attack tactics
 

I see a lot of people posting about their approaches and how they fire off 4 torpedos then get maybe one or two to hit. My question is what are you guys doing in your approaches? I play the game on 100% realism with all those Tmaru whatevers added on and I get a miss maybe once every 15 shots.

Maybe I've just been playing this and SH3 for too long, but using the map and course finder it seems impossible for anyone to miss a shot unless they've been seen.

Maybe if someone could direct me to a topic where they map out the "correct" way to approach a target....because if everyone is following that and I still hear of people wasting over half of their torpedos.....then obviously it isn't a correct way to approach.

Well, I play with hardcore torpedoes, so a huge % of my fish fail to function properly.