When you said "straight runner" re the Stallion, did you mean chaning it from a ballistic to cruising flight profile? If so, I don't like it, I think these are regarded as ballistic weapons...

The APR-3 torpedo payload of the Stallion will run straight along its launch bearing (relative to the path of the missile that fired it) with a vertical snake.

Of course, the Stallion will remain a ballistic missile.

Looking at NavWeaps - there aren't many sites that list anything on the Type 89...

From a plausibility standpoint, I find it incomprehensible that you think it is more likely that a Japanese electric torpedo can do 20 knots more than the DM2A4 that is 10 years newer (and both use silver-zinc) than the idea of a Russian middleweight electric torpedo that is almost three times the mass of the Mu-90 and has more than three times the non-warhead mass (250-50=200 vs 720-60=660 - which goes into things like propulsion and the battery space) might just be able to crawl out 7 more km than the Mu-90 at slow speed.

Other sources suggest it is thermal, which is much more likely considering the speed and range involved.

Probably, you fell into Tony's (webmaster of NavWeaps and Warships1) old anti-plagiarism canary trap:


It is not there anymore, but was when NavWeaps was still the weapons pages of Warships1.com - and the pages hadn't been updated that much since then - mostly pictures added but if the text changed substantially I never saw it happen.

The "silver-zinc" stuff is almost certainly the set-trap. As an aside, I'm pretty sure the set-trap for the Russian Post-WWII torp page is most likely the "solid-fuel turbojet" for the APR-3 (maybe a solid fuel driving a pumpjet, but a turbojet?) It seems like the mistakes are deliberate set absurdly so as to snare stupid, lazy copiers but not lead honest, smart people into ingesting false data.

I entirely agree with the elevation idea, BTW.

Oh, good. I almost feel like Christmas now - I'm getting a bunch of wishes solved at once. The vertical snake sounds really good because as it is, we can't set which side of the layer a SUBROC's torp drops in :D

As a sub driver, I think the fact you can be right over the top of me (and AFAIK I won't hear you because we IIRC disabled it to avoid hearing missiles as they flew atop the water or somethin) and drop your torps at point blank range plenty of penance for the fact you don't have a wire.

Well, since the Japanese don't export their technology, to the best of my knowledge, they are free to upgrade whatever they want at any time and any price and no one would know the difference.

Germany, Russia, and the United States (to some degree) have export considerations that are factored into their design.

The Type 89 might cost an absurd amount of money per round, I dunno what the major limiting cost factor for an electric heavyweight torpedo might be, but I wouldn't count out the capabilities of the Japanese to engineer warmaking equipment.

Your source is pretty good there is seems Kaz.

I'm actually going to go with the Type 89 being thermal, and I'm also going to reduce it's snake pattern.

Actually, the failure to export is not really an advantage. The ability to export means lowering costs due to economy of scale and the ability to get someone else to test out your weapons - maybe even in real combat without any "personal" risk to yourself.

They are also limited by how they have 1% GNP, and that everything in Japan costs so much, exacerberated by how they deny themselves economy of scale to preserve the production line - weapons crawl out.

I won't count them out either. In fact, if it can do 30km at 70 knots with a thermal motor, that's already a very impressive capability. In kinematics at least, it will be clearly superior to the early British Spearfish (23000 at 60+) and pre-ADCAP Mk48 (32000 at 55), not to mention the UGST, and arguably superior even to the later variants of either (whose estimated range capabilities are not as well defined, but there is only so much you can do to increase efficiency in a basic design and fuel and the drag will go up immensely due to the increased speed, so it'd be a nut to chew just to assume they can keep their old ranges at their new max speeds).

What turns "impressive" into "ten foot giant" is the idea they can do it with electrics, with silver-zinc batteries no less...

