Was in no way saying anyone had to patrol submerged.Just saying since the pre war tactic of being a slightly mobile minefield, just staying under during day and surfacing at night was very common first couple years of the war, I began to follow the doctrine if playing in 41, 42 and early 43 because it adds to the challenge.Once I get into late 43 and on I stay on surface most of the time as they did in RL. Up to the player of course. One boo boo they made is giving us the TBT from day one of the war, US subs didnt do night surface attacks ( few brave skippers who winged it and did night surface attacks without training) until 43 or so.Again, up to player.

What they don't tell you is that the reason tactics changed wasn't that the captains changed their minds. The ostriches who hid all day were fired and sent to pound sand on the beaches of Japanese infested islands and new blood, who were willing to fight their boats were brought in to get the job done.

The one who made that happen was Admiral Lockwood, who wasn't afraid to make wholesale changes necessary to get some production out of the boats. It wasn't as if they were really safe hiding underwater all day anyway. It wasn't as if changing the plan to surfaced patrol was going to cost more American lives. It was that those sacrifices would actually have some justification when the submarines were producing victory instead of pursuing some pipe dream of just trying to survive.

Lockwood had no sympathy for that view. You fought your boat or you became cannon fodder on a beach somewhere. At least there you weren't endangering 60 other good men.

yea, makes you wonder how things wouldve turned out if sub force had not been in the hands of a wise man like Lockwood. I knew Captains didnt suddenly change their mind, the ostrichs were sent packing and the new guys were given free reign for the most part to sink, sink and sink some more.

Not sure if youve ever played a patrol, esp an early war patrol using the old tactics of staying submerged all day and surfacing at night, what a different game, give it a try in early war if you havent, you seem to like a challenge Robbins:salute:

Lockwood saved the subs skins no doubt. he also listened to the captains reports about the magnetic detonators. Nobody else did.

Another point is the early war Captains were under orders to stay submerged all day, during pre-war training if even your periscope was sighted during wargames you were disiplined and could even lose your command.

To call these men cowards or ostrichs is a dis-service to them. Many could not fight their boats and lost their commands because alot of the Torps couldn't hit a anchored target at point blank range.

We all have that friend that knows everything and you can not change their minds until they are completely proven wrong. Thats how the Navy Brass was and they risked these mens careers and lives because they just couldn't be wrong.

I've found that before you get an SJ, patrolling submerged gives you a greater detection range at times with the sonar than your visual search. You can then surface and run down the sonar bearing until you pick them up.

As a player of WW2 subsims I confess my sin ... I enjoy the pre-radar era. I like sonar work. I might also add that even in the "radar era" the passive hydrophone may well be the "sensor" of choice under many circumstances.
BUT
I would never drain my batteries to cover a veeery modest area while a good combination of surface patrolling plus some "dips" for sonar work works better (more area actualliy patrolled and your batteries are always full). Whenever I "dip", I keep my speed is 1 kts or less and I do so for less than 15-20 min. Then on the susrface for 1-2 hours then another dip. Actually It is more role playing on my part, as ingame fleetboats seem to behave with a full sonar capacity even while surfaced (something that doesn't feel quite right :hmmm:).

Good point warlord, not fair to tag them all as ostrichs or cowards.Many were just operating as trained and ordered.However, some continued to do so even after they were allowed to operate in other manners.LCDR Donald McGregor, the first Skipper of the USS Seahorse comes to mind.Slade Cutter was his XO and they clashed because of McGregor's ultra conservative, ostrich approach, if I recalle correctly he even passed up some prime targets.Read that in the book MARU KILLER by Dave Bauslog, great read.Cutter did say in the book to be fair to McGregor, it's the way he was trained but admits he was on the line of cowardice.McGregor had also been removed from one command but managed to get assigned to Seahorse because he was well connected.McGregor was out after some unproductive patrols and Cutter took over.Sure you know about Cutter but he went on to sink many ships while in charge of Seahorse.

Heh, i know of a better "cheat" then that. Don't bother to submerge, and just man the hydrophones periodicly. The AI crewman will only respond to contacts within the confines of the sensors specs (9km, 15km, 20, whatever), but you the player can hear much much further with them regardless. It's a short coming that was carried over from SH3.

So, a fleetboat with chin mounted passive sonar, need not even submerge. Just man it yourself and scan carefully. Under normal usage (IE, letting your sonarman do his job), upgrades to sonar supercede the WCA sonar. Which only has a 9KM max range in TMO. Other sonar upgrades have a range of 15 to 20KM. So the game will ignore the 9km sonar and use the 15KM sonar. But none of that matters due to this "bug" with the player listening through it. If you know when to stop and listen, you can intercept quite a bit. :shifty:

Not a bug. Just an incentive for the player to "man" the station himself. Similar effects have been around since Aces Of the Deep in some form or another.



