View Full Version : Air attacks off Midway
PepsiCan
05-29-07, 06:25 AM
Hi
Yesterday I was playing around with my new Gato class boat. And there are two strange things:
1) It is start of June 1942 and I am offered a Gato class boat. I love it, but I think from a historical point of few Gato's did not start to appear in the pacific until at the end of 1942? Is that correct?
2) Although it is after the battle of Midway, I'm being attack by Japanese planes, just off Midway! Where the heck are these planes coming from?
Anybody have the same experience?
ReallyDedPoet
05-29-07, 07:04 AM
Hi
Yesterday I was playing around with my new Gato class boat. And there are two strange things:
1) It is start of June 1942 and I am offered a Gato class boat. I love it, but I think from a historical point of few Gato's did not start to appear in the pacific until at the end of 1942? Is that correct?
2) Although it is after the battle of Midway, I'm being attack by Japanese planes, just off Midway! Where the heck are these planes coming from?
Anybody have the same experience?
Some of this stuff will be fixed in time :yep:. Lets hope that patch 1.3 does the trick with the various bugs, then modders can go to town on correcting some of the above:up:
RDP
elanaiba
05-29-07, 07:08 AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gato_(SS-212)
On her first war patrol from Pearl Harbor (20 April (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_20) – 10 June (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_10) 1942 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942)), she unsuccessfully attacked a converted aircraft carrier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_carrier) 3 May (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_3) before being driven away by the fierce depth charging (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_charge) of four destroyers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyer) off the Marshall Islands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Islands). On 24 May (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_24) she was ordered to patrol the western approaches to Midway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway), taking station 280 miles westward during the Battle of Midway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway).
elanaiba
05-29-07, 07:19 AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Silversides_%28SS-236%29
Departing Pearl Harbor on 30 April (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_30), Silversides headed for the Japanese home islands, in the area of Kii Suido (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kii_Suido), for the first of her many successful war patrols. On 10 May (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_10), just after 08:00 local time, the submarine sank a Japanese trawler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawler) with her three-inch (76 mm) gun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Drum_%28SS-228%29
Cleared Pearl Harbor 14 April (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_14) 1942, action bound on her first war patrol. Cruising off the coast of Japan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan), she sank the seaplane Tender MIZUHO and three cargo ships in the month of May, returning to Pearl Harbor 12 June (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_12) to refit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Flying_Fish_%28SS-229%29
Pearl Harbor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor) for final training 2 May (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2) 1942 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942), and 15 days later was ordered out to patrol west of Midway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Atoll), threatened by an expected Japanese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan) attack. During the Battle of Midway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway) 4 to 6 June (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_6), she and her sisters fanned out to scout and screen the island, at which she refitted from 9 to 11 June (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_11).
Same happened to me in mid June there. Too far from wake to see CV aircraft. My only thought was that maybe a random TF was somehoe in the regon, though I don't remember seeing any so close to Midway.
You could certainly see an H8K that far from Wake though.
Too bad I frequently see 2 H8K or 2 H6Ks at the same time. Maritime patrol planes would only be seen as single planes except for a few missions where whole squadrons flew together as bombers (like the H8K attack on Hawai'i).
tater
PepsiCan
05-29-07, 08:12 AM
...was one of the attackers. So, sounds odd. Happy to see that I was wrong on the Gato. Seems I've deserved that boat rightly :up:
Which file holds the data as to whether air attacks can occur in the area of Midway?
There are a few files.
Use the campaign editor and lookat the jap airbases. The yellow circles are the range.
There might be CVs, too, so you need to look at missions in the same time period that might have CVs in the area.
The aircraft ranges need looking into as well. I think they tend to be too long, certainly operationally. I'm not sure if the game uses range, or radius. I need to check by changing a plane's cfg, then making that plane the only plane on a certain airbase, then seeing if the circle changes. Regardless, the max range numbers for planes shouldn't be used, but rather a typical combat range.
Given that most of the planes in SH4 hold bombloads that are multiple times greater than RL, their real operational range sould be measured in how many feet they got from the hard stand, cause they'd not get into the air, lol.
