merchants - sonar?

[Red Devil]

It has happened now too frequently as to become a damn nuisance.

1. heading to get within range of a solitary merchant, 100 feet, slow ahead and when merchant is still out of range, it starts zig zagging. There is no way it knows I am there. Or two ships, out of range one turns about and does a runner whilst the other keeps coming!!

2. Radar off, heading into a port, or or home - nothing showing on blank screens and I keep getting radar hits??

[Gray Lensman]

It has happened now too frequently as to become a damn nuisance.

1. heading to get within range of a solitary merchant, 100 feet, slow ahead and when merchant is still out of range, it starts zig zagging. There is no way it knows I am there. Or two ships, out of range one turns about and does a runner whilst the other keeps coming!!

2. Radar off, heading into a port, or or home - nothing showing on blank screens and I keep getting radar hits??


Funny... never happens to me playng stock, TMO or even FotRSU (in between save game corruption episodes)


They're detecting you visually, somehow... Scope up too long. Scope up at too high a speed. Yes, I saw that you were slow ahead. Did you wait until the speed actually dropped off to 3 kts or below before raising the scope? Once submerged, when I raise the scope, it's only to collect data as quick as possible and back down it goes, even if all I see are sonar tracks on the map, but especially once I can see them... Figure if I can see them, they might see me.

[KaleunMarco]

Funny... never happens to me playng stock, TMO or even FotRSU (in between save game corruption episodes)


They're detecting you visually, somehow... Scope up too long. Scope up at too high a speed. Yes, I saw that you were slow ahead. Did you wait until the speed actually dropped off to 3 kts or below before raising the scope? Once submerged, when I raise the scope, it's only to collect data as quick as possible and back down it goes, even if all I see are sonar tracks on the map, but especially once I can see them... Figure if I can see them, they might see me.

actually both TMO and FOTRSU have merchies with sonar.
and yes, they will detect you even if you have snuck through the escort screen. they have the same sonar sets and when you increase your speed to rise above the therm, they will detect you and react negatively to your approach {those bastages!}.

tell me this: were there escorts nearby? did they react just after the merchies reacted? :har:

war is hell. and the guy that said that never left the United States.

:Kaleun_Salute:

[Gray Lensman]

actually both TMO and FOTRSU have merchies with sonar.
and yes, they will detect you even if you have snuck through the escort screen. they have the same sonar sets and when you increase your speed to rise above the therm, they will detect you and react negatively to your approach {those bastages!}.

tell me this: were there escorts nearby? did they react just after the merchies reacted? :har:

war is hell. and the guy that said that never left the United States.

:Kaleun_Salute:


Really? I've never had merchants behave like they detected me with sonar. It's always been a visual blunder I made, usually with the scope.

[KaleunMarco]

Really? I've never had merchants behave like they detected me with sonar. It's always been a visual blunder I made, usually with the scope.

maybe not.:03:
what i posted is fact for TMO and FORTSU.
check out the Eqp/Sns files for the merchies or tankers. check out the Nippon tankers. they get sonar in late 43/early 44.

not sure about the other Megas like RSRD (prob) or RFB (poss) probably Not GFO since it is a "fix" for Stock.

you're just going to have to adapt and get sneakier. (is that even a word) :D

:Kaleun_Salute:

[Gray Lensman]

maybe not.:03:
what i posted is fact for TMO and FORTSU.
check out the Eqp/Sns files for the merchies or tankers. check out the Nippon tankers. they get sonar in late 43/early 44.

not sure about the other Megas like RSRD (prob) or RFB (poss) probably Not GFO since it is a "fix" for Stock.

you're just going to have to adapt and get sneakier. (is that even a word) :D

:Kaleun_Salute:


Oh, I believe you... I just never attributed their zig-zagging to them having sonar and only ever looked at the various sub .eqp files not the merchie files.

Jap merchies having sonar? Is that even historically accurate for WW2 or is it an attempt to make SH4 more challenging with these mods? That's pretty nasty also, considering the in-game SH4 AI sonar is always "on" whether you hear the pinging or not. No wonder Nicolas made his "launcher" mod that mitigates this always "on" behavior. All the more reason to use it. I just can't believe, historically, that Jap merchies were "pinging" away constantly on their sonar sets.

I've also never read any historical accounts where the author made mention of being detected by a Jap merchie using sonar. This is one of the gripes I have about SH4. Certain internal SH4 design mechanics prevent historical close-in penetrations that occurred with relative ease "before detection" historically, both with the "always on" sonar and nighttime visibility being such that you are always seen in-game trying to penetrate a convoy on the surface at night. Bubblehead1980 has been experimenting with some mods with some success to reflect these historical behaviors and accounts.

