You're absolutely right goldorak, I don't know why I'm not thinking clearly. I must be having brain overload from all these contacts, god I HATE trying to cover everything in high-contact environments. I guess I was so busy with the sonar station that I never even thought to pop up to PD and take some pictures. On the other hand, I'd picked up some of the traffic pretty far away, like 20 nm which I believe is outside visual range.

It's funny, in the scenarios I'm playing now TMA is no longer really a problem, but SONAR is such a pain in the ass. Trying to keep situational awareness and tag only certain contacts in the mix is a real headache. The main problem is that multiple contacts share similar bearings far too often and, coupled with mirror contacts from ships on my other side, I almost never know which freqency lines go with which class.

Hint hint, nudge nudge:

http://www.commanders-academy.com/fo...ead.php?t=3961

This program by someone with the username "Heinrich Liebe" used to be on subguru.com, but it seems Bill linked to the wrong file.

Take note, the latest version of that file can be found in the file repository at the CADC. I've deleted the attachment to the post and instead included a link to the file repository.

Btw. if anybody has the converter files for 3DSMax 3.1 for DW, please upload them to the file repository and send me a pm afterwards. Thanks

To me the correct way is to track by SONAR. Not always you can track by periscope, if there is hostile air around I wouldn't go to the surface certainly. And... It is not to be assumed that surface contacts (especially if hostile) don't change course/speed. If I am not supported by surface vessels or excellent intel I wouldn't go to the surface anyway (ship's reactivity sux).

If you manage a good classification of your contacts you can focus on the hostile/assumed hostile ones for your TMA work (good classification means good classification in the NAV-MAP). What is certainly not hostile goes green, what's unsecure yellow, what's hostile/assumed hostile goes red). Only if you're going to attack you need a good solution on all the rest around your target. Obviously, try to merge your trackers as much as possible.

Your question about the Hull array, I don't know if things changed lately, but the hull array was primarily there to classify, and not to track.

Hey Nexus7, good points about hostile air cover and such. I do think one of the biggest problems with DW is that my scope/masts can't be detected, so I try to play as if they could be as much as possible.

I guess I am having a bit of a problem when it comes to classification, especially in scenarios where there are surface hostiles mixed in with the surface neutrals. I generally try to have a tentative classification and rough TMA before a contact gets within 10 nm if possible when driving a nuke. When driving a Kilo of course, it's whatever range I can get out of the scope and little sonar suite which is often slightly less than 10 nm.

I was playing a scenario whose title escapes me ATM, but it invovled the interception and sinking of a Chinese cargo ship near Panama. The scenario starts me out with very little info other than that there is a cargo ship in the area with some warship escorts, but no general position is stated or marked on the map. There is what seems to be a plethora of contacts at the start and it took me about half an hour just to sort all these out from their mirrors and one another. Because they were basically all between 90 and 200 degrees, they tended to have tracks nearly on top of one another which made classification EXTREMELY difficult. I don't really have time to turn off the filter and go through the whole list for every contact, so, knowing there were no other subsurface vessels out there, I simply classified most of them as unknown surface. The only ones I could pick out right away were the ones that were pinging, but even so, the track were all so close in bearing it was hard to know which TA contacts to merge with the active intercept tracks. So how do you guys deal with situations like this? I was unable to pick out the cargo ship for about two hours, by which point I had traveled at maximum tactical speed to a point SW of my start in hopes of spreading the contacts out a bit without getting too close. However, even with this maneuver many of them stayed stubbornly close on the TA, though they did shift about a bit. It seems there are just some environments where there are simply too many contacts clustered together to make manual sonar operation anything but a nightmare. And there really were only about ten or twelve ships in the scenario, they were just all in the same area.

In RL, I would assume a sonar operator would have more time to pick out and classify each contact as they would not all be appearing simultaniously at random ranges and speeds. A real sub would be in transit to the location of the intercept and so would pick up surface traffic as it came into range in a much more gradual manner. I would also think that in RL I would get at least a rough idea of which direction to look in for the Chinese convoy and more likely an estimated transit path. Oh well, this one is more the scenario designer's fault than DW's.

Basically it's unpossible/unreal to give you any kind of answer on a simulator that i dont' know anymore.

When you insert the object "RL, Real life", then you would need years of school to still raise questions.

My personal battle is against people acting stupid.

Oh well, I've been trying my best NOT to act stupid or ask stupid questions. My knowledge of (ahem) RL naval warfare is basically nonexistent as I have never even had a conversation with anyone from the navy and there aren't many real life accounts of modern naval operations in audiobook format (I am visually impaired). I was simply extrapolating from what I have picked up here and there on this and other forums. However, I do still think that the way most DW scenarios thrust the player into an immediately contact rich environment with almost no intel or link data makes picking out and tracking contacts a much more difficult task than it ought to be. Were it not for the time constraints of this being a game which should be fun (i.e. not have hours of play with nothing going on) I would prefer to start a little further out from the fray so I could classify and track contacts as they are detected, not have to sort out a dozen all at once while having no idea whether one of them might be an immediate threat.

The only turnaround to this is
- have another person doing sonar (multistation)
- turn autocrew ON
- show truth...

Of course it is pretty normal that classification is a relatively difficult task in a sub... I guess we are way limited in terms of available means to classify stuff. I guess in RL the signature is more exact and different than in our NB frequencies...

For this reason, a scenario with tons of stuff around quickly shows the limits of the simulator... (all russian subs, frequency(1)=50.0000 hmmmmmmmmm. I don't know if the MODS changed that).

btw... I didnt mean that you're acting stupid.