SteamWake
05-29-07, 09:59 AM
Hi
2) Although it is after the battle of Midway, I'm being attack by Japanese planes, just off Midway! Where the heck are these planes coming from?
Ive been asking this since release. I even set out to "scout" for the apparent carrier but no joy.
orangenee
05-29-07, 10:11 AM
You're not the only one, it seems to happen in a certain grid square though, if I avoid that particular square I don't see a thing until I'm closer to landmass or Task Force. So it quite odd.
The jap airbases have a range of nearly 3000km.
Wake overlaps Midway by quite a bit. Looking to see what needs fixing...
Well, the various air bases are mixed with too many different types of planes, IMO. I think the obvious change would be to alter the airbases to not have super long-ranged patrol aircraft out of Wake as a regular, random feature. This would make some sense, because the US constantly bombed Wake, staging bombers from Midway (Oahu to Midway for gas, bomb Wake, then RTB via Midway again). I think most H6K and H8K groups covered the central Pacific from the Marshalls.
FIREWALL
05-29-07, 11:33 AM
Being West of Midway and being air attacked has always bugged me .Where are our air patrol planes near our sub bases? :damn:
Come on. Japan didn't invent the Long Range patrol plane did they?:D
The jap airbases have a range of nearly 3000km.
Wake overlaps Midway by quite a bit. Looking to see what needs fixing...
You know that's odd regarding wake . . . from my understanding . . . it was pretty much combat ineffective for most of the war . . . but I have had that same problem with Wake . . . North North East of Wake I got pounced by two H8Ks . . . but was able to shoot down one while crash diving . . . had to go back though due to very badly injured deck gun crews.
TheSatyr
05-29-07, 01:50 PM
The Japanese didn't invent patrol craft, but the H8K had the longest range and could stay up longer than any other patrol craft of it's day I believe.
Also,keep in mind that Japanese a/c on average had greater range than planes of other nations. A case in point being the bomb attacks on the Phillipines at the beginning of the war. All the aircraft including the Zeros took off from Formosa,but US Officials in the Phillipines were convinced that carriers had to be involved since they didn't believe fighter aircraft could fly that far.
Unfortunately for the Japanese,they didn't seem to use that range advantage very often in carrier vs carrier actions.
Having said all that,some of the ranges in SH4 do seem to be a bit out of whack.
The H8K and H6K should NEVER be seen in pairs, BTW.
What is the point of maritime patrol aircraft if you fly them 100m apart? They would operate (aise from close to base where the radial search pattern was narrow) such that the maximum visual ranges would overlap in the middle, so you'd expect them to be twice as far (or a little less) away from each other as they could see.
tater
The Japanese didn't invent patrol craft, but the H8K had the longest range and could stay up longer than any other patrol craft of it's day I believe.
Also,keep in mind that Japanese a/c on average had greater range than planes of other nations. A case in point being the bomb attacks on the Phillipines at the beginning of the war. All the aircraft including the Zeros took off from Formosa,but US Officials in the Phillipines were convinced that carriers had to be involved since they didn't believe fighter aircraft could fly that far.
Unfortunately for the Japanese,they didn't seem to use that range advantage very often in carrier vs carrier actions.
Having said all that,some of the ranges in SH4 do seem to be a bit out of whack.
Even longer ranged the then PBYs?
The H8K "Emily" was an excellent flyingboat. Excellent, period, nt just excellent for the japanese.
Very well armed, decent payload, fantastic range, good flying characteristics.
TheSatyr
05-29-07, 09:32 PM
Yeah,I think they did have longer range than the PBY. The M8K was basically a flying gas tank with wings. I could be wrong but I think they could stay in the air at least 12 hours.(Possibly closer to 24 hours). It was probably the best flying boat of the war. The down side was no armor and it didn't take many hits to turn it into a flaming torch.
They were pretty versatile. Could be used for extreme long range recon patrols,for anti-sub patrols and could be configured as bombers. I've even read where they tried sticking a couple of torps under the wings and used some as makeshift torp bombers.(Which was something PBYs could do as well).
The Japanese actually raided Pearl Harbor at least once with a small group of these things.
TheSatyr
05-29-07, 09:36 PM
Incidentally,according to the History Channel,near the end of the war,Japan was developing a bomber that could fly from Japan to the US. The plan was to hit San Francisco with bombs with chemical warheads. The war ended before the planes and warheads were completed.
The Japanese were masters at building long range aircraft...but at the expense of protection for the plane and the crew.
kylania
05-29-07, 09:37 PM
I got nailed in that same spot too.. endless (well, ok.. 6) aircraft attacks as i was stranded on the surface.
Kinda sucked :)
The H8K2 (the most numerous model by far) had a max range of 3,862 nm (4,475 miles). It could do over 24 hour patrols. (max range over cruising speed is nearly 28 hours).
Cruise speed was 184 mph, max speed was 290mph. It was a very fast plane.
In all ways an excellent aircraft, only inferior to the PBY in numbers built, PBY wasn't even in the same class.
I started messing with a mod to totally redo the IJNAF tonight.
I have fixed the bomb loads for all IJN aircraft from the gross overloads they are in stock SH4.
I have changed the units in the various airbase airgroups to at least be "normal" numbers---this usually increased the number of aircraft, actually. I used a Sentai of 9 as the standard unit.
I added a new airbase type, the flyingboat base, which is equipped only with H6K and then mixed H6K/H8K units, then H8K units late in the war.
I changed the floatpane base to only have floatplanes (Petes), no flyingboats.
Upped the range a little on the Pete based on "normal range" listed in Rene Francillon's book.
I'm debating what to do with the small, normal, and large airbases. Since aircraft would be assigned in complete Sentai, the only difference can be the number of planes. Vals and Kates were not frequently used as land-based units, but I have also removed the bombs from the Zero, so some shorter ranged aircraft with bombs would not hurt (as stand ins at the very least).
One thought is to think of the 3 sizes of base as 3 types of base, not sizes. The bases don't render on the ground, they are just center points for planes to spawn in the air based on. I was thinking a "small" base might be fighters only. A "normal" base might have single engined bombers (B5Ns and D3As), while a "large" airbase might have G4Ms and the Q1W (though only ~150 of those were ever built). If I did it this way, I'd build air capability by tiling bases. Rabaul might have 3 small, 1 normal, and 2 large bases (27 zeros, 9 vals, 9 kates, and 18 bettys). There were floats and flyingboats there, too, so 1 each of those (9 Petes, and 9 H6Ks).
If you place planes where they really were, you actually get far more planes than we have now, since there are only maybe 20 airbases in SH4, and there were a lot more than even 60 Sentai.
The big factor would be to really understand how the chance of air encounter happens.The actual numbers of planes might be better to simply fake in so that the chance of encounter is right---shoot for a realistic outcome, not a realistic order of battle. I think this is really what we want. One possible way is to reduce the planes to a number that might be available immediately for a strike at any given time. The airbase would then be less likely to ever spot you with so few planes. What I'd then do is to actually plot planes on the map in a mission in realistic search patterns. A series of spokes in a radial pattern. If a plane flying such a patrol spots you, they will attack, AND since they make a contact report, the chance of an "airbased spawned" strike jumps to 70%.
That's a lot of work, but I bet mcoca's program could be tweaked to do it. Place a plane with a single waypoint, then the program can be used to create an angular spacing, and distance, then do the rest.
elanaiba
05-30-07, 02:03 AM
One thing to remember about airbases is that they are taken into account for "air domination". So there needs to be a balance - where appropriate - between allied and japanese airpower. Or else chaos - lots of airstrikes and stuff like that - will ensue.
AkbarGulag
05-30-07, 05:05 AM
When the Japanese staged the Pearl Harbour attack, their airforce had already realised the value of 'drop tanks' and could range out to 1,900 Miles. Thats 3,000km. This is their 'non' boat versions. I.E fixed wheel aircraft. This was a fighter/bomber design. The 'betty' bomber had a range of some 3,700km loaded so was also capable of such distance, though im not sure if they were used in anti-naval operations.
