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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.
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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:). |
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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. |
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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*
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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 |
Ahhh! I thought I was using the doobies under the chin...Thanks RR...SK
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Even without radar, using late-war tactics in the early war shows how much more effective the US sub force tactics became as the war continued. There really wasn't any way for the captains to have figured out the tactics in advance; the US (along with the Japanese) always assumed subs would be scouts and adjuncts to fleet actions, and trained accordingly. |
Does anyone have some actual data/info on the hydrophones performance on surface (at varius speeds) versus "listening" submerged (at varius depths). I always was under the impression that you must "dip" for proper hydrophone "work".........
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The disadvantage is that supersonic sounds are refracted, reflected and absorbed much more easily than the lower frequency sounds of the acoustic hydrophone head. So although the precise direction the high freq sounds are coming from can be more precisely determined, they are much more prone to refraction and reflection on the way to your sub than lower frequency sounds. That precise directional determination may not be worth the paper it isn't written on. Range is much shorter with supersonic sound because it is absorbed much more readily. In order to do a proper long range sonar sweep in real life, they submerged to periscope depth or below, depending on acoustic sonar for long range and supersonic sonar in conjunction with the supersonic to fully develop the characteristics of a closer target. The game doesn't begin to render the sophisticated (sorry modern submariners! I understand it's not sophisticated by today's standards.) array of filters available to glean hidden information from sound signals that were incredibly more varied than the very few recordings we hear repeated exactly time after time in the game. With sonar, there is very little similarity between the game and real life. |
Thanks RR,
for a moment I thought Ubi got it right and I was wrong concerning the ART of listening (with and without quotes) :DL . |
UBI getting something right? :haha::har::rotfl2:
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Look, you gotta realize that for Ubi to "get it right" they would have needed hundreds of recordings. They would have had to have been able to manipulate those hundreds of recordings so you could count propeller rotations, hear continuous and continuously varying background noise.
The would have to have had own ship noises dependent on engine speed, which engines are running, different depth, what activities are going on aboard and the damage state of the submarine. The would have to have refraction, reflection and absorption of sound varying by frequency of sound, wave state, temperature gradient, thermal layers, underwater obstacles, plant life, etc. They would have to reproduce all the filters and all he switches in the real sonar, and each of the adjustments would have to realistically change the sound you hear, multiplying the necessary number of sound samples by a factor of at least 10. And when they were finished, all you would have is a sonar simulator. There would be no more bandwidth left for the rest of the submarine! Ubi did really well, given the state of the art with computers and software. |
Short cut methods, simplified tables, randomization factors and plain old talent may produce an interesting game without the need of a Cray supercomputer. In our case something as per a "dampening" factor for surface hydrophone work could urge the player to "dip" for more "productive" hydrophone work. After all it is a game not the navy's secret nuclear sub training simulator........
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