Run, Stand, Chase
 

During the first 9 months the US was completely on the defensive. Coral Sea and Midway are defensive battles. The next 9 months the US and Australia were locked in a better fight of attrition in New Guinea and the Solomons with Japan. The few subs available were tasked to screen for, harass, and block Japanese fleet operations, which is pretty dangerous stuff close to their main bases and often under enemy air. Like Japan, pre-war US doctrine was for the subs to act in support of the battle fleet.

After that there were enough boats available for the US to go on the offensive and go after the main lines of communications and supply in the enemy's rear areas. The sub force also realized from it's own experience and the German example what subs were really good at doing and how best to use them. Not to mention that they began to get the torpedos to work.

I just dont want Beery to go off on a tangent, a ship was a ship and a skipper who sank a merchantman got as much credit as one who sank a warship, it's the ones who came home without a catch which were given a desk job. Right from the start, PH was sending patrols off of Japan and other areas of the pacific to snag merchant traffic.

One mod which would be correct would be to end the career of a player who sinks no ship in two consecutive patrols prior to summer 1944, since that was more or less official practice.

Forlorn is right that due to circumstances, many fleet subs were assigned to indirectly support military operations and attack warships and troop/supply convoys (ie SE Asia in 41-42 and around guadalcanal in 42-43). Its only in 43-44 that enough subs were available to regularly send alot of subs to the prime fishing grounds around Japan and Formosa.

I don't think the statement the US was entirely on the defensive is accurate (IMHO).

Even before the April Doolittle Raid the USN was conducting hit and run raids on japanese outposts. Not major offensive action, but not entirely defensive, either. Midway would have been defensive if it had been reactive, but due to codebreaking it was really an offensive action IMO. Nimitz chose to engage the IJN on his own terms. I'd tend to call an ambush "offensive" thinking.

If you define "offensive" as taking land, then yeah, 9 months it is (Guaadalcanal).

you wont regret it, you may never want to go back to the Atlantic!:up:

Also incorrect, to a point. There was a list of priorities, and warships were Number 1. I'll have to look again to see where the merchants landed. I agree, they were to sink anything they could, but on the other hand even Lockwood didn't act like Doenitz: there was no applied anti-merchant campaign with a central commander sending boats en masse to chase known convoys. In fact, for most of the war the separate commands were just that; they didn't even have an established set of operative rules that all commands were to follow.

Just reread a bit of a book covering Atlantic and Pazific War. June 25nd 1943 tankers were ordered to be the most important target behind all other military ships by Lockwood. Right before that the monthly rate just got near 65000 BRT for around 40 to 50 boats in their patrol area. :doh: Sorry, can't add more - more than 4 books I can't read at the same time. ;)

Ha Ha!

Another interesting tidbit from the book concerns torpedo usage. This endorsement was attached to one of Morton's Patrol reports by his commander after Morton went on a patrol and decided to use only one torpedo per ship. It ended up being a wasted patrol (unsual for him)

"The decision of the commanding officer to fire single torpedoes, while understandable, is not concurred in. A minimum of two, preferably three, torpdedoes, using a spread, should be fired at any target worthy of torpedo expenditure, taking into consideration the poor performance of the Mark XIV torpedo........Torpedo spreads must be used...."

So....taking these two exerpts into consideration...if I wanted to run my patrol that way and try to simulate a plausable WWII sub patrol outcome i would:

1. Not use my deck gun, unless on small targets, or to finish off cripples
2. Fire two to three torpedo spreads at any enemy ship

That combined with a mod that makes it harder to find contacts would probably result in a realistic patrol result...No more 100,000 Merchant ships sunk on a single patrol!

So...the book is definately a treasure to have! :up:

Don't worry. I'm just trying to learn a bit before I go into full info-gathering mode. I have two books coming in tomorrow, so by this time next week I should be less clueless. Anyway I'm not going to make any radical alterations to the game through RFB until I have referenced and cross-referenced a lot of info.

I'll be interested to hear more on this, because if we can adjust renown points gained for sinking vessels based upon these priorities it will go a long way towards getting players to play historically. If the navy wanted subs to support the fleet it would be good to boost the renown gained for sinking Japanese navy targets while reducing the renown gained for destroying merchants. In this way players will tend to seek out military targets - perhaps holding on to torpedoes in the hope of a juicy carrier or battleship.

If there's no incentive to attack military ships it will just be a tonnage war as in the Atlantic - clearly we want to avoid this if SH4 is to have its own separate identity - not to mention the historical accuracy issues that have been raised here. I think we have an opportunity to make the two sims (SH3 and SH4) very different in terms of the experience and the sense of history they give to the player.

Of course all this is moot if the developers have hard-coded the renown points gained for sinking various ship types.

Well, the ship cfg look like this:
So it looks like this is adjustable. Renown award for a sampan is 20, FWIW. Tyohei is 100. Warships are clearly weighted renown wise. A sub-2000 ton DD is worth more than a 5000 ton freighter.

Interesting; I think the Hiryu had more than 400 crewmen . . .

Does that variable even matter for an AI ship? It's something that's pretty abstract as is.

PD

All the crew numbers are very low. I assume it might have somethign to do with how many lifeboats/survivors are generated and so is an abstract figure.

tater

Excellent comparison.

PD

I pulled out some raw numbers from silent victory:

1942-there were 350 patrols resulting in 180 ships sunk (725,000 tons), including 2 cruisers and 6 submarines. 7 U.S. subs were lost, 1 in port to an air attack, 3 by grounding, 3 sunk. An average of 8 torpedoes were fired for each sinking.

1943-there were 350 patrols resulting in 335 ships sunk (1.5 million tons), including 1 escort carrier and 2 submarines. 15 subs were lost. An average of 11.7 torpedoes were fired for each sinking.

1944-there were 520 patrols resulting in 603 ships sunk (2.7 million tons), including 1 BB, 7 CV, 2 CA, 7 CL, 30 DD and 7 subs. 19 U.S. subs were lost. An average of 10 torpedoes were fired for each sinking.

No matter how you cut it, the overwhelming majority of ships sunk were merchantmen.