AirborneTD
05-30-07, 06:23 AM
Betty's were primarily responsible for the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse. This is very plausible.
Interesting, elanaiba, that didn't occur to me since I've never seen planes fighting.
That makes things rather more complicated.
Wonder what would happen with Midway given more fighters...
I'm not really upset with the play balance in the game (which any game maker will tell you is the hardest part.) Total realism is not possible since there is no human element in the AI. There have been times when it seemed the sky was swarming with AI planes sent to hound me (seamingly out of nowhere) so it seems plausible these aircraft may be coming from great distances to cover a strategic area.
Also, there have been long patrols where I was able to range far and wide without any aicraft sightings, so when I see examples of these two extremes, I can't help think to myself there is some balance and variety to the game. The war becomes "personal" as opposed to simply reliving history where you know everything that's going to happen and your pet counter action works every time. Players can share experiences where some have similar stories to tell and others have their own unique story. This is very difficult to achieve in a game and deserves some credit.
One of the reasons I obstain from modding until very late in a game's life (if ever) is it takes a long time for people to really understand the intent of the original programmers. Some modders take a miopic look at a particular feature not taking into consideration the effect this has on the total game, or basing their mod on a personal rather than practical application for a feature. Many players for good or ill suck up these early mods like vacuumes wanting ANY game but the one they bought. The seamingly endless complaints of bugs and broken games comes from these aggressive players mis-applying mods. It makes a lot of noise in the forums making the game appear to be worse than it really is. The excitement of the hunt to find the control over a feature and share it plays a role in this fervor.
I say all that to finish by saying of all many many historical games I've played, over time I've come to enjoy and appreciate the game as created. I'm not an anti-modder. I create flight models for Flight Simulator. But, in that process of studying how to do that over a span of 20 years now, the appreciation of how the programmers applied their skill to detail mostly lost on the average gamer continuously increases with time.
Go for it tater. You are demonstrating your care and research in your work. I like that.
-Pv-
Personally, I like to at least have the baseline game in the ballpark with reality. A Zero with 3x1000lb bombs, when it could only carry 2x132lb bombs (and virtually never did so) is past my limits of ignoring. The Nth time I get bombed by a plane I know didn't carry bombs, it starts ruining the immersion of the game to me. Really, for me the desirable end goal is immersion, and since I read quite a bit regarding the Pacific War, that also includes things like the campaign layers. Heck, I think the same when I see 2 H8Ks flying in tight formation instead of doing their jobs and spreading out, lol.
You are totally right, though, balance is very very tricky. I played a while watching air attacks. Maybe I'm just a terrible shot with the AA guns, but regardless of their bomb loads, when I see planes, I make a hole in the water and climb in. The critical balance issue seems to be having air be a real enough threat that you act like a real submarine and submerge. Others that are crack shots might need Vals armed with photon torpedos to be afraid enough to pull the plug instead of fighting it out. In that case my little mod might not be what they need (I posted the IJN airplane fixes (just proper bomb loads) in the mod forum, BTW).
The campaign is another area that I personally pay attention to. When I can go out and bag 100k every other patrol, I get bored really quickly. When I see 3 Yamato BBs... it's like watching that godawful movie, Pearl Harbor all over again.
I tend to mess with things because it's in my nature to do so. I imagine that for most modders and mission/campaign builders it's more of a personal thing to make the program do what we want it to.
Put it this way, if SH4 had persistant units---meaning a finite number of ships in each class would be possible, and once sunk they'd be gone---I'd literally go through every Tabular Record of Movement (TROM) at combinedfleet.com, and put every IJN warship where it belongs from the moment the forces started moving prior to PH, to the surrender. You'd be able to read a book about a sub taking a peek at a date, time, and place and seeing the Tone, and I'd have her there, or near enough (likely I'd used radius waypoints to keep a little fog of war ;) ).