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I dunno, being able to hear 30 KM away in a set of hydrophones specified with a max range of 9KM seems like a bug to me. *shrug*

Technically you are correct. Visual range is about 11 km conservatively. Sonar range is a ridiculous 30 km. Provided you are anchored, your area searched is 9 times greater with sonar. But on patrol you are not anchored.

If submerged, you are traveling at 1 knot to save batteries. Let's pretend you can go three knots and still have batteries at the end of the day just to be generous. So in 12 hours you can go 36 miles, searching a path 36 miles wide (18 mile radius is 36 mile diameter). Let's again be generous and square off the corners of your search path, giving you even more unrealistic search area. But we're trying to show that even fudging the numbers in favor of sonar, sonar sucks. Sucks badly. So you have searched an area 36x36 miles or 1,296 square miles.

Now lets take this puppy up on the surface where she belongs. Now we only search a 10 mile radius, but our search path is 9 knots times 12 hours long, 102 miles. 102 times 20 equals 2,040 square miles.

The winner by a resoundingly ludicrous margin: the surfaced boat with the lesser search range. In real life they could actually search a wider radius with high periscope than they could with sonar, resulting in a 10/1 advantage for the surfaced boat. If you have radar that is about the ratio.

No matter how you cut it, Patrolling submerged is foolhardy. You're burning up all your fuel charging batteries. If you are lucky(?) enough to find a target you have depleted batteries and are in no shape to go into combat. Your boat is just a travesty of fatal errors stacked on top of each other.

The ostrich strategy is totally without merit in every respect as a default way of hunting. It is not safe, it does not find targets. Do the math any way you want. It is moral bankruptcy of the highest degree.

I agree its a bad tactic, but if you roleplay then until at least mid 42 its the historical way to do it. Realism is a very subjective subject when dealing with any type of sim so its up to each player to decide how he/she commands the boat. Some say the game is most realistic when set to 100% realism, however i doubt any captain did all the crew members jobs like in the sim. There really is no right or wrong way to play the game, if your having fun then your doing it right IMO.

Also i don't doubt for a minute that some Captains continued to spend the day submerged long after the order was retracted and those men deserved to lose their command. It must have been hard on these men to spend years training one way only to find out it does not work well in wartime and having to unlearn all that. New blood was needed, however before the change these men were just doing it the way the Navy instructed them to do it and their lack of success should reflect more on the people making the rules than the Captains following them.

I roleplay as the Captain, meaning i give the orders and the outcome is based on how well my crew performs. I spend my days underwater until mid to late 42, I use Auto-Targeting, I hardly ever man the sonar station but i will look at the Radar once in awhile. I count on my crew to do there jobs and for me thats the way i enjoy the game the most. I never use time compression when leaving port until i am several miles away and when i return i raise my scope if i have a successful mission (Wish i had a Broom! LOL) and dock the boat before i end the mission. I am not above using the external cameras, but never during combat and i have map contacts on to simulate the crew updating my map. I do use Limited Fuel and batteries, Realistic Repair and Loading Times and the other realistic settings.

Some would say thats unrealistic, but for me it makes me feel like i am a Captain of a Fleetboat. I don't knock anyones playstyle, To each his own.

Nice Thread! Alot of wisdom passed along here, gang. :ping:

It seems to me I read somewhere that hydrophones worked at decks-awash. SOOOO...what I'm gonna do is: stay on the surface and every hour or so dip down a wee bit, all stop, kick "Ears" off the stack and do a sweep or two myself. Back to ahead whatever let the deck air dry in the sun and be on my way...How's that sound? Oh, I'm a pilot and planes just scare the beans outa me so I'm playing '42 with a Gato sporting radar.

Your best bet if you want to do the dunk and listen is to listen at periscope depth or slightly below. Your acoustic sonar head is that thing rotating in front of the bridge sticking above the deck. It hears lower frequency sounds, which travel further than the supersonic sounds the two heads below the forward torpedo room do.

What I do is submerge about every 30 to 60 miles. At 9 knots, that's every three hours go to periscope depth, do a couple of sweeps, surface and continue for another 3 hours for 30 miles. Now if you go six hours or about 60 miles, there's a chance you could pick up a new target that will be behind you. It's not a tragedy but can be avoided by dipping every 30 miles.

I think most of us have a tendency to listen too often rather than not often enough. If you dunk every 30 miles you'll pick up as many contacts as if you were able to run the entire distance submerged at 9 knots, which you can't!:D