Well, I already said that I think it is indeed a thermal torpedo and will model it as such. :)

Well, I can't see you reply while I'm replying myself. Maybe next time I'd push the Refresh button to check before committing.:D

I don't know if Type-89 is electric torp. I find hard to believe that this not newest weapon could get 70kts on electric batteries and with a good range!
The best current electric HWT the Black Shark is capable of 50+ kts (not more, you can't get enough power output from batteries to get more) with good range, and it's batteries are for sure more modern than those of Type-89. So for me either it's not electric or doesn't have such speed...

Oneshot - to check depth of sub target, maybe overfly it few times at different alts and see where you stop getting MAD signal ? And with spiral search pattern (circling and going down) you don't have to know exact tgt depth, just if you set correct depth torpedo will get there faster, without spiraling. I would vote for realistic seeker cones for air dropped torps.

LW - to be sure we are thinking about same things :-)
I think you are talking about spiral pattern going down and up ? Helical is straight but "snakeing in both bearing and alt" like a horizontal screw, something like very streatched horizontal spiral... for air dropped it would be spiral I think - it would circle but descent all the time slowly, or second option is to simply increase depth after each circle by 100-200fts or so.

About APR-3 - the reason it searches without starting up it's engine is first that it has limited range, and even more limited running time, so it searches falling gravitational in the water. If it did few circles on engine, it would probably burn out fuel before intercepting target. Second reason would be that active seeker would have very limited range at speed of over 70kts (wahsed out), but it can detect far when torp is slowly descending gravitationally, that's why so big (for Russian torp) det range up to 2.5km probably. When it detects target it starts it's engine and runs for intercept, quite possible that it reaquires it only from shorter range at full speed.

So I would try to emulate the real way it works, it's a pity that we can't set a buoyancy for torpedos then it could fall down slowly without engine... all can be done probably is emulate torp fuel and range limits by doctrine calcs and run it first at 10kts or so searching, only after detection set max spd and count range (or rather mission time) from that moment. I'm not sure than very fast but short ranged APR can be usefull in straight running mode for SUBROCs, and what if it falls bahind or by side of the target ? And if you set it to fall short, it may be too short for it's small range...

To prevent very fast torps (over 55kts) from doing strange things while turning, you have to increase it's database turn radius slightly, untill it behaves correctly. If you remember there was a problem with stock 65kts Type-40 torpedo, not only the torp speed bug was showing, but it was doing "vertical snake" while running sometimes, couldn't stabilise on it's depth...
Little (10-20%) increase of turn radius corrected the problem.

For ADCAP active seeker without snake the cone would be 60deg horizontal and 25-30deg vertica... What is wide snake in passive mode for ? To see it's passive ? OK but why wide ? Passive seekers in db always had wider cones than active, but 60deg (+/-60 so 120deg) like for active seems more than enaugh, if you want snake pattern to show it's in passive mode, maybe left the 30deg snake, not wider ? It's already limited in speed to 40kts in passive mode, 45deg snake reduces effective speed significantly... By the way, I set active speed limit in doctrine to 55kts, if you allow ADCAP to have higher max speed (some people estimate it for 63kts based on ADCAPs engine available max fuel flows) then it would be transit only, after active enable it would slow down to 55kts anyway :-). Maybe I would make it to speed up to max again when homing and tgt being closer than 1000yd (from this range it should keep target track even slightly washed out).... hmm nice idea, you'd see that torp is going for kill by observing terminal speed change :)

About Naval Weps and anti-plagiarism canary trap: the APSET-95 entry with absurd values can be this just well :-) also some torpedo calibers are off (easily noticeable error).

Wouldn't a circle/helix make more sense for something dropped from above????

Gotcha. Well that is a little bit more difficult to model using what we've got, but too much so... I'll think I can just add the depth control function to the snake pattern and we'll have just this.... or maybe just a big mess. Well, that's the fun!

Ok, here's the problem, I have to keep the range of the APR consistent with the range the AI should be firing them at. If I have the torpedo start out its already limit range at a slow or very slow speed, it will eat up a large amount of its already limited range and then when it fires its rocket it will shutdown almost immediately. Also, given the fact that the ***torpedo doctrine cannot undergo a state change when newtrack*** I can't do the terminal homing speed mod, at least not on target tracks if we want the torpedo to slow down again.

