mogami and a Furutaka, much less a Tone and a Mogami, other than maybe "Oh, look! It has four turrets forward!", but you can really only see that from basically a 90° shot, so don't sweat the details too much... - It looks great as-is.

Turrets with rangefinder removed were not a problem:



The problem was trying to solve those turret 3 gun barrels clipping the turret 4. I thought that adding the gun directly to the .dat file instead of a reference to the library would let me change elevation, but it didn't. I would have sweared I had done it before . I have no clue here .

Also added nodes for all the AA gun positions in 1945, but I haven't added them yet to the .sim file. That's a lot of work!