Need Help with Targeting

[Freshy]

So I am playing the last training mission in SHIV. I hit one of the large modern tankers with 6 torpedo's and it never sinks.

I try a few more times, and begin to think that the medium freighters might be a little easier.

I sink the first one with four MK14's in quick succession into its starboard side. I am still puzzled as to why it took four. After this, I sent my to stern shots into another medium freighter and it becomes dead in the water.

I dive deep to reload. When I get two tubes filled, I go back to periscope depth and send both fish into its starboard side. It doesn't sink. Fortunately, the rest of the convoy has left, including the escorts, so I can sit and wait for the next two tubes to reload. When they do, I fire my last two shots into the same spot as the previous two shots. It still does not sink. I would have thought that four torpedo's into the same location would have blown the stern completely off. I had to surface and finish the ship off with my deck gun.

What am I missing? I am getting hits. The ships are just not sinking. Is there some trick to it?

Any help would be appreciated. I like the game. Just getting a little frustrated.

Freshy

[Chock]

You were probably just a little unlucky, some shipas take a lot to sink, I've had many a big freighter shrug off four or five torpedo hits.

Historically, tankers were hard to sink if they avoided structural damage that would break their backs. Simply putting a hole in a tanker would do very little if it was just a hole and hadn't weakened the ship's structural integrity. After all, a hold full of oil or a hold full of water is much the same and would have about the same effect, so if the tanker's crew could seal off a hold full of water, it would probably not make much difference to the ship's stability.

This is why the torpedo which ran underneath and detonated right under the ship in an attempt to break the keel, was thought to be the holy grail of ship sinking methods pre-war. Unfortunately, it was later determined that most ships actually sank from a loss of stability rather than flooding in real life. The fact that the magnetic anomaly detonators which were supposedly triggered by the magnetic field of the ship as they passed under it, were not being triggered because the torpedoes were running too deep made this even worse, as you may know. You can avoid this problem by setting them to run shallow, but if you have historical 'duds' selected as an option, you may be in for further frustration. This is the kind of crap real skippers had to put up with.

If the thing is not going to shoot back at you, just surface and blow it away with the deck gun. Even if there is a destroyer nearby, you can still get away with doing this by getting on the other side of the target and using the target to shield you from the destroyer (note that this is a bit risky, because he will come for you, but you can always hide under your target, and there's not much a destroyer can do to you when you are under the ship he is supposed to be protecting!).

With a bit of luck a destroyer might have a crack at shooting at you over the target and hit his buddy by accident (the A.I. in Silent Hunter is a bit dodgy in this respect, they'd never risk that in real life), but it does offer you a fun way to save ammo!

Note that you can escape with the noise of the sinking ship covering you, as long as you go fairly deep.

In any case, stick with it, on reasonably realistic settings some targets are just hard to sink, you have to accept it and view it as a challenge.

[Freshy]

Thanks Chock.

I just played one of the "Quick Missions" and sank a Kogo class Battleship with six torpedo's.

Oh, and yes, I do have the dud torpedos setting turned on. I have been playing sub games since Silent Service from Microprose way back when on my old Atari 800. I love them.

I was just wondering if this game simulates damage to the target based on the location of the hit. I seem to recall hits on the bow being generally more likely to be fatal than hits on the stern. I could be mistaken though.... :-)

Freshy

[Chock]

I might be mistaken, cos I never really look under the hood of SH3 or SH4, I tend to either play em or mod the graphics or sounds rather than the code or cfg files. But I'm fairly certain SH4 does simulate localised damage, however, to what extremes I don't know.

You've probably noticed that a hit in the bow will make a ship go down by the head etc, and supposedly what the ship is 'carrying' has an effect on whether it goes BOOM! But then again, you've probably also noticed that you can blow a hole right through where the propshafts would be and the thing can still be merrily ploughing along when it really would be impossible based on the visible damage. So obviously there are cases where the damage you do and the hits you get don't really tally with the real world.

I guess when all is said and done, your torpedo hits a ship, the program rolls a dice and figures: 'mmm yes, roll a six for a single shot kill, oops, you rolled a five, unlucky, keep firing sonny' etc.