[Rinaldi]

maybe not.:03:
what i posted is fact for TMO and FORTSU.
check out the Eqp/Sns files for the merchies or tankers. check out the Nippon tankers. they get sonar in late 43/early 44.


Now this is news to me. I've never had them behave that way but then again I use lone merchants as practice for a more pressing attack and go through all the usual steps taken to reduce noise, aspect, etc.

[Red Devil]

I was at 100 feet depth, so certainly zero visuals. Thanks for all the above info, very interesting. I can attack a convoy with relative ease, getting inside the destroyer screens, but even then some merchants will suddenly change course and the convoy becomes haphazard. But not all the time. Maybe as it was stated, 1943 saw a turning point where sonar is on merchants but I have never been pinged by a merchant so it must be passive. I have been pinged by destroyers quite a lot. Tactics in a convoy dictate a quick attack, on at least 2 vessels, go deep, change course to that which the convoy was originally going, and once deep, (300-320) stay at slow, if rough weather, go to standard for as long as I can, leaving enough battery power to make an eventual escape, hopefully the convoy will begin to converge again, and I am waiting. The destroyers for some reason think I am still behind the convoy and continue search patterns. It works. Single shipping or pairs, no destroyers (unless liners) and it seems to be harder. Talking of liners, they do not take evasive action when I am sneaking in. I am at 300+ when the lead destroyers goes past, coming up to P depth after he has passed. No fast than 1/3 at this stage. I dont know if its in the game, but its a fact that Asdic ( sonar) was terrible in rough weather, almost 100% useless.

[jorgegonzalito]

It has happened now too frequently as to become a damn nuisance.

1. heading to get within range of a solitary merchant, 100 feet, slow ahead and when merchant is still out of range, it starts zig zagging. There is no way it knows I am there. Or two ships, out of range one turns about and does a runner whilst the other keeps coming!!

2. Radar off, heading into a port, or or home - nothing showing on blank screens and I keep getting radar hits??




In Silent Hunter the inexplicable things abound. It's a game designed to make life miserable for the player, regardless of realism or historical facts. The ships did not start the war with installed sonars, perhaps a few and then they were equipped over time, but in SH even the poorest fishing boat has it. Ridiculous situations like what happened to me, which I explain in another post: "The unsinkable merchant", serve as a sample engine for this topic.

[Red Devil]

Yeah, I read your post 'The unsinkable'

[KaleunMarco]

Jap merchies having sonar? Is that even historically accurate for WW2 or is it an attempt to make SH4 more challenging with these mods? That's pretty nasty also, considering the in-game SH4 AI sonar is always "on" whether you hear the pinging or not... I just can't believe, historically, that Jap merchies were "pinging" away constantly on their sonar sets.
i am pre-disposed to believe the same thing.
i have read dozens if not hundreds of books on the the PTO and not one mentions electronic sensors on merchies.
so, in the end, i suspect what i heard from a friend is true:it is an attempt to make SH4 more challenging with these mods.

and that's ok.
it's a game...although it is predisposed to act in one way, but that's ok.
despite being depth-charged and shelled, i am still here.:03:

i'm playing DW at the moment. and the escorts are murder if they detect you. i wonder if the Nicolas-mod would work with DW.
i am hesitant to use a TSR like that because SH4 gets real funky when you shell out to another app.

[Gray Lensman]

i am pre-disposed to believe the same thing.
i have read dozens if not hundreds of books on the the PTO and not one mentions electronic sensors on merchies.
so, in the end, i suspect what i heard from a friend is true:it is an attempt to make SH4 more challenging with these mods.

and that's ok.
it's a game...although it is predisposed to act in one way, but that's ok.
despite being depth-charged and shelled, i am still here.:03:

i'm playing DW at the moment. and the escorts are murder if they detect you. i wonder if the Nicolas-mod would work with DW.
i am hesitant to use a TSR like that because SH4 gets real funky when you shell out to another app.

I've not had any problem using Nicolas' launcher while running TMO. FotRSU is a different story, but I'm pretty much convinced now after 3 1/2 days of NON-corrupted game play with TMO, that all the problems I was having with FotRSU was internal to that mod itself regardless of any other opinions. I've been playing SH4 8 to 12 hours a day since I'm retired.... More if I wasn't distracted with outside yard work!

