For those that are encountering the sound that's being heard when nearing Truk Island area, check your Hull Damage reading before and after the sound occurs.

I took a trip to see for myself Beginning Year, 1943. I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary until I was within the atoll area (the light colored ocean surrounding the Truk Island group). At Radar Depth (subs keel about 40 ft deep) the depth under my keel was around 24-27 ft....that's about 65 ft deep in most places, sometimes more, sometimes less. Seas were moderate to mild. I noticed when I heard the "sound", I checked my Damage Management screen and noticed a higher amount of Hull Damage had occurred from the digital readout. I'm suspecting the sound is coming from damage that's occurring to the sub due to the shallow water in the Truk area.

One way to find out is to run your sub aground to see if it sounds the same. I didn't get to check this because I was soon killed when I surfaced at night and the gun battery on one of the islands somehow spotted me and sunk me before I could do anything about it. Going to be getting around to those eagle eyed land lubbers soon!

Hello all. Rookie here. Have been following this thread with much interest. I can report that I have encountered "the sound" near Truk and had zero hull damage both before and after hearing it's deafening roar running FOTRS bp V 0.53. Preparing to install 0.56. Thanks and a request. TMO had me spoiled I guess. The external camera (not free camera) but fixed camera that moves with the sub. I liked it better in TMO because I could really zoom in. In FOTRS ULT I can zoom to a certain distance and get no closer. (Period key) Thanks for all you do guys. I'm having more fun with a computer than I have had in a long time. BTW...I stream SH4 on Twitch. Username: Immelmann_Burn.

Is that a whistle that I hear? :har: :har: :up: :salute:

A Warm Welcome To The Subsim Community > Immelmann
Subsim <> How To Donate <> See The Benefits <> Support The Community:salute:

btw Capn, I've "tweaked" the Batteries file also, and turned down some of the guns from "Veteran" to "Competent", and even a few "Novice" peppered about, though none of those near any of the "established" Japanese base locations from their WWI "winnings".

I have reproduced The "New" Sound rather reliably by opening the mission I made that is East of the 152°10' line (you have to zoom in a bit on the Chart to see it). I then drive West toward Truk (I'm about mid-way between the parallels), get beyond the line, and again, like in the original "The Sound!", you have to use TC, which I have not figured out the level yet, but it's gotta be above 2x, and I'm thinking it's 32x might be the one. Anyway, once you get West of the line, a change in the boat's elevation does it, if you're above periscope level. I'm looking into the "Dive! Dive! Dive!" sound sequence, and there is a "glitch" in the file as it quits, that I'm trying to cut completely off of the end of the file, and not introduce more glitching... I do not know that I have the correct sound, but that's about the last thing, other than the "ambiance" sounds, that plays before The "New" Sound goes off... Forthcoming experiment...

Edit 0735 Local: OK, I do NOT want to "color" anyone's perception, but if you all would play the "Collision_AntiSubmarineNet_int.wav" file ("Data / Sound" folder), and see if you think that's the "source"??? I can't figure the trigger, but it sure sounds awful familiar... :lol: Don't ask me how I found it... :roll: - Let's just say, that you are a really easy target for the shore batteries if you're stationary and close to the surface, and your deck is kind of sideways leaning...

That sounds about it!

The trigger?!?

How about a Sub Net sitting off the Truk Island groups Western coast line, and you've run into it?!? :D

Just need to take a look at those things to see if there's one in the area. Is it's Speed=0.00001??

Well, first of all, no American sub skipper would attack a boat the way you do. They would use radar and their problem and accuracy of information is precisely duplicated in the nav map. A real captain with radar would not use the stadimeter at all.

You and I use basically U-boat attack procedures, which don't require ship ID. Dick O'Kane used it and I've seen a couple reports where Fluckey used it too, called constant bearing technique by Americans. But the standard stadimeter stuff was what was primarily taught to American skippers. I don't understand why, knowing better, you insist on using the stadimeter now. After all, the Dick O'Kane attack method was developed after extensive conversations with YOU.

You would think that with a superior TDC with a position keeper that would mean that Americans would have a much better hit percentage than the Germans. In fact the opposite is true. The reason is that more than half the targets sighted during the war were misidentified. All that fiddling with the recognition manual exposed the fatal flaw of the stadimeter technique. Most of the ships on the ocean were not in the manual. And even when it was, the sub crew picked the wrong one. Of course, picking a ship with the wrong dimensions results in a wrong range. And wrong range results in misses.

Using constant bearing techniques eliminates target identification from being a factor in the attack setup. That results in a higher hit percentage. Using radar to get the range makes all that academic.

As Dick O'Kane said when his radar went out, "@#$#, there goes half my torpedoes, wasted." He said this because now he would have to use the freakin' stadimeter. You DID know stadimeter is a four letter word, didn't you?:haha::D:haha:

If that's the sub net, and I think it is, you'll hear the sound AND you will slowly take hull damage too. As CapnScurvy says, look at your hull damage meter to confirm this. If so, it's a sub net and you can go on to the next grating problem!

I would love to read a discussion on targeting where as many of you submarine aces are involved as possible.

ADDIT: maybe best not to pollute this thread though, and moreover what I have in mind is a "help the noobs/journeymen on their way to mastery" sort of thing. If anyone knows of a thread please point me there, or if you think I should just start a new one (assuming some of you will jump in there).

One of the things I did some time ago was to incorporate the German Radar digital readout for the U.S. Radar screen. It gives you an accurate readout, down to the meter. The Radar screen that I put into FOTRS Ultimate is going to give you a fairly accurate reading......you just have to make it yourself, and it's relying on you figuring out the approximate range.

There are two problems with both.

The German radar digital readout is only in Meters, it doesn't translate into Imperial units of measurement....no matter which unit of measurement you choose. The developers screwed up the coded hard files by not giving the readout both types of measurement. Since that's a hard coded thing....it is what it is.

The other problem is there is no way of "Sending" a found radar range to the TDC. The Sonar station has such a "command", but not the Radar. Since that's a hard coded thing too.....it is what it is. With OTC I put a "Range Dial" in-game to add a radar manual found range to the TDC, but, that's another story.

OK, as for The "New" Sound... If you run the mission I made where I always get the sound, but rename the Jap_Minefields.mis file to .bak or some other, there is NO sound that occurs. No matter what you do. If you run Stock with the mission that I'd made that I can always get the sound (mis file adjusted for Stock calls), I can NOT get the sound. There is a Jap_Minefields.mis file in stock, but there are no sub nets around Truk. My next task was to move the subnet on the East border of the Truk Lagoon, the portion of it that infringes on the 152° Longitudinal line, and no change. Still got The "New" Sound... so next I'm going to try to eliminate one element at a time from the Minefields file, and see if I can figure what it is. I'm also going through it with a text editor... maybe there's a "bad" call in it that doesn't show in the ME, but makes its presence known in the game... :salute: It's gotta be something about 58-60 deep...

Reporting on v0.56 Experience
 

So far I've noticed two things on my first patrol to Area 7; While surfaced at night, we encountered what my crew identified as a 'tugboat" that turned out to be an Armed Trawler. They peppered us with MG fire, causing about 3% damage to my Gar's hull. That started the crew shouting. Is there any way you are working to eliminate the shouting? Webster had it whipped in his "Stop the Shouting" mod, but I am reluctant to try adding it to FOTARS v.056.

The other thing that occurred after reloading a save to eliminate the crew shouting (drives me nuts!) was after spotting a fishing boat and diving to 100 feet at night (very dark night), I was sitting there not moving and fat, dumb and happy only to have a plane drop a bomb square on me! I know you are working on maybe toning down the AI, but a pilot hitting my exact spot with a bomb that doesn't go off until 100' deep is a bit much, even for Ducimus! This occurred on December 22 at about 0800 hours, six miles off the coast, and about 15 miles south of the entrance to Bungo Suido.

Otherwise, all is well so far.

Perhaps the plane was MAD - equipped... See, it's like this: the fishing boat sees you. They radio in a report. Plane comes along and drops the depth charge at the point of last report... Or maybe Superman was the co-pilot... sorry. Watch out for the armed merchant also, that looks like a Dutch (or was it Norwegian?? or something else maybe??) regular merchant, and it's really an armed merchant... lots of cannon, and you'll see them all of a sudden unfurl the swastika... As for the shouting, I wish there was a way that it would calm down after a few minutes, but we might have to adapt the "No More Shouting" to FotRSU, once we get the sounds finalized. I think we did have something similar in there for a while, but then the crew was too mellow and laid back... sort of like they'd found the hemp farm on one of the islands... "Like uh, dude, there's this like uh, plane thingie uh, and-uh, it's like, ya know? bombing us man? Totally bummer. Made a hole in that wooden slatted lounge area towards the back of the boat, man..."

Having played with the mod in 0.53 a good bit now (and now updated to 0.56 and dreading having to manual id ships now) I'd like to offer a few comments/suggestions. As an apprentice developer I know that ideas are worth a dime a dozen, and implementation is worth millions, so to the extent I'm able, I'm willing to try to help with anything. I reckon you guys do not have access to the source code (a real shame, but meh, I guess Ubisoft still stands to make good money on the game, not to mention SH5 and SH6 too . . . cannot blame them for protecting their IP) so I realize there are bound to be certain limitations. All that said, some comments/suggetsions:

1. Harbors are generally poorly protected. In my longest running campaign so far (up through about Aug '42) I sank something like 12 ships totaling in the 50k tons ballpark just by cruising into some harbors and lining up "cannot fail" shots. Invariably half these shots failed (so the dud/stochastics of torpedos seems about right) but nonetheless, at the cost of 3 to 4 torps per boa on average, I was getting high rates of kills. Easily 4 times what seemed to be tallying up in the radio reports from other skippers.

The harbors where this was quite effective were: Kushiro, Saipan, Garapan, Urakawa and (if memory sreves) Myakazi. On the way to hit these places I also sank quite a few other ships, so it wasn't like this was all I did. But as you can see: not prime homeland bases, and some not even home islands (Saipan and Garapan). It may be that if I were to try this in Osaka, Hiroshima, Tokyo, etc. I would not be so lucky, but I haven't done that yet (starting a new career now).

If memory serves, sound detection devices were a standard feature at even the smallest of ports, so attacking a port was necessarily a risky venture. While it is true the IJN had a shortage of long-legged ASW ships that could tag along with task forces and merchant convoys, I believe they did have plenty of 2nd and 3rd string boats that either had hydrophones and depth charge racks, or could have easily been outfitted with them. Even a veritable dinghy with a top speed of 12 knots would at least pose some protective benefit. I'd have to dig up details on exact designs, and numbers of such boats, but I have the capacity to do that if it is desired, the upshot of all this being: most IJN harbors should have at least some additional ASW protection, even the hinterlands. Perhaps it would only be 75% coverage but I get the impression that, right now all the smaller peripheral ports are effectively unprotected.

Having sub-chasers, much less destroyers at every single port (which I believe TMO did?) seems to be taking "realism" too far in the other direction. IJN ASW resources were never abundant as far as I'm aware, but there was at least _some_ degree of ASW capacity at most ports where any ships of note might make a call.

2. Escort computer opponents (CO) are too aggressive in closing to point-blank / depth charge range, and do not make effective use of their guns while their target is surfaced. I don't know the details of all the boats, but I reckon most of the destroyers that would be used in escort roles, and even the subchasers must have guns that are capable of 9 or 10,000 yard shots, if not 16k. Nonetheless, they rarely seem to open fire until about 4,500 or 5,000 and what they spend most of their time doing is closing the distance head on toward their target--effectively reducing them to one or even "half" of a gun depending on how effective the front turret is at shooting straight ahead (I see that many of their designs had a distinct up turn on the bow so I'm not sure). What they obviously seem to strive for, across the board is to get close and either shoot at point-blank range (which they are not really that effective at anyway), ram the sub/force it to dive and then pelter it with depth-charges. If sub behaves "normally" and dives at nearly the first sight of an ASW equipped warship, this script makes sense. But when the sub does NOT dive and engages the convoy with the deck gun, this script does not make sense. Indeed, if the sub is doing a lot of shooting, attempting to close the distance at all may not be wise because it evens the odds to some extent: while the DD is closing rapidly he is limited to only about as much firepower as the sub can dish back at him. While it is true that the destroyer is presumably a bit more durable and may have a higher caliber front turret (and/or a multi-barrel turret) it is also true that the destroyer has a much higher profile above water line and is in some respects a "sitting duck" if the sub skipper is ballsy/cheeky enough not to dive when doctrine would suggest that is the sane thing to do.

Instead, what escorts really should do is move away from the merchants they are protecting at an oblique angle (so that over shots at them have as low chance as possible of hitting a merchant instead) and begin a series of maneuvers that allows them to make use of their advantage in number (if not effectiveness and accuracy) of guns. This means approaching the sub at an oblique angle (not head on and not at a right angle); I would guess that, in generally a course that is somewhere between 25 to 35 if the sub is moving away or 100 to 110 if it is closing should allow most of the guns to engage while also closing distance (assuming 0 is parallel to the subs course with the approach DDing going in the same direction as the sub, 90 is perpendicular and 180 is parallel heading at the subs bow). Speed should be maintained at a moderate pace, if possible slightly faster than the sub seems to be going.

If the sub submerges, then switching to the standard "barge right 'em and stuff depth charges down his periscope shaft" script makes sense.

Even without any tweaking of IJN computer-opponent destroyer gunnery that sort of change in destoyers might make them a bit more effective.

None of this may be possible to implement and if so, my apologies for lengthy but pointless post.

Just to confirm your findings, I used a Save(using .53Beta) where the "sound" reproduces every time on loading this save. I'm West of Truk just NW of the western entrance, on the surface when radar contact is made with a WSW bound convoy. When I rename that Jap_Minefields.mis file, e.g., Jap_Minefields_bak.mis file, and re-load that Save, the "sound" is gone! Your on to something, hoping you finally nail the cause.