Inspired by the tsetse thread and my experience with the Silent Hunter series, I'm working on tweaking ships.ini to produce a better ship damage model. The good news is that since there are no class files, this "mod" should be compatible with just about everything. The bad news is that since everyone's ships.ini could be different, I can't just give out a file that everyone can install, so it's Do It Yourself for now, I'm afraid.
Be sure to back up ships.ini and don't try this if you don't know what you are doing. Since this is D.I.Y., you can tweak to your own taste. Experiment if you like and post your results in this thread.
I'm going to post some suggestions. (Note: I'm using a ships.ini based on UP 2.01 modded with most new ships found at SAS)
To get started, lets tweak medium sized ships, especially the dry cargo ship and the Type VII U-boat.
Open ships.ini and find the section // Hull Durability. The entries give damage model characteristics for various sizes of segments of a ships hull. As far as I can tell, it works like this:
MinShotCaliber is the minimum caliber, in meters, that will cause ANY damage to a ship's compartment. When a vital compartment is hit by the
NumShots value of shells of the MinShotCaliber, the ship will be
destroyed and sink. When a compartment is hit by about 75% (not sure of exact value) of the NumShots, it will show
damage and the ship will start to list. Each ship has a few vital compartments (i.e. hull segments) and more than one may show damage, but any one destroyed compartment will sink the ship. If you use a larger caliber than MinShotCaliber, then the program extrapolates so a lower effective value of NumShots is used. Similarly,
MinHitExplTNT and
MinNearExplTNT values give the minimum kg of TNT (I think 50% of the weight of a bomb, eg. SC 50 has ~25 kg TNT) needed to damage a compartment due to a direct hit and near miss, respectively. I think the program figures out how much the effective TNT of a near miss is based on the exact distance from explosion.
NumHitExpl and
NumNearExpl give the number of respectively, direct hit and near miss bombs containing the minimum TNT required to destroy the compartment. Again, IL-2 extrapolates if you use larger bombs.
Find [strength_HullMedium] and change the entry to this:
[strength_HullMedium]
MinShotCaliber 0.037
NumShots 106
MinHitExplTNT 10
NumHitExpl 11.2
MinNearExplTNT 49
NumNearExpl 3 //16
Now, you don't need a direct hit to cause damage to the medium ships! IMHO, this is a big improvement from stock. With this particular value, a near miss by a roughly 500lb bomb will damage a compartment but not destroy the ship. Larger bombs may destroy the ship with a near miss. Also, if you "bracket" a ship with multiple medium-sized bombs, the results of near misses may be variable depending on if you damage a few compartments or destroy one. It's no longer an all or nothing prospect; when you attack a ship there is now some uncertainty as to what will happen. IMHO, another big improvement!
After the gun and hull durability sections will come a section on gun parameters. Then, there will be the section // Ship Specs. Find the section [Tramp]. This is the dry cargo ship. Find the subsection // Vitals. If you want to make a ship weaker or stronger, change the line strengthBasedOnThisSection strength_HullMedium to strength_HullSmall, etc. However, I didn't do this.
What we are going to do is make a cosmetic change by exaggerating the list of the ship when its vital compartments (hull sections) are damaged. The order of the sections are from bow to stern. Change the entire vitals section to the following:
[Tramp:Part0]
BaseChunk Hull1
strengthBasedOnThisSection strength_HullMedium
Vital
damageDepth 1.5 //0.33
damagePitch -5 //-1.5
damageRoll 10 //7.0
damageTime 52.0
[Tramp:Part1]
BaseChunk Hull2
strengthBasedOnThisSection strength_HullMedium
Vital
damageDepth 2.0 //0.33
damagePitch 0.0
damageRoll 15 //2.0
damageTime 38.0
[Tramp:Part2]
BaseChunk Hull3
strengthBasedOnThisSection strength_HullMedium
Vital
damageDepth 1.5 //0.33
damagePitch 5 //1.5
damageRoll 7.0
damageTime 54.0
These will be results of near misses by single 500lb bombs to each of the three hull sections:
fore
aft
center
Now find [SubTypeVIIC_Srf] and, as before, change the vitals section to the following:
[SubTypeVIIC_Srf:Part0]
BaseChunk Hull1
strengthBasedOnThisSection strength_HullMedium
Vital
damageDepth 2.0 //0.2
damagePitch -5.0 //-2.0
damageRoll 0.0 //5.0
damageTime 52.0
[SubTypeVIIC_Srf:Part1]
BaseChunk Hull2
strengthBasedOnThisSection strength_HullMedium
Vital
damageDepth 2.2 //0.2
damagePitch -2.0 //0.0
damageRoll 0.0 //2.0
damageTime 48.0
[SubTypeVIIC_Srf:Part2]
BaseChunk Hull3
strengthBasedOnThisSection strength_HullMedium
Vital
damageDepth 2.0 //0.2
damagePitch 7.5 //2.0
damageRoll 0.0 //5.0
damageTime 54.0
I've made the U-boat take damage and list based on pictures of U-505:
Well, that's it for now. I would like to comment though that in real life, ship damage was/is HIGHLY variable and no hit points based model will ever be perfect. We could discuss how strong or weak the ships should be until we are blue in the face. But, feel free to discuss and let me know what you think.
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Topic: D.I.Y. Ship Damage Mod (Read 30069 times)
