Why in the world would I get involved in producing a shooting technique for Silent Hunter 4, name it after a famous submarine commander, Dick O'Kane, and never read his book? Well, for some reason I hadn't read Dick O'Kane's Clear the Bridge until now. Stupid!
In answer to the enquiries about whether Dick O'Kane ever used such a technique or whether ANYONE had used something like the Dick O'Kane Technique during the war, my stock answer is that we developed the Dick O'Kane Technique entirely in the game and with MoBo. Although the technique is historically plausible, it COULD have been executed by a real submarine, we have no evidence it was ever used. It was merely named in honor of a great submarine commander and we do not imply that he did anything like the Dick O'Kane Manual Targeting Technique.
Then I read chapter 7 of Clear the Bridge yesterday:
Quote:
“We’ve got her on course two seven zero, speed eight, Captain.” It was Fraz's voice. "Range twenty-eight hundred, we're twelve hundred yards from her track. It looks good from here." It looked good from the bridge, too, but a bit scarier perhaps, for at this stage her angle on the bow looked very sharp, and a slight change of enemy course would put us underfoot. That was always the case if you were really right in there, and there were invariably anxious moments until the rate of change of her angle became pronounced with the decreasing range. Perhaps it was well that I was busy twisting our boat for a minimal silhouette, marking bearings, and then settling her on the heading for near zero gyro shots. A black squall in back of us gave us further security from detection, but I more than welcomed Fraz's call, "Ten degrees to go, Captain."
"She's turned back, but she'll never make it." It was Jones, just in back of me, keeping track of the bow escort. I knew exactly what he saw: The escort ahead was coming toward us. It was like having another pair of eyes and the judgment to go with them.
"Constant bearing-mark!"
"Set" from the conning tower.
"Fire"
The next three torpedoes, each fired to hit a specific point, zinged out at eight-second intervals. From the instant of firing it was impossible for the enemy to maneuver his 600-foot ship to clear the divergent torpedo tracks. The whacks of the first two detonations
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We can now say that the Dick O'Kane technique has left the realm of merely being historically plausible to being able to say that Dick O'Kane himself executed such an attack on the very first target recorded for the Tang.