To simulate at this point the idea that torpedoes can outspeed their active sensors represents a major change in design this late in the game for me, and only for a limited number of torpedoes that also happen to be the most advanced (Spearfish, ADCAP, Type 89, APR family), and of course this only comes up as an issue because of our ability to push the phsyics engine past 55kts for torpedoes. For the Player ADCAP, this ought to be fairly straightward. I want to add a PassiveEnabled and ActiveEnabled variable set anyway, so the hard part is getting it to work with the physics, although I had to tackle this anyway for the passiveenable function.

This sucks to know at this point for the rest to do this, but I can, so I will.

The reason I would do this is to allow the player to fire a passive torpedo to linger in an area, something like the circle pattern that is being removed, but in my opinion more effective in searching an area, although less so in blocking a path, although using torpedoes like that is not necessarily in my personal tactical doctrine. :p

The Stallion is for use at long range... if the target is at long range, you probably don't have anything but a bearing. Thus, with a weapon as short ranged as the APR if you can estimate your lead, firing a straight shot weapon with a verticle snake (or helix) is more effective than a circle torpedo, since you have a wider margin of error on the one parameter you have the least information about, range.

In fact these weapons ought to be VERY effective, that's why its good that the range and seekers are very limited.

The non-SUBROC version of these weapons on the Helix and other russian ASW aircraft will retain the normal circle/helix function.

Ok, here's what I'm going to do with helix function, assuming I can get it to work right.

All LWT's will have a verical change applied to them for the snake mode as well, which is the helix I believe amizaur was talking about. They will also retain the depth change on the circle mode as I set it currently.

For the player, you can set the Floor and Ceiling to be within 200ft of each other, and that will disable the depth change on searchdepth.

Another good reason why I've been waiting to do the database.

This would be a great time however to get ALL the ideas out... so anyone have anything else for the torpedoes in LWAMI4, I really need to finish this!

Cheers,
David

Sometimes, it really is better to be lucky than good.

The oscillating depth search function that I scripted for the circle search, works perfectly with the snake search function as well!

So now, the only change I need to make it to assign the LWT's in the database separate doctrines with the variable depth search and give the HWT's a doctrine without these features.

Oh happy day.

Cheers,
David

Ok, here's the problem with the active homing speed reduction.

The APR has to move at its max speed right off the bat and it always enables right away, since it has such a short range. That means it has to have a seeker that can track at 68kts, even if it has a limited range.

So does that mean the ADCAP, Spearfish, and Type 89, amongst the most advanced *heavyweight* torpedoes in the world can't track at under 65kts? (which is the max speed I'm going to have for these, probably 60-61 for ADCAP and Type 89 and 65-66kts for spearfish, whatever the physics lets me do).

I find that inconsistency problematic. And given that these torpedo are thermal torpedes anyway, this will only come into play when they are near the surface anyway, since the depth limits their speed, these torpedoes will rarely be over 60kts when they are running.

I've come to the conclusion that this sensor speed washout is really only an issue because these torpedoes have very large sprint out speeds that we can't even model because of the phsyics engine. Yes, if we could have a 80kts running spearfish and 70kts running adcap, then yes, I would obviouly impliment this, but at this point, I'm not convinced that an adcap can't track over 55kts, at least to some degree.

So, at this point, given that we are only looking at 60-63 kts ADCAP near surface only and 65-66kts running Spearfish near the surface only, and a APR that cannot have these features, I'm not going to impliment the Active Homing Speed limits. I'm also going with the idea that just about everything in the game has some plausible "upgrade margin", since we are simply adding new things entirely in other places.

For those of you who are diehard realists, I encourage you to try to mod, and see if what you make is 1) fun to make 2) fun to play. I'm having a blast doing this, so as long as I'm having fun, I'm going to feel the need to take liscense when it's a matter of hours of scripting for 3kts in limited circumstances. :)

Cheers,
David