SH4 escort question?
 

Very simple:

How can an escort detect you from 800/900m when you are submerged and all stopped with silent running on, just waiting?

No matter if at Periscope depth with no raised scope, or even 50m depth?

Do they have Japanese kind of medium aboard? :haha:

Calm sea or heavy sea without difference?

Very very rarely i can remain undetected, so i suspect it has to do with the escort skill (noob/veteran/elite) not to say elite can see you wherever you are or staying...

I’m not sure in reality Japanese escorts were that good at detecting sub all stopped from hundreds meters away.
They don’t in SH3/SH5, but they do in SH4...

Depends upon the mod. Some mods negate the effect of the thermocline, others accentuate it. Some give the escorts superman hearing, others make them deaf. The settings for Elite, Veteran, Competent, etc for the crew skill, is also influenced by CFG files. A whole bunch of variables that can be adjusted. "Silent Running" really isn't so silent. The older the boat, the more noise it made, and you might have a shaft bearing going bad, or Bernard is back in the galley banging on the pipes, :O: Gertrude the mascot cat just sneezed... If you're still in Ralles Mod Pack, add-in that Tokko's Revenge that CaptainScurvy put in with his OTC, and you'll really find the escorts now have x-ray vision from 16,000 yards, and not just 11,500... :o :salute:

Yeah, i had that with TMO 2.5 alone (plenty of times) FOTRS V1.3 (few times) and lately in Ralles Real Soup (few times also).
Not in FOTRSU, you know why...(it’s not fine tuned)

I didn’t check what kind of DD skill found me even stopped at 900m, but i’m Quite sure it’s an elite.
When you get 2 or 3 of those guys upon you (like in TMO) no matter what you do, you are dead. Not really fun, nor really historically accurate imho.
With only 1 elite among couple of normals, you can survive (as i did) and it’s enough though.

After numerous patrols in Ralles (it’s the RSRDC campaign layer?) i think it’s very well balanced and it seems there aren’t too many elite DDs.

I hope in future FOTRSU there will not be too many elites...one per convoy should be enough! :D

In real life, i always thought a DD couldn’t detect a sub when all stopped below the thermal layer. Elite or not...

There is always a "signature" of a submarine. Sort of like with camouflage paint, if you are patient enough, and look closely, you can see it, but it is definitely more difficult, and under certain circumstances nearly invisible, so the crew skill plays an important part. What we've been trying to do with FotRSU is to have it to where the Japanese are lackadaisical with their convoy protection early and only a few are "skilled" at their trade. Then about mid to late 42 they get concerned and start paying attention, but only a few are highly skilled. Then they get serious, and skilled by the end of 1943 through 1944. Then, since they are being rapidly eliminated with torpedoes and don't have the talent pool to fill vacancies, they get young and unskilled mixed with elite veterans, if you follow what I'm saying. Most of the mods have the skill level of the AI the same throughout the war.

Trying to balance all the different aspects of the AI, along with the skill level of the individual ships, which is done mostly in the campaign files, has been difficult. We can test a few scenarios prior to release of a version, but as has happened, there are highly-skilled airplanes everywhere in one version with ships that are just right. Then the next release, the planes are good, but now the ships are dum-dums. Then the next you have dum-dum planes falling from the sky ~and~ dum-sum ships. This last version, we turned up one AI, and lowered another. When you tweak the AI for the enemy, the sub suffers. When you adjust it for the sub, the enemy AI suffers. We hope this next mix will be really close, with the escorts maybe a bit too tough for most, but we'll see what happens, and be ready to adjust.

Bleiente did a really good job tweaking TMO and RSRDC with OTC. It is very playable as-is. :salute:

Yes it must be very hard to tweak and fine tune the AI behavior.
It’s not only in the Sim file...because i already tried to adjust things in this file without very good results. Many more factors seems to be effective elsewhere :)

You are right with Bleiente. His mod is my SH4 favorite up to now, i can survive through it with very good results even if sometimes it can be damn hard.
Everything is well balanced, never boring, each patrol a very nice entertainment.

Can’t wait to see next FOTRSU raising the flag!

Are you being pinged? In the game, it's sort of like sonar is always on, except it only becomes active to your ears if you fall within the cone.

Yes i’m pinged sometimes...not always...
I don’t think it’s always active because i can pass the cone without hearing it.
In fact, thinking about it, they don’t ping me that much. At least, a lot less than in regular TMO without other mods.
I prefer it that way :haha:

Just saying it's how the game works, if you fall within the active sonar cone, it's always on for ya, lol.

"In real life, i always thought a DD couldn’t detect a sub when all stopped below the thermal layer"

In real life you couldn't stop and "hover", you had to keep moving fast enough for the diving planes to be effective in order to maintain level depth. Trim dive TRIED to balance fore and aft and get as close as possible to neutral buoyancy, but it was very rare to get even close enough that you were rising or descending slowly at a full stop.

The game ignores those physics and allows you to stop dead even at periscope depth, in real life you could only do that for a minute or two before you'd be 10 feet deeper or shallower.

As for thermal layers, the game doesn't model those very well either. In real life they're like clouds in the sky, some higher some lower, some with sharply defined edges and some wispy, some with flat bottoms and some sloping. A sub cruising at 200 feet can enter a layer at the edge, top of the layer is at 100 feet, then it slopes downward to 500 feet 2 miles later so you move from under the layer to on top of the layer horizontally, the sub doesn't change depth but the layer boundary moves down, or even peters out altogether so there's no sudden temperature change. The thermal spike can also be strong or weak, a 10 degree change in 5 feet versus a 2 degree change in 50 feet, a weak layer won't help that much when hiding from active sonar.

The OP mentioned "800/900M", 900 meters is about about 990 yards, state of the art active sonar had about 1500 to 2000 yards effective range, so within that range the ping will pong. Aspect plays a big part, if you're broadside (the escort pinging is on either beam) he has a nice wide target to get an echo off of. He'll actually get the same strength echo if you're facing directly toward or away, the difference is it's a narrower target, so the focused ping misses 3 degrees left and the next misses 3 degrees right as he's sweeping, but if he happens to have it pointing directly at your bow or stern he gets an echo. Advantage to keeping your stern toward him is (1) it reduces the odds of a direct hit from the ping as he sweeps back and forth and (2) you're opening the range from his search circle. Reason that's important is because the ping goes out at 041, next goes out at 042, then 043, the space between the degrees becomes wider the further away you are. The pinger can get lucky and get a strong echo at 10 thousand yards if you happen to be right on the exact bearing, but the further away the less chance of a direct "hit" with the center of the sound wave.

In game, below the layer is the place to be, deeper is better.

Very good post Sniper :yeah:

Of my experience, only SH3 NYGM render this effect pretty well :yep:
If you don’t run at least 1 knot you are sinking...
Would be great to see that in SH4 as well :yep: