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Originally Posted by jldjs
Patrolling near 119-50'E , 20-22'N on MAr 4 '44 around 20:00 hours on mission from Midway - Attacking a column of liners with 4 escorts. Two of these look like what I attached, believed to be Momi Class II escorts. When viewed in museum they look okay, meaning they have their "clothes" on!...
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jldjs
No, 3 Large Old Passengers, 1 Modern Passenger liner, 4 escorts and a Modern Composite Freighter on track 217 at 16 knots
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jldjs
Got it. Just to add, following this encounter I moved north and three passenger liners traveling east on track 097, fast(15 kts) spawned. Managed to sink these and with in minutes game time, 3 more liners appeared on that same track.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jldjs
No escorts!
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Originally Posted by torpedobait
In v0.53 and 56 career mode I have encountered many instances of "Small Convoys" consisting of unescorted troop ships and/or liners in 1942-43. I didn't think it was all that unusual for FOTARS. Almost never happened in TMO.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by torpedobait
11/18/43, 0530 radar contact with small 3 ship group at 129-28E, 28-49N. Group consisted of 2 Large Old Passenger Carriers and 1 Modern Passenger Liner. No escorts. All 3 are now on the bottom in the vicinity of 129-49E, 28-53N.
In a few hours another came along, one European Built Liner and 3 escorts. All 4 were sunk. Two of the destroyers were apparently manned by inexperienced crew, and they tended to hold course and speed to their downfall. The third came straight at my 180 with no zig zag. He ate a fish at about 600 yards and went down quickly.
11/19/43 , 0030 radar contact with 4 ship group at 129-17E, 28-37-30 N. Two Large Old Passenger Carriers and two Modern Passenger Liners, no escorts. All four now clutter the bottom a little east of their original sighting. Total tonnage for the 8 ships and 3 escorts was slightly over 80k tons.
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Neither myself nor cdrsubron7 have delved too much into the intimate details of most of the layers, letting them be what they are in Fall of the Rising Sun, other than cdrsubron7 tweaked the Task Force layer for more consistency and better performance, and we've eliminated a few troublesome RGG, or moved some spawn points to attempt to eliminate stacked spawns with the moveable groups. There has been minimal re-routing and / or group re-construction (except in the TaskForce layers). So it's a bit surprising to see the same exact groups, with the same exact spawn frequencies from 41a through 44a, with just a few groups dropped in the Troop Convoy layers between 41a and 43a, and added back in for 44a (??
??)... Here's the routings for the 43a layer, showing the Formosa - Luzon area:
And North of Okinawa, South of Kyushu:
The circles show the approximate areas of the sightings listed in the quotes above. One thing you might notice is there is a group routed across Northen Luzon island in the Philippines (say "whuh??!!?" you say). Similar happens in another layer up by Okinawa. Needless to say, we might have to zoom in close on all these files... shouldn't be like that.
In the 43a layer, there are 21 groups, set to spawn on an average of every 11.5 days, or about 2 a day from various locations. In the 44a, there is actually an ~increase~ in the number of groups to 35, with a slight decrease in the spawn rate, so that it is actually about the same number of groups on the "playing field" at any given time - supposedly...
If you 'Run' the ME, it is rather surprising, and eye-opening...
If the rate is supposedly about 2 a day, why are there 26 of 35 out and running in this screen shot?... This is July 1, 1944 here. July of 1943 is very similar. I've been spending the last couple of days going over the
www.combinedfleet.com site's listings, trying to gather enough info to be a bit more "realistic" with the amount of groups out there, but yet offer the player a chance at finding one. So it'll be something between this and RSRDC levels, hopefully leaning more toward "this", probably. However, there will be very few "unprotected" groups of Troop Convoys, at all... especially later. Do NOT expect to be able to sink all the Troop ships ~and~ the escorts in one "sitting". I haven't gotten into the nitty gritty of that just yet, but when your boat is detected, they will attempt to avoid you. On top of that, you ~will~ find the occasional DD that will attempt to exterminate you with extreme prejudice...
btw, for reference, in the future, after these Troop Convoy layers are edited, if you find groups of troop ships with an inordinate amount of escorts, like 2 ships and 6 or 8 escorts, you can figure that it'll be an SNLF convoy, equivalent to the US Marines. The Navy took care of them, and most often with top-line DDs. If you see groups with not that many DD, say the ratio is the other way around, with 4 transport and 2 escorts, that's probably going to be a regular army group, with 2nd line DD escorting them... just as info... just a bit of inter-service rivalry going on there... |;^)