Lost my mojo

[barker262]

G'day all,

I had prided myself in being able to use standoff techniques to torpedo ships consistently at distances beyond 4000m. But in a new career with a new crew, I can't hit a thing. Could it be that my watch crew and hydrophone operators are both giving me bad data to solve with?

At one point, I could clearly see my target with scope, and knew it was about 5000m off at 40' to the boat, but the hydro said that the reading was at 49'. Then he said 'no contact'. Odd. I haven't had a successful intercept with four bearings method since taking this crew out.

Even surface contacts are elluding me, tried my watch officer, distance estimates come in and the target track was wavering back and forth even though the ship is traveling steady. I've fired five torpedos now and missed each time, some forward, some behind. Is there some way to mitigate their estimates or should I sack them and hire some new crew? Or am I just rushing and forgetting the basics.

[barker262]

G'day Blitzkrieg,

I can't rightly say. Haven't had a shot with this crew at anything closer than what I was before. I will head in and take a close shot. But I was most concerned about the hydrophone operators reading a heading that was so obviously wrong. If it keeps up, I'll get rid of him when (if) I get back to port, hopefully I can blame someone other than myself.

Incidentally what do you use to determine speed, I had been observing and timing 3.15, but I might start tracking the ship bow to stern and time that.

[Tupolev]

Remember the hydrophone is picking up the screws, so the bearing to target the bearing to a sound contact won't be exactly the same.

I've also noticed that when I've a contact locked on in my scope, the sound man will sometimes lose the contact. I read it's something to do with how the game's code handles visual, sonar, and possibly radar contacts.

Finally, I personally use a combination of plotting over time and fixed wire to figure speed estimates. Though I've found waiting until dark and steering a parallel course and matching speeds to be the most accurate speed estimation.

T

[Warren Peace]

I can confirm that having the scoped locked will often result in the sonar operator reporting no contact, I suspect the game handles the sensors in a hierarchy, such that if the target shows up on your nav-map (visual), it ceases to track it with hydrophones until the visual contact is 'lost'.

Also, depending on which mods you are running, the WO can lose his picture-perfect accurate reports (I've already had mine tell me a ship was 500m closer than it actually was).

As for target speed, I'm running MaGui so I use the wire-timing combined with the AOB Finder for initial estimate, then use a 10-minute target track on the nomograph. If those numbers are close, I know I got the speed about right, although I will do another check about 1-minute before firing. I can't live without the OLC based mods anymore, the attack disk + aob finder make manual shooting incredibly satisfying.

[barker262]

Thanks fellas for the replies,

to Warren Peace (warren peace...snicker), apart from the GWX and a few sound mods I have a GUI mod called GWX 3 - Rafael DSK GUI, it has the large pull out dials and a square looking attack scope. Would I be able to add the MaGui without affecting it (and what does it do?) I gather it has ranging aids built into the scope. The Aob finder I have downloaded but yet to open, I'll wait till this career ends to give it a try.

P.S. I too have yet to survive a couple of months (at 90% realism)

[barker262]

Looking on the main MaGui thread and can't find the download link, everything seems to lead to a new thread. Wouldn't happen to have it handy would you?

[Pisces]

I never heard of that Rafael mod,.... (nevermind)


http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=172376

I'm pretty sure it is an either/or situation, since it seems to change similar parts of the game as the MaGUI mod. You'll have to make a choice if you want a rectangular scope or a circular one.

[EDIT]Makman94's thread, bottom of the first message is a link to his download folder:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=166320

[Warren Peace]

Originally Posted by barker262

Thanks fellas for the replies,

to Warren Peace (warren peace...snicker), apart from the GWX and a few sound mods I have a GUI mod called GWX 3 - Rafael DSK GUI, it has the large pull out dials and a square looking attack scope. Would I be able to add the MaGui without affecting it (and what does it do?) I gather it has ranging aids built into the scope. The Aob finder I have downloaded but yet to open, I'll wait till this career ends to give it a try.

P.S. I too have yet to survive a couple of months (at 90% realism)

I have not used the Rafael GUI, so I can't give a comparison of what you'll gain or lose by switching. I am also 99% sure that you wouldn't be able to run both of them together, GUIs (in my experience) tend to not play well together, since they all tend to work on the same files.

However, I can tell you that MaGUI adds in a whole boat-load of useful tools. It gives you an two-sided attack disk (Front side allows you to work out an AOB in about 2 seconds after getting the target's course, back side is a crazy slide-rule thing I haven't figured out yet, but I understand can be used to work out a target's speed, intercept course, firing angle, and all kinds of useful information). It adds an AOB finder to both the attack and observation scopes (another very useful tool, pull it down over the scope view and you can use it to find range, AOB, and speed, all in less than a minute once you've gotten good with it). It increases the attack scope to 1x, 6x, and 12x magnifications (nice for flag spotting, curse you GWX gray contacts!), locks the UZO and binocular zooms at 7.6x (if memory serves), alters the appearance of the TDC when viewing through scopes (the observation scope has a slide-in, slide-out TDC on the right, the Attack Scope is much cleaner than stock, and has a pull-down for the torpedo settings, so you have access to more information on-screen compared to locked-in components that don't move). It uses 6 dial controls (3 displayed, 3 hidden but show up when moving the mouse to the left edge of the dial), adds an impressively accurate and HUGE compass to the nav map (drop down from the top of the map, good for plotting course corrections for intercepts), and a boatload of other minor quality-of-life changes that I'll not mention since I'm up to a book-length post as it is.

I used OLC + ACM previously, which is also a fantastic GUI I would suggest taking a look at, but something about MaGUI is making me love it just a little bit more.

Edit: Forgot to add, MaGUI also scales all of the zoomed-views to properly display the dimensions of a ship (requires TMTv2 if using GWX thread here: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=153937, download is in Makman94's signature). So if you measure 1500m range from the 6x observation scope, then switch to the 12x attack scope, you'll get about the same range (some error will occur due to having to estimate the angle-measurement, tenths of a degree do make a difference).