why i come home with a few fish left

[Perfect Midnight]

after droping home fry off in china deep in the yellow sea, im headed back to pearl, (oh, 100% porpus mid '42) have just started full real with manual tdc, and im learning, had 3 fish left in forward tubes passing just south of japan, at this point i had missed most of my shots, and had just a few med freighters and fishing boats (AA gun hehe) for about 7000t, and i was cool with that, not bad for beginer with full real hardest settings, i thought ill save these fish just incase, juuuuuuust in case i see somthing big, i had chances at small ships on the way but turned them down, half way to mid way, it happend, large task force, (coming back from battle of midway?) makin about 13kt, right at me, about 9 in the morning, sun behind them. this is it. its time, this is why i save a few fish. their dd screen was not on its A game, and i crawled in to position eyeing a flat top closest to me, hard to get a good ID at this range and angle, looked like a 16000 tonner, fired all three at 3300m at 1 deg apart, dove and turned, what seemed like FORVER later, two hits, one miss, and a 28000 ton fleet carier meets davy jones. lol,, i love it.:arrgh!:

[magic452]

Nice shooting there. :up::up:

One degree gyro angle off set is a lot a 3300 meters try about 1/2°. Game will do that.

Magic

[captgeo]

Good Job Skipper, welcome to subsim.:yeah:

[Armistead]

Nice report.

[Perfect Midnight]

after thinking about it for a while, the 1 miss ("torpedo missed sir") was only about 5 secs after after the 2 hits, and the 2 hits were way past due by my stop watch, perhaps there was a lager flat top behind the one i shot at and thats what sank, i have been playing sub sims since aotd when i was 13, now im 30 and just now started manuel targeting, its HARD, but nice new chalange, ill try to post more stuff in the future, so i can advance to whatever is above bilge rat :arrgh!:

[TorpX]

Sometimes it can be tricky figuring out how/why some/all of your torps missed. I do try to do a good post-mortem on my attacks, though.

Nice story.
Are you playing stock, or mods?

Oh, and welcome aboard! :salute:

[fireftr18]

Sometimes it can be tricky figuring out how/why some/all of your torps missed. I do try to do a good post-mortem on my attacks, though.

Nice story.
Are you playing stock, or mods?

Oh, and welcome aboard! :salute:



Doing a post-mortem on your attack sound intriguing. How do you do one in sh4?:know:

[Perfect Midnight]

stock 1.3, no mods, i have to get the add on to get 1.5 and TMO RSRD and stuff like that, untill now i played sh3 with GWX3.0 and a few simple skins and smaller mods that came with it, ill be getting the add on soon cuz i realy want to play TMO and RSRD.

[TorpX]

Doing a post-mortem on your attack sound intriguing. How do you do one in sh4?:know:
Well, I haven't got it down to an exact routine, but I consider two areas to be important:

First, I will log, on paper, as much of the data relating to the firing solution as possible. I play RFB without map contacts, so it is necessary to do this if I want to know what happened.
For example, my observations will be recorded along the lines of:

time-sub course/speed-target-AoB-bearing-range-speed

and firing solution:

target-torpedo-time-depth-firing bearing-track angle/range-run time-result(and time)


I don't follow the same format, (I will try to change/improve it) but you get the idea here. Hasty shots cannot be neatly done this way, but I try to avoid those as much as possible.



Second, I will make a save shortly before an attack. So, I can reload the relevant save and play it through again if I need to. Originally, I made the saves because I had some crashes and had to do an approach over, but last time I bungled a major attack, I realized I could play it over. I would never play anything over to pad tonnage or escape death, but if I can't figure out what happened, I might do it for this purpose.

I used the playback when I messed up an important attack against a seaplane tender and wasted four Mk 10 torpedos. It was a long shot, about 3,200 yds., but I thought I would get three hits out of it. All missed. At the moment all I could do was evade, and over the next hours break contact and finally reacquire the target. A follow up attack (at very close) range sank it.

Even though I later sank the target, those misses still bothered me. I thought at the time the torpedos probably went too deep, but as I thought about it more, this seemed less likely. I looked over the firing solution, but it seemed ok. Finally, I replayed it. I change the depth...still miss. After a few replays and no real answers, I just followed the torps with the external cam, yard by yard, and saw they ran out of steam before they reached the target. To make a long story short, the ship was making a course around the the islands (north of Luzon) and not on a straight course. Someone with a sharp eye might have noticed the AoB on the last observations were off, but the difference was not obvious (at least to me), and the torps were launched on a track making the range about 300 or 400 yds. beyond their maximum. If they had had more steam, the first one or two would have hit, the last two would have missed no matter what. The track was not as favorable as it appeared.

Anyway, it was a good lesson to me. Don't rely too much on visual ranges to plot an approach, and don't assume that targets are moving on a straight course just because it's convenient to do so.