I'd do all that work partially because it would be cool to see the entirety of the war played out on a 3d map.
tater
PepsiCan
06-04-07, 06:38 AM
Hi
I may have found the cause. Apparently, in the campaign, the battle of Midway starts in feb and end in september! That explains the airplane activity off Midway. It probably is the carrier task force. You can find more in this link.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showpost.php?p=484373&postcount=4
It can be modded if we want to therefore.
That post you linked to is not the answer. The dates in Campaign.cfg have a different purpose. Yes, they do tell the Midway mission to load up. But the date is not the date the Midway mission starts and ends. The date in that file is the day range your PATROL can start during for the Midway mission to load. It needs to be before the Midway missions actual time so that you might see Midway happen on RTB from patrol, etc. Presumably the late end date is just to make sure all the units "evole" back home.
I'm somewhat with -Pv- on that one, in fact he must have been reading my mind as I wanted to post something along those lines for a long time.
Often there are compromises in game design to achieve a realistic outcome with a few adjustments which might be unrealistic when looked at on their own. In fact, the more realistic you make things for the AI, the more bright and human-like it has to be to still achieve results that resemble reality. Take flightsims for example: Many people complain that AI flightmodels often are "better" in terms of ubber and less prone to stalls etc than the player ones, though the problem is when you give the AI a flightmodel as demanding as the one of the player, the AI has to be able to deal with that or keep crashing into the ground. Or is unable to achieve proper turnrates or fly proper ACM, to stay away from the stall AOA. In the end, you would need an AI as good as a human, but by then you should be in a hurry dropping flightsims, heading over to the military where they keep talking about those future fighter planes that won't need a pilot anymore.
Case in point with the Zero's bombload in SHIV is that I feel those pilots are pretty poor droppers and miss your boat more often than not. It's not that difficult to hit a relatively slow moving sub in a dive bomb run, and even a near miss should lead to catastrophic damage. When a sub was caught by aircraft on the surface before it could dive it was pretty much over for all I know. If the "bang" of the Zeroes loadout gets reduced, I could imagine it would lesson the air threat too much, especially seeing how the sub seems too strong anyway and can take quite a number of shell hits, collide with merchants without serious consequences, destroy DDs by ramming them etc. and how you can take out any attacking planes rather easily because those pilots will never fly any evasive maneuvers.
Anyway, reducing the Zero bombload might be cool because there are still other planes with a realistically bigger bombload attacking you, but keep in mind that those Zeros will then probably be nothing more than a nuisance, albeit great for gunnery practise. ;) Maybe also replace the majority of them with some real ASW patrol planes.
I'm well aware that reducing the Zero bombload might make air less dangerous. My overall fix will be to also add more realistic numbers of air bases or larger air groups.
The problem withthe zero is that it has long range, so it is seen a LOT in game. And since it carried NO bombs in RL, getting bombed by one is utterly immersion killing. It'd be like seeing an enemy merchant and having it launch a Harpoon missile at you, or a homing torpedo. Sure, it would be deadly, but not terribly realistic.
Zeros were not maritime patrol planes, they'd not fly long ranges bombed up to look for ships to attack. They didn't carry radios that were any good (if at all), so they couldn't report. Having them unarmed means that you'll at least get reported, and expect a followup, maybe by something armed with bombs. I think that reducing the Zero's range is the next fix. Part of the problem is that you see so many zeros WAY out at sea where you'd really expect to see naught but real maritime patrol planes (G4Ms in that roles, and flying boats).
Heartc, I don't disagree with compromises needed for realistic outcomes. In fact, that's exactly my goal.
I'd like to see planes enough in the right areas that remaining submerged during daylight is important. OTOH, I'd like it if a single problem getting out of TC fast enough didn't result in 6000lbs of bombs dropping on me from 2 Zeros as well.
