Roger that..

This is the plan. Pillboxes and coastal bunkers should surround the whole perimeter of Europe (no more patrolling coastal waters on surface), with higher density around ports where they should be equipped with searchlights and better visual sensors. :up:

As for magnetic loops, even though each sensor available in game has its shortcomings I still hope that we can find a proper way to emulate them. Relying only on visual sensors would make their detection too weak though (=no detection when submerged, reduced detection with fog, at night/dusk and on rough seas) :hmm2:

Never tried to place coastal guns underwater :hmmm:
Making them random shouldn't be needed. As long as we give them a wide assortment of sensors and we conceal them within the landscape, the player would never know which kind of defenses he is facing. Also consider that for our watch crew to detect them we should surface the boat, which is exactly what we should avoid anyway, knowing that there is an high probability of encountering enemy lookouts near ports. :03:

Cool website. I remember having visited it the first time you posted its link in another thread. I would stick to the locations reported by it, if ever we manage to model those loops :up:

Good one! Pity that it doesn't disclose the position of the Graf Zeppelin (I think it wasn't any longer in Kiel by 1943) :)

I'd have to make a patch to model those.

I'm thinking along the lines of:
if coastal defense has a hydrophone then add code that checks to see if contact being checked by hydrophone sensor of coastal defense is a type of sub. If so then get a random number. If random number <= detection % defined in patch file (new variable) then coastal defense detected sub. This way even if they don't see it visually or the sub is underwater it still has a chance to detect it.

That would kill 10 birds with 1 stone .

Not lame at all. OH's subnets are set as sea units. They have an unit_ship controller in their sim file. For them to report enemy contacts, we should give them radio and transmit antenna zones, and an unit cmdr controller. Having an unit cmdr controller, they would become potentially detectable by radar and lookouts but, being submerged, they shouldn't be detected anyway by those sensors, unless one plays with map contacts switched on. We could even copy clone the subnet unit, set it as a non-collisionable new unit (collision model and spheres removed), and replace its model with a scaled donwn, very basic, mesh thus reducing further its detectable surface.

(nevermind my remarks above: I have just seen TDW's reply)



This would definitely answer our question on which sensor(s) we should use on the "magnetic loop units" :yeah:

If we could place coastal defenses underwater, and set their hydrophone sensor the way I have described above, we could accurately mimic the working of detection loops :hmmm:

TDW says that the CDs would have a chance to detect subs underwater . Why bother putting the CDs underwater .
Chance to be detected would be awesome . I would really hate to start a new campaign and just avoid an area because I was spotted by a coastal defence in the last campaign .

Provided that TDW's patch can take sensitivity sectors into account, the reason would be having CD's to detect us not within a circular radius but rather on an almost straight line. Well, the maximum detection area would actually be composed by two opposite cones with their vertices centered on loop unit's position; detection outside them would still be possible, but it would require a longer "exposure" (this is how sensor's sensitivity works).

If you look at the following picture (taken from the website you have pointed), you will surely understand what I am aiming at:

http://indicatorloops.com/oban_layout.jpg

Shouldn't my idea by applicable, loop units on land and circular detection ranges are still a good compromise, indeed :up:

Has anyone ever looked at the 3 files in the museum folder ?
Silent Hunter 5\data\Museum
Do they need updating ?

My patch will have nothing to do with that. That's all taken care of by the sensor itself. I will just merely intercept the signal strength reported by the sensor if it's a hydrophone and attached to a coastal defense and it's checking to see if it detected a type 300 series unit to have it report back full signal strength if the random number <= detect % defined in patch file (thus saying to game it detected a sub)
:up:

Yep, but doing that would nullify the effect of sensitivity sectors, i.e. a strong signal and a weak signal would have the same chance to be "normalized" to full strength. Isn't that?
Unfortunately with the AI sensor controller, there is no way to set multiple deaf sectors as my idea would have required, but we can still set the hydrophone/magnetic sensor to have a single, narrow, detection arc, and place in game the units equipped with it so that sensor's arc will span over harbor entrances and chokepoints. We could also set multiple sensors with different ranges, for Trevally to choose the one among them covering only the appropriate area :hmm2:

Tomorrow I will create a signal station model :up:

I didn't use the random % chance thing I was going to do. Instead I just gave the signal strength a boost based on max range of the sensor and contact's distance from the sensor. This allows the sensitivity sectors to be utilized for the hydrophone sensor of the coastal defense.

You can set multiple deaf sectors - that's what the sensitivity sectors are for :up:

Sober !

...that did it, i can run it now selecting Western Approaches using "silentotto" without CTD.

Thank You !

I forgot about the chimney smoke problem when I uploaded some terrain files for OH2 . Vecko found the problem .

ohh than THX to both of You :sunny: