Sonar Tracking

[xptical]

I am bout 3500 meters from a ship. It is closing. I know it's closing because my sonar man says so. I know the range because I used the periscope. I wanted to submerge and follow the target on sonar only. I have the bearing line on my nav map. I click over to sonar and click the "range to target" button and get a report that I have no target.

How should I properly discpline a sonar man that can't figure out that if there is only one track, that's probably the one I want?

I was thinking of submerging to 50 meters and let him see if he can reach the surface before he drowns.

After that, how do I tell his replacement which target I want range to?

[xptical]

One more thing. I changed the game to metric so that I could use a heading overlay tool. The imperial one caused the game never to load.

On imperial, the running depth is in feet. It's *very* easy to go 7 or 9 feet down. Or 13 and 15 feet. On meters, the graduation is way too fine. Each click covers 3 feet and change.

If the draft is 9' and I set the torp to 3 meters, I might get a contact detonation. If I set it to 4 meters, it probably won't go off.

If most boats in the game go down, what, 20' at most, why does my torp running depth go down to like 50 meters?

Can it be fixed/modded for finer control?

[jdski]

If you get a contact report from the sonarman, you need to lock on the target by selecting "follow nearest target" right after he first detects it. If you wait he will continue sweeping, and will come back, no target detected".
So you then need to go into the sonar position yourself and move the hydophone to the target and then ask the sonar to follow nearest target. THen ask for the range or ping it yourself. It could also be that it's too far away to get the range yet with the sonar, and he's only picking his sound up with the hydrophones.

[kakemann]

But when pinging I think the enemy would notice that there is something in the area, right?

[AVGWarhawk]

I take my butt to the sonar stations and find the target myself. Once I have the sonar picking up the target, I send the ping myself. But, you need to tell the sonarman what target to lock and he will get you what you need.

[EAF274 Johan]

Does this also work if the ship is not the nearest target?

[xptical]

Maybe I'm being dense here. The manual says to left-click on the sonar station to take control.

How do I control the sonar direction thingy to find a ship?

[Iceman87]

Home and End Keys.

[jdski]

Does this also work if the ship is not the nearest target?

No, I've tried to track a warship which was not the closest target. If you select follow nearest target, he does just that. I wish it would track the selected target on the hydophones instead though. However if your asking if you have the hyrdophones set on the warship and it's not the closest target, and you want to ping it for range and set the bearing, then yes it will work on any target. It's not recommended to ping a warship though.