Take the CVs right now. Any assumption that there is a realistic outcome within the airgroup range of a CV is plain wrong in stock SH4. For the Atlantic, that paradigm was OK. Even for a game where you played an IJN submarine it would be OK. Why? Because SH3 used CVEs. US (and RN, possibly) CVEs operated composite airgroups. Fighters (frequently FM-2s (GM (Eastern) built F4Fs)) as well as TBF/TBMs. The planes all carried bombs because their only role in life was... wait for it... HUNTING SUBMARINES (except within range of LW maritime patrol aircraft, then some fighters would be fighters, too).
As a result,during daylight, the existence of a CV would mean planes flying around from the whole airgroup in game, which is realistic.
The IJN didn't do that. Not just because they had such weak ASW doctrine (which is true), but because they knew that keeping planes aloft all the time would actually get them detected more often. You see that in game, you are in open ocean, and you see a Zero or a Val... CV! Unrealistic outcome since the IJN didn't fly scout bombers around looking for subs. The CAP would be looking for snooper planes, not subs unless they happened to spot one. Since many (most?) Zeros were not set up with radios, they'd have no way of reporting except flying low over the CV and dropping notes on the deck (they actually did this). Usually the CAP was alterted to the enemy by surface ship fire.
So realistic outcomes might require setting the Cv's airgroups to no planes at all, or at most a tiny number of Zeros. For the sake of gameplay I have considered adding a Val or 2. Dunno. Even with a very few planes in the airgroup, I get buzzed a lot. Another possible change is to really reduce the range of both the Zero, and the other CV planes (Val and Kate). It's not like they actually get in realistic battles with other ships with them. Then the CAP would at least be close to the CVs, not hundreds of miles away for no reason.
It's complicated, no question. It needs to be not just realistic in terms of the loads and the content of the airgroups, but for balance.
the_belgian
06-04-07, 12:20 PM
Could they come from Wake?
:hmm:
Yeah, Wake is an option, I think there is an airbase there. If there is the dates need looking at, Wake was realyl hard to keep supplied, and it was bombed constantly by the US.
I prefer the idea of Zeros not carrying massive amounts of bombs.
Would a Zero put out a contact report or a radio transmission to nearby sub-hunter planes if it detected an enemy submarine? I could definitely see a Zero pilot shadowing a sub from outside the range if its AA weaponry in order to relay sub-hunters onto it.
Not sure if that's in IJN doctrine, but the idea makes sense when I think about it.
I think if they see you in game, they report you.
BTW, in general the idea that there might be a well-tested, intricate balance in many games that really need to be appreciated before you start bashing it apart. One look at the campaign layers makes this clearly untrue for SH4. You can clearly see they started with some excellent ideas about how to organize the layers. Kudos to the devs for that. Quickly, though, you see that having prepared a good foundation, everything above it was slapped together pretty quickly. The convoys are carbon copies of each other. No ships are given any cargo past the defaults. The escorts are universally set to novice AI in convoys. The TFs are all very similar. Yeah, the random %s mean they are all slightly different in game, but it's clearly rushed.
The scripted battles. Again, they started off OK, but then failed to follow through. They go to the trouble of labeling each force by admiral, roughly have the basic coposition (CV group vs BB group, etc), but fail to make even the most basic nod to the real formation. This isn't a number of units killing FR issue, either. There are many random TFs with 4 CVs, yet Midway has the Nagumo force with 3. The Yamamoto force lacks Yamato while every other random TF has 1-2 of them in it.
SH4 needs modding just to get in the ballpark with realism, so I totally disagree with the notion it needs to be left alone. As always, YMMV.
tater
I'm not against modding. I'm certain that after we've seen the last official patch, careful technicians will have by then come to a more full understanding of the data files. With some careful adjustments to force levels and capabilities, I'm expecting a more rounded and satisfying experience will result.
Right now though, I'm satisified to play the game largely untouched and see the modding stage of the game as life-extending after the patch cycle. Certainly, patches become more reliable and sophisticated after the patch cycle not to mention the game becomes easier to maintain.
-Pv-
No question. My attempts to fix the campaign layers have been largely to learn the editor, actually. I find I do better when I attempt to solve real problems rather than just messing around.
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