Important thing about Nicolas' mod is to be sure to enable it with Ctrl-Alt-t when you get to the SH4 main menu and BEFORE you load any saves. It'll give you a little "windows chime" sound to let you know you're good WITHOUT shelling out to look at the small launcher screen. Win10 Windows Defender will probably give you some issues since it's an unofficial executable and Windows is just trying to protect the system. It even "quarantined" the darn thing on me once and I had to jump some hoops to restore it. LOL, Snakes! Why'd it have to be snakes?

In the case of his launcher, you are not really shelling out to it during the game. It's already in place before launching SH4 and every time I save, I exit the game AND exit the launcher. During FotRSU I did get one "out of memory" error, but I think it was associated with the LAA being invoked a half dozen times and it could be it was building up some memory leakage.


edit> UPDATE: Nicolas Mod (the AI-FIX-3) for the last week was just giving the normal "false" alerts, but today Windows Defender started being specific about it containing a specific possible Trojan so I'm no longer recommending its usage. I'm not seeing any real signs of Malware activity but better safe than sorry.

[Red Devil]

A Gray Lensman out of memory, thats a good 'un :ping:

[Gray Lensman]

A Gray Lensman out of memory, thats a good 'un :ping:


I doubt seriously if the memory leak filled the entire 32 gBytes of Ram I have. More than likely it overfilled the 4 gByte area being used by the SH4 LAA executable. at which point it became LAU... "Large Address UNaware", or LAL "Large Address Lost" LOL

[Red Devil]

I was refering to the books by EE Doc Smith :har:

[Gray Lensman]

I was refering to the books by EE Doc Smith :har:


I know... Read the books several times. I adopted the name years ago (in my younger years) but over time it's taken on a new meaning for me since my hair is mostly gray/white and I have to wear readers now. The ole Gray Lensman just ain't what he used to be. LOL

[jorgegonzalito]

A sincere recognition to all those who have contributed their time, creating mods that allow to give a little more common sense to this game. My mood has changed a lot in recent weeks, and each mission that I undertake I am gradually increasing the level of realism. I am using numerous mods that solve a number of annoying issues, and also provide more fair rules of the game. Thank you all very much!

[Gray Lensman]

UPDATE: Nicolas Mod (the AI-FIX-3) for the last week was just giving the normal "false" alerts, but today Windows Defender started being specific about it containing a specific possible Trojan so I'm no longer recommending its usage. I'm not seeing any real signs of Malware activity but better safe than sorry.

[Red Devil]

I had a problem a while back with Malwarebytes throwing up a 'false positive'. It turned out that they were 'at war' with Iobit and a piece of software I had in my pc. So they made sure that any pc found with Iobit software in it threw up alarms. FPs just might be someone throwing a wobbly about someone else.

[Gray Lensman]

I had a problem a while back with Malwarebytes throwing up a 'false positive'. It turned out that they were 'at war' with Iobit and a piece of software I had in my pc. So they made sure that any pc found with Iobit software in it threw up alarms. FPs just might be someone throwing a wobbly about someone else.


I'm generally a little "loose" about warnings since there are a lot of "false" positives, but when I start getting specific Malware warnings from Win Defender, (some sort of alphabet soup coded gibberish), I can no longer ignore the situation. I don't want to spend several hours blitzing the machine and reinstalling everything.


Since this old (2010) software mod had been repackaged and recently reuploaded just this year (2020), I can't rule out that the repackage job just might have introduced something.

[Red Devil]

oh boy, did we go off track, must have been a dud torp :lost:

[Sniper297]

Some Japanese merchant ships were indeed equipped with sonar for defense, see page 7 in this;

http://www.fischer-tropsch.org/primary_documents/gvt_reports/USNAVY/USNTMJ%20Reports/USNTMJ-200B-0343-0412%20Report%20E-10.pdf

[Red Devil]

sniper - thats brilliant, many thanks. :Kaleun_Salute:

[KaleunMarco]

Some Japanese merchant ships were indeed equipped with sonar for defense, see page 7 in this;

http://www.fischer-tropsch.org/primary_documents/gvt_reports/USNAVY/USNTMJ%20Reports/USNTMJ-200B-0343-0412%20Report%20E-10.pdf

did you catch the date on the report? a lot of good it did our skippers and crews during the war!

[Red Devil]

yes, it was when US Intelligence hit japan big time finding out all they could.

[Sniper297]

"did you catch the date on the report? a lot of good it did our skippers and crews during the war!"

Only thing I could find with a quick search, pretty sure it was known during the war, especially when some of the marus started dropping depth charges by rolling them off the stern. :timeout: IJN ASW started out kinda lame, got a lot better toward the end of the war, including new tech like magnetic anomaly detectors and infra-red carried in ASW aircraft. Better coordination between planes and destroyers too, which was how they got the Wahoo. Gotta remember that a lot of that stuff wasn't documented because it was classified top secret during the war.

