ACTUV Scoring Structure

[Gargamel]

From the Manual:

You LOSE a point for every 10 seconds you spend at full throttle. (This interval is scaled for progressively lower speeds. As speed decreases, the time between point deductions increases.)

From Neal's FAQ:

- fuel pts are decremented 1 point for every 10 seconds at max speed; the time to lose a point increases as the inverse of the square of the speed / max speed

I took this info and charted it out. I wanted to see which sub's were penalized the most for using higher speeds.

The following chart shows Pt's penalized per ten seconds of fuel usage vs ship speed. The lower the number, the less the penalty:



If you can't see it, the Remora and Gator have the same line.

Data:




As you can see, certain subs get a far greater fuel penalty at increasingly higher speeds.

Then from the manual:

• In most missions you RECEIVE 200 points for every minute you hold the SSK on MF /EO/IR/or Radar.
• In most missions you RECEIVE 300 points for every minute you hold the SSK on High Frequency Active Sonar (HF).
• If you hold the SSK on multiple sensors, you get the combined points for all sensors that hold the contact.

So then if we look at our Speed Penalty / minute vs type of Sensor, we get these charts:



This shows how many points per minute we get for various speed levels after taking the penalty/10 seconds into consideration.

So if you read the rules, You get the HF and MF bonuses for using both sensors. So (and I know this is making you nuc sim fan boys holding your head muttering obscenities) if you leave your Active sonar on after you have established contact, you will be practically doubling your score.

This does not take into consideration the pings per minute penalty (You get penalized 1 point per ping), but when you are getting a base of 200 pts for MF tracking, I can't imagine it would take more than 6-10 pings per minute to maintain contact. A fair trade in my opinion. I could get into speed vs MF bonus vs pings per minute, but the graphs would end up 3 dimensional and a real pain to describe here, so I decided to skip it and assume the amount of pings required to hold contact would be the same across all platforms, up to their maximum usable speed, so the differences would be negligible.

So looking at the most efficient ACTUV's, Remora and Gator, we discover that the Gator does not have an active MF system at all. So it looks like the Remora has the potential to be the highest scoring ACTUV.

But...

That's not considering the SSK's actions. If it reacts adversely to the active sonar, then you may end up losing more on the Remora since you will be running around at higher speeds, while the Gator usually just sits behind the SSK using its long range HF. If the Remora can keep the SSK in HF range and under it's usable speed cap (15 kts), I think the Remora would be the best ACTUV, based on the scoring system.

So what's all this mean? Well basically it shows that finding and holding contact is far more valuable than fuel conservation or EM stealth. Getting 200 points per minute for maintaining contact at long range is a far greater bonus than the 6 points per minute fuel penalty and the (guesstimating) 12 points per minute continuous sonar usage penalty. Even worse case scenario, you are earning about 182 pts/min for just maintaining contact, where as a quieter, more fuel efficient approach just accrues fuel penalties.

You start the game with 2000 Bonus points: 1000 bonus points for MF High Frequency Active Sonar (MF) and 1000 bonus points for fuel.

To be complete, this means you can actively ping 1000 times, assuming 12 pings a minute (1 every 5 seconds), or actively run your sonar for 83 minutes and 20 seconds before losing that bonus. You can then run at Full speed for 2 hours and 47 minutes before running out of fuel bonus.