A few new ideas

[Fidd]

34. Damageable internal equipment/effects from DC attacks.

I remain ever hopeful that at some point depth charge attacks will become much more protracted, with greatly reduced lethality, absent hedge-hog attacks. I'd like to see the following effects of DC near-misses:

Broken glass items, eg any gauge, be it electrical or pressure related, with physically larger gauges being the most vulnerable. Loss of Papenburg and/or tilt metre. Need to use standby gauges if they are undamaged, with even these standby gauges being possibly lost in prolonged DC attacks. Sounds of broken-glass underfoot. Possible intermediate "cracked" state for non-pressure instruments between working normal and unusably damaged?

Minor leaks, fixable by operating isolation valves.

Medium leaks, fixable by (machinist only??) tightening flanges/using blocks of wood, the latter creating noise of hammering. (need not be represented by avatars, could simply a sound effect?)

Major leaks, requiring surfacing to initiate repairs as a precondition. Bilge fills in meantime. May result in inability to rise to surface once all tanks, bilge and trims are blown, and air exhausted.

Leaks most severe when at depth, the deeper the worse the leak.

Fire in e-motor room or diesel room or in circuit breaker cupboards, or, in the radio room, or hydrophone room. (in order of likelihood). Fire may be extinguished by crew by picking up an extinguisher. Duration and severity of fire may reduce effectiveness of electric services, or, render them inoperable.

Cracked batteries resulting in lower battery current, and reduced overall charge held. As more and more cells are cracked, the bilge water becomes increasingly acidic. If bilge water rises to a certain point (3m3?) and battery damage has occurred, chlorine has starts to fill the submarine if ventilator hull-valves are closed. This produced coughing crew sound effects, and necessitates surfacing and ventilation before a lethal concentration is reached. Bridging cells may be undertaken and continued whenever bilge water is less than 1m3? Bridging cells is something the captain can order which will work, unless the bilge water exceeds 1m3, at which point he may longer do this, and surfacing is the only possibility. Ability for chief to obtain a reading of number of cells cracked and bilge acidity.

Loss of instrumentation lights, both for back-lit electrical instruments, and internally lit pressure instruments.

Loss of gyros for gyro compass. Captain has the ability to determine approx position and heading from stars or sextant use. (figural) IMPLEMENTED - sort of!

Crew wounding - broken arms/shoulders or head-wounds. Once dressed by another crewman, if arm broken, then controls operation is slower and more awkward. Head-wound reduce vision/hearing. Visible slings or bandages on wounded crew, so that players may wish to replace (say) a Helmsman or Dive officer who can longer easily control their station.

Damage to one of more tubes, rendering one/some unusable. Minor but persistent leaking of one or more tubes, (when flooded).

Damage to radio or hydrophone gear, deck and flak gun. Possible to repair when surfaced.

Damage to optics of Periscopes, but not UZO. Cracking of lens, or complete dislocation of a mirror or lens within. Not repairable (in less than 3 hours)

Creation of "mess" throughout the boat, clothes/blankets on the floor in front torpedo room, books or other personal items in two crew compartments, food, tins (rolling about?) kitchen utensils in kitchen; opened locker doors in any compartment with them. Broken tables where they exist.

Damaged main-ballast tanks, creating oil trail an escort may follow in daylight. inability to blow a given tank completely, requiring compensating blowing of negative or trim tanks.

Feel free to add your own!

[Fidd]

35. Effects from depth-charging:

"Camera shake" from depth charges, the nearer the greater. Sounds of loose-objects crashing about afterwards, eg tins falling our of cupboards, glass breaking, involuntary cries from crew. Camera shakes direction being related to where the charge explodes, ie if above and right, the shake is perpendicular, so a diagonal shake if looking forward or aft. If above or below, a vertical one.

[Toybasher]

Originally Posted by Fidd

35. Effects from depth-charging:

"Camera shake" from depth charges, the nearer the greater. Sounds of loose-objects crashing about afterwards, eg tins falling our of cupboards, glass breaking, involuntary cries from crew. Camera shakes direction being related to where the charge explodes, ie if above and right, the shake is perpendicular, so a diagonal shake if looking forward or aft. If above or below, a vertical one.

I fully agree on this. There IS some camera shake already when depth charged but I feel it should be much more violent. As you said, have some loose physics objects that get knocked around, paintings flying off the wall, etc.

Maybe temporary "stunning" of the player character (can't move, camera sways heavily for a few seconds) to represent them getting knocked nearly off their feet but that could get frustrating to take control away from the player like that + I don't know how realistic it would be.

I imagine at the very least the rocking the sub has when surfaced could be repurposed to have depth charges feel like they're knocking the sub around.

[Fidd]

36. Variable individual items of uniform

Currently, unless you get to know the same player playing the same role, it's hard to tell players apart visually without mouse-hovering their avatar to get their name.

It would be a cool feature if some alternate apparel existed such as a neckerchief, civilian shirts of different colours, a heavy jumper or differently shaded uniform trousers, glasses, beard-length etc. The ideal would be that each player can set their persistent appearance every game onwards.

An alternative to this would be to increase the variety of appearance via use of some more distinctive clothing, but to tie these set changes automatically by role, rather than by player preference. The latter being easier to code than the former in the paragraph above.

A further development of the clothing alternatives, is the use of wet-weather gear when on the bridge or casing if the wind-speed is above a given level. I suggest that lack of said gear could cause a shiver effect, so that a short period would be okay, but a longer one could make manipulating controls harder over time? To put on, or take-off wet-weather gear might be achieved by opening a locker in one of the two "messes"?

[Fidd]

37. The need to reform the Radio compartment.

There are several issues/bugs affecting the radio compartment. The first of these is the effect of latency on morse-mutililation. The latter occurs when dots become dashes, or vice versa, or when pauses between letters are shortened or gaps between dots and dashes are lenghthened. This can make reading morse extremely difficult, even for those who know morse well, and should not be occurring over the short distances we transmit over. There is no actual need for morse signals to be sent and received at exactly the same time, a short pause between it being keyed, and it arriving at other boats could be staggered to allow for error-checking, to mean that the same code is sent and recieved.

The second set of problems in the radio-room concerns the note-book. When an encrypted signal is received, it should be automatically written into the "cypher-text" side of the note-book. Entering those code-groups into the Enigma should then result in the clear-text being written into the clear-text side of the note-book, alongside of the cypher-text on the other side. It should be possible then for the radio-operator to edit the clear-text, for example by context inserting numbers instead of letters, and to add spaces to render the cypher-text as clear language, rather than retaining the 4 letter groups. He should then have the ability to "publish clear-text" which would enter the text into the radio log. When sending a signal using "simple-radio", and the encrypted checkbox is ticked, then the signal received by other radio operators should be a cypher-text. They may have had VHF or HF radios for voice communications, but these should confer a greater risk of being DF'd by surface-craft. (DFing of long-wave transmissions, such as those between BDU and U-boats we easy to DF, but hard to DF with any accuracy). If no-encryption is used, then these massages should be available to the escorts when they are eventually playable. IMPLEMENTED - more or less.

The third problem currently, is the inability for players using real morse to communicate (as occurs on Duyfken games) to enter plain-text of morse transmissions into the radio-log. Again, I suggest there be an edit/publish mechanism so that corrections and clarifications can be made, the text adjusted before being sent to the radio-log. IMPLEMENTED or nearly so.

[Fidd]

38. Ships slowed by damage

If a ship his hit by a torpedo and suffers adequate damage, it should gradually fall behind the convoy, whilst an escort is detached to search the area around for a time, before it heads back into the convoy. After which it'd be vulnerable to fire from a deck-gun. Thus enabling the deck-gun to serve a purpose in game.

[Fidd]

39. 3rd party"water-spouts from DC attacks". It would be useful - and cool - to be able to observe the spouts of water as escorts prosecute attacks on other boats, such spouts being visible for a fair distance? There should be a marked difference in timing between seeing the water-spout, and hearing the detonation?

[Fidd]

40. Concealable settings

It would be brilliant, I think, if a lobby host could conceal some settings from players, especially in multi-boat/multi-player games, so that there was more of a recce' phase to the game, especially with a distant convoy. Settings that could be with-held might be:

Asdic permanent on/off
Torpedo failure settings various
Size and composition of convoy
Whether or not convoy "zigs"
friendly-fire
Duration of escort search

Ones that affect personel distributed amongst the boats, such as those able to use complex radio, or use the Enigma, would NOT be concealed, nor would the year, the time of day or weather.

The advantage in this concealment is that Enigma signals could be used to direct uboats to the convoy, or to an intercept point, giving some further information previously concealed from crews, thus conferring some point to decrypting signals. It would also be good if there was a third convoy distance setting possible when making missions, that allowed spawning outside of hydrophone or visual range under any weather conditions, to help give content to navigators, who would take the Enigma clear-text, and then plot an intercept to bring the boat within hydrophone range.... This idea would therefore help give content to two rather under-used positions, namely radioman and navigator.

[Lost At Sea]

Some fantastic suggestions across these few pages
Are the Devs aware of this particular thread ?

Cheers,
Lost

[Fidd]

Many thanks, I just put them out there in the pious hope one of them will see them one morning over coffee. There's plenty of others with idea, many better than mine, but it does I think show how much further this game could be developed and improved.

[Fidd]

41. Semi-autonomous offline U-boats

What if a there was a persistent real-time movement of convoy to and from British and allied ports, and an automated and/or manned BDU was able to order uboats to patrol squares. Captains would program the movement of their boats, with a count-down timer (possible messaging or emailing interested parties when the u-boat is within 40nm of a convoy). Players and skippers could then either log in at the required time of day to intercept the convoy, or if preferred, could delay their intercept until a more convenient time of day (RL) for players, or, the hours of darkness, or both.

A running battle would then develop between convoys and U-boats as they concentrate, with only the fun bit of the game requiring the attendance of players. For the bulk of the passages to and from u-boat bases, no player representation would be required, other than the route/speed being plotted by the captain.

A similar, but allied, routine could allow for Hunter-killer groups of escorts being attached to convoys, or escort carriers, with aircraft being used to preclude surface movement in daylight. This might mean that a convoy battle goes on for several RL days, with players concentrating on crewed boats at times where the u-boats are within striking range of the convoy, conferring a whole new tactical stratum to the game, sometimes presenting the u-boat captain with the need to attack in daylight, or poor weather, or with surface movement complicated by aircraft or hunter-killer groups. Much could be abstracted, as development permits, such as aircraft being with a convoy slowing the speed of u-boats in daylight, rather than being "in game". Likewise radar-equipped escorts could make life awkward for night-time surfaced progress.... with combat sometimes occurring away from the convoy....

This could also allow for much larger convoys being attacked by more than 4 boats, (although not more than 4 at a time for now), as perhaps a dozen or more u-boats could be sent towards a convoy or covering a patrol line, with players dropping into each of the 12 as each becomes within the 40nm range. Enigma signals from BDU could provide convoy position updates, with navigators plotting intercepts, which the captain then enacts to bring a given boat within range of the convoy at a (RL) time amenable to his crew players, and at a time of day where the u-boat is concealed by darkness....

Fuel usage could be factored in, so that captains are faced with decisions as to whether or not they can sustain x speed for y time to intercept a given convoy, or, if such a persuit might miss the convoy and cause the u-boat to return from patrol without firing....

[Fidd]

42. Differentiation between boats.

It might be "nice" if there was a few persistent visual changes between different boats, in terms of stowage of food, tins thereof, and random object placements, such as a game of "scat" on the table rather than a chess-set, or an uncleared meal etc. The object being that when you're crewing a particular boat, it looks a little different if you crew another, to help create the sense of "u96" rather than "identical boat #1" as it were.... Different records, pictures, personal-items etc

[Fidd]

43. Minefields. These should come in several forms:

1. Mines at depth 40m to near sea-bed, anchored to sea-bed, over which shipping may safely pass.
2. Mines at 40m or less, anchored to sea-bed
3. Mines at surface to 20m anchored to sea bed.

Maximum depth (anchor depth) in which mines are sown being 160m(?).

Class 3 minefields are known, and visible on map (as an area) on map. Classes 2 and 3 are settable in workshop mission and are not visible on map. If shallow enough mines and cable may be viewed underwater by OP/AP, or OP/OP/UZO/Binos/naked eye if surfaced, and the mine is at the surface.

Progress through minefield characterised by occasional graunching sound of cables running along hull, possibly drawing a mine down onto the hull if snagged on obstruction on u-boat. Alternating astern and forward on e-motor may allow release of same. A mine detonating results in "destroyed by mine" on end-screen. Mines on surface move up and down with wave action. Very occasional free-floating mines may exist in minefield of any type.

As mine-fields require a sea-bed depth of 160m(?) or less, they're predominantly employed in coastal-waters, and either dropped by minelayers or minelaying submarines, or by aircraft. They are often employed to deny an area to surface craft such as the straits of Dover and northwards toward Zeebrugge, or the northern and southern side of the western approaches, These latter two were further protected by class 1 and 2 types as an anti-uboat measure, and successfully sank a number of u-boats.

I see the value in such minefields being in (one day) workshop coastal missions, where single boats can operate in coastal waters around the UK and Ireland going after smaller convoys, often unescorted, or for missions such as getting into Scapa.

[Fidd]

44. "Direction-finding"

Throughout the war, there was a multi-pronged attempt to locate both Uboats and RN ships through the use of directing-finding "or D-effing". Of the two sides, the allies had the advantage, as the geography of territory held (including Iceland) permitted better cross-bearings to be made of transmitting axis uboats and surface ships. However, at range, this of little use beyond that of "there are now thought to be 13 u-boats in your area" variety. This obscures the tactical advantages of shorter range D-effing, especially in the period before radar was common, and when done at ranges of 50nm or less, it allowed escorts to be detached to chase down a given bearing at speed, forcing the u-boat shadowing the convoy, even beyond visual range of the u-boat, forcing it down where it could neither communicate and might - with a little luck - also be sunk. Such attempts were much more successful when the Hunter-killer groups did so, as there was little scope for the u-boat being able to get away, and attacks were prosecuted until it was compelled to surface, or was sunk.

So how should this shorter-ranged "D-effing" work in terms of the game?

For U-boats, their ability to DF allied radio signals would give some indication of the bearing of a convoy, beyond that of hydrophones, and does so passively. It would allow for the position of a convoy to be established from a more imprecise BDU guestimate, allowing the u-boat to eventually establish hydrophone contacts later. This would allow for the game to allow a starting position for u-boats outside of hydrophone range, giving some much-needed content for navigators and radio-operators, who would need to decrypt BDU signals, move to the right area so directed, then D-eff, then plot an intercept course until one boat of the flotilla is in hydrophone and/or visual contact.

Conversely, allied shorter-range D-effing allows for the faster-moving escorts, fuel permitting, to be detached along a bearing to force a u-boat down, whilst perhaps summoning other assets to keep it down or kill it. The more frequent the German (or allied) radio-signals, and the longer, the more chance of a D-effing station (or ship/u-boat) being on the correct frequency to d-eff it in real time. Although both sides employed frequency schedules to complicate this for would be listers, and both sides used radio-silence as required, once the position of the convoy was known, this was of less and less utility.

In conclusion, for the Uboat d-effing a convoy gives some positional or directional information, and also some indication of it's escort size and composition. For the allies, it permits escorts to be employed more proactively (either at human direction) so that u-boats too often, or too long on the radio, are more likely to see a fast moving escort on the horizon heading more or less straight towards 'em.

Personally, I'd very much like to see this aspect of the electronic-war modelled, ideally with allied players managing assets within the convoy defence to not just react to boats within torpedo range of the convoy, but to keep them at bay, providing a more varied and difficult game experience for all concerned. Thought to be slated for development

[Fidd]

45. Leigh-light equipped Wellingtons in the ASV role at night. Introduced in circa mid '42, these had a very bright searchlight in the retractable ventral turret of a Wellington, which could traverse, and hold the submarine in the gap between when radar-contact was lost - circa 1000m out - and when the attack could be prosecuted. The search-light was sufficiently dazzling to make return-fire in darkness difficult, and the losses of u-boats attacked so prohibitive, that Doenitz ordered u-boats to recharge in the day, when they could see aircraft, but to dive at night when they could not. These were active in the North Sea, the channel, and the Bay of Biscay in particular. Attacks were flown at 50 feet! A terrifying prospect for any pilot, even without the possibility of return fire. I believe the altitude was held using an early form of rad alt, and the pilots were limited from using any appreciable bank owing the very real risk of dropping a wing-tip into the drink. Many crews were lost in training sorties, and as many again on ops. It did however reduce the operational efficiency of the u-boats, sank 30 or so, and more importantly, put the rest at risk of attack from aircraft in daylight. In another effort to deal with the threat from night ASV wellingtons, and Sunderlands, considerable efforts were made by the Jerries to up-arm the AAA guns on u-boats, particularly in range with 3.7cm cannon, but also in volume of fire, with the quad 20mm cannon installations. In attempts to offset this, a forward-firing 40mm bofors gun was installed in a British B17, and although highly successful both in terms of damage done, and out-ranging the opponents weapons, this was not proceeded with. Later, German radar recievers were fitted to alert the crews to enemy radar, first Metox, and later Naxos (for different wave-lengths, as allied radar evolved).

How would this function in game terms?

In Biscay in particular, it would make surfacing at night, somewhat risky, although a measure of safety would exist when close to a convoy owing to the number of returns. A standing watch + AAA gunner on deck would be sensible, although this would in turn result in a slower dive. 2nd attacks were possible, and trained for, although commonly all DC's were dropped on the 1st pass if practicable. It was also common for these aircraft to operate in pairs, one to attack, and the other to report the position of the u-boat, and it's approximate heading, in case the attacking aircraft was destroyed. It would then also prosecute an attack if feasible. Metox or Naxos would give early warning, allowing a dive to occur.