[REL] Depth Charge noise mod

[schlechter pfennig]

Depth charges are an anti-submarine warfare weapon, intended to destroy a submarine by being dropped into the water in the close proximity of a suspected submarine's location, and then detonating, which subjects the target to a powerful and destructive hydraulic shock.

Their effectiveness required the combined resources and skills of many individuals during an attack. Sonar, helm, depth charge crews and the movement of other ships had to be carefully coordinated. Even so, there were two major drawbacks even the best-trained depth charge attack crew faced: one was that, in order to deploy its depth charges a ship had to pass over the contact, dropping them over the stern; sonar contact would be lost just before attack, rendering the hunter blind at the crucial moment. This gave a skillful submarine commander an opportunity to take evasive action. Secondly, in the minutes immediately following the explosion of a depth charge passive sonar was unable to track contact due to the massively disturbed and displaced water churning as a result of the explosion, and even active sonar/ASDIC had severe difficulty reacquiring contact right afterwards. This gave the aforementioned skillful submarine commander yet a second chance to disengage and evade.


The depth charge noise mod simulates both the short-term, immediate, and the long-term, lingering, effects of a depth charge explosion. When a depth charge explodes it creates a spherical explosion, leaves behind a large, roughly globular area of water churning with acoustically noisy bubbles. The depth charge noise mod still displays the visual effects of the depth charge explosion, both above the surface and beneath, but now adds a pocket of bubbles that remain behind each explosion. Each depth charge explosion now creates two invisible Bolds, one with a lifetime of five (5) minutes, an apparent surface area of 900, and a noise level of 10, and a second with a lifetime of one (1) minute, an apparent surface area of 300, and a noise level of 75. (I have no idea what effect the "noise" setting have for any given value, as that is not explained anywhere; as well, the basic Bolds have their noise value set at "0". I suspect that that value is set at the time of deployment, but I have no way of ascertaining that. )

In tests I have been able to (usually) carefully creep away under silent running from a group of eight destroyers actively hunting (and pinging) my test submarine, after the first couple of depth charge runs had created a lot of water disturbance. The escorts usually wind up repetitively depth charging the location of the "bubbled" area . . . usually. The effectiveness of the enemy escort sonar operators (whether Poor, Novice, Competent, Veteran, Elite) helps determine the effectivity of the masking effect of the disturbed water area, which means the more dangerous the enemy is, the more likely they are to successfully reacquire contact with you. As well, escorts that have been fooled by the noise disturbance into reacting to it over and over, do not get trapped into a loop and never stop attacking the hidden bubble cloud; eventually they figure it out, and leave to go hunting elsewhere.

The depth charge noise mod is meant to simulate real behavior of a specific object: that of a depth charge. It is not meant as a "Get out of jail free" card, or to make evading enemy escorts easier just to make that easy.

Feedback and comments are appreciated!

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Revision history:

Version 1.0: initial release; WAC 5.0 only

Version 2.0: Usable now for 4 different game versions [stock (vanilla), GWX Gold, NYGM, and WAC 5.0]; altered the "bubble" appearance; added a second noise effect; (readme file is still for version 1.0 release; will be updated next revision)

Rev. A: (hopefully) fixed the save-and-reload-CTD bug; made adjustments to the disruption sizes, noise levels and lifetimes.