Matrix Games Forums

Originally posted by DoomedMantis
Yes but was that system damage or flood or fire damage. I have seen them reduce the later two, but never system damage. If they can then I withdraw that part of my last comment.

Doomed

System damage. There was no floatation/fire damage. This ship was on the way back to Noumea from Gili Gili, where it had repaired all the other damage (float/fire).

I'll have to watch out for that more carefully.

Although I think that my other comments from my original still stand

Doomed

Without knowing how repair vessels are going to be modeled in WiTP, its hard to know how the ports should be modeled. For instance, I get the impression that a lot of the repair capacities of Noumea came from having the Vestal there. Off hand, I'm not sure repair squads on top of repair vessels would be that helpful and would certainly be one more annoying thing to have to keep track off. Good modeling of the repair vessels combined with the size of the port standing as a proxy for permanent fixtures like drydocks would likely be perfectly adequate.

Unfortunately the age of the vessel normally had very little to do with system damage, a 34 year old DDG had few original bits left believe me( rebuild feedpump for the 62nd time coming up), probably 30% of failures were crew cock ups, and when they happened, they were the ones that really hurt. Feedwater contamination was the worst, VERY easy to occur, VERY hard to rectify.

To sum up though, when the ships were younger, this would be a very typical cycle, Ive thought long and hard about this, and looked back through some old diaries.
In port, night before, system damage 0
1st day sail, either 1or 2, or at least 25:rolleyes:
day 3, back to 3 or 4

That 1st month, around 3 or 4
2nd month, creeping up to 5 to 10
beginning 3rd month, 10 to 25, a break of a day or two would be required to get that back to 1or 2
For the 4th month it would climb pretty quickly( usually leaking valve packing, which requires shut down time to repack)
If you could get a week end alongside this would allow a quick reduction from say 20 to 5
After 4 months return to port HAS TO HAPPEN, BOILERS MUST BE CLEANED.Boiler life is about 2500 hrs between cleans ( ****, having trouble remembering that)
However the final system damage, and most important one, is people.That does climb slowly up, that does effect ship operations, we were always losing guys for various reasons, even in peace time, in the tropics, 2 weeks was the max, before fatigue began to cause people to make mistakes.

Hope this helps
PS Beer is good:D

Thanks a lot, thats very informative, and I hope that Matrix takes your views on board. It certainly puts things into perspective.

Doomed

Yes that was very informative. Thank you for posting it. I definately doubt that Matrix will change their model to account for things like 3 boilers breaking down one day and working the next, but who knows. As it stands now, it appears to me that you send a ship to sea, it acquires system damage according to some formula and then requires time in port to repair. The worst part is not knowing how fast it acquires the damage and what causes it (I'm sure rough seas, and maybe just random "operational" damage, but does cruising speed affect how much damage a ship takes?) and more importantly how long it will take to fix it and knowing that it will have to sit in port to fix and isn't something the crew can fix while underway.

The question I have for Herbieh is what were your repair times on these problems? From what I read in the books, the amount of system damage accumulating seems OK, but it takes forever to take system damage off short of Pearl.

Im going to try to answer how long system damage should take to come off.
Basically two weeks in Pearl or other major port should do it, for the 1st 2 years of ops, (if the port visits happen every 4 months at the max). The next port visit then, allow 3 months for Refit, at least.
Heres why-. Basically all maintenance in those 1st 2 years of ops revolves around the boilers, 95% of other jobs(pump rebuilds, turbine inspections, condensor cleans, valve replacements), can all be done relatively quickly,but the boilers, especially in those days were a buggar.
In my day, we burnt dieso, and this is very important, dieso doesnt choke boiler tubes , FFO does, big time.
I always cleaned my boilers chemically, 1st, cool boiler, 12 hrs.chuck in chemicals, staem boiler for 4 hrs.
cool for twelve hrs
Fill and dump several times(8 hrs)
Open up boiler(8hrs)
Inspect
Close up boiler
Fill and pressure test, this might not work and need several goes, 8 hrs
Box up, light of and establish chemistry.
If all went to plan we could start on Friday, finish monday
Now for WW2 methods, which I have done just once .
Open boiler
Remove all internals-2days
High speed brush clean each tube-1600 odd tubes-3 days:eek:
sight each tube with balls, 1 day
put back together, 2 days
Pressure test, re light off
However all the externals had to be cleaned off the soot, Ive never done that, but have seen old movies, this horrible job took at least 3 days, washing the tubes, or dry brushing them.
So, we have about a week a boiler, times 4 boilers, you can do two at once, but never all four at once, as you need the power!
A BB or CV is different, they have 8 boilers, and did them at sea, simply shutting down one boiler room for a week, in a continous rotation. For them, a constant system damage of 8 would be realistic, with damage of 1 at 48 hrs notice(Get to work!)
But poor old DDs are very fragile, we need port time!
Any way, hope I dont sound confusing.
Truth is, some skippers are just like some UV players, they want 0 system damage all the time, they aint going to get it.
I do think UV gets accumalation right, but repair could be a bit quicker(not much experience on that yet, I drive the Imperial fleet into the ground, half my ships have system damage 20 or more, and they wont be going home until Cairns is in my hands!)

PS Beer is good

I guess that explains some of the the attraction of N-reactors for propulsion!