[Red Devil]

yes indeed. Which is why CIA etc flooded the Japanese mainland as soon as the surrender was signed.

something that might be of interest to you is Operation Downfall which were the US military plans for the invasion of japan proper. a million body bags were stored on Okinawa for the expected casualties.

www.39-45war.uk/downfall.html

[Moonlight]

^That was a cracking read. :up:

[KaleunMarco]

yes indeed. Which is why CIA etc flooded the Japanese mainland as soon as the surrender was signed.

something that might be of interest to you is Operation Downfall which were the US military plans for the invasion of japan proper. a million body bags were stored on Okinawa for the expected casualties.

www.39-45war.uk/downfall.html

try Hell to Pay by Giangreco (https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-DOWNFALL-1945-1947/dp/168247643X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1N1NI0JKJNEZM&dchild=1&keywords=hell+to+pay+operation+downfall+and+the+in vasion+of+japan+1945-1947&qid=1605476471&s=books&sprefix=hell+to+pay%2Caps%2C224&sr=1-1).

give it as a present to all of those Boomers who think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocidal war crimes.

[Gray Lensman]

Some Japanese merchant ships were indeed equipped with sonar for defense, see page 7 in this;

http://www.fischer-tropsch.org/primary_documents/gvt_reports/USNAVY/USNTMJ%20Reports/USNTMJ-200B-0343-0412%20Report%20E-10.pdf


That's hydrophones (listening equipment) not sonar. SH4 makes the merchants act as if they have sonar itself. Big difference.

[Sniper297]

Well, if you want to get persnickity, it would be passive sonar, and you're correct that the game doesn't model sonar very well. I was an Aviation ASW Tech 40 years ago, lots of schooling and experience with the AN/AQS-13/A dip sonar in the Sikorsky SH3 Sea King - hunted for Red October before anyone ever heard of Tom Clancy. :ping:

https://scontent-msp1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/1798536_689195187791431_918332513_n.jpg?_nc_cat=10 8&cb=846ca55b-ee17756f&ccb=2&_nc_sid=cdbe9c&_nc_ohc=7eewlq1C8ZcAX8x2Kmq&_nc_ht=scontent-msp1-1.xx&oh=f1dc35568337a4b6d66e77f25f8b7ba6&oe=5FDE69A1

Retracting the transducer, which consists of a hydrophone (barrel shape at the top) and projector (skinnier cylinder hanging from the bottom of the hydrophone, the part that pings). Can be used in active or passive mode, either way the hydrophone is the part that receives the sound waves or echo. The whole system was just called "sonar", including the "dry end" which was the electronics and sensor station inside the helicopter.

https://scontent-msp1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/11038997_909391539105127_6817096460298438910_n.jpg ?_nc_cat=109&ccb=2&_nc_sid=cdbe9c&_nc_ohc=RjyCn6aSY_QAX87V14Z&_nc_ht=scontent-msp1-1.xx&oh=934cf65edab758f483b8b22096dabfa7&oe=5FDD4092

Every sonar system has a hydrophone, passive only systems don't have a projector, but either way if you're making enough noise a good operator can get a bearing and make a good guess for the approximate range.

[KaleunMarco]

Well, if you want to get persnickety, it would be passive sonar, and you're correct that the game doesn't model sonar very well. I was an Aviation ASW Tech 40 years ago, lots of schooling and experience with the AN/AQS-13/A dip sonar in the Sikorsky SH3 Sea King - hunted for Red October before anyone ever heard of Tom Clancy. :ping:

yes, you did. and some of us are very happy with the job that you and your mates did.
:Kaleun_Salute:

[Red Devil]

we called it ASDIC in WW2, then sonar crept across the big pond ;)

[KaleunMarco]

we called it ASDIC in WW2, then sonar crept across the big pond ;)

yes. ASDIC was the Brit name, a Bells Labs guy simultaneously was developing SONAR, but they were twin brothers with different mothers.
as you know, hydrophones, or passive sonar, have been around since DaVinci. we never had any use for it until submersibles came along.

i always get a kick out of navy movies that include submarines and as soon as the film shows the sub we start hearing sonar pings. that's probably because if the screenwriter told the story the way it happened, the movie would get very boring watching the hydrophone operator sit there and basically, just listen. intently. there would be no activity, no sound, just a guy with a headset, trying to hear the enemy ships.
there was less activity than watching your kids play with their personal electronic devices. (not your kids specifically, anyone's kids:03:)

let the pinging begin!!!:ping::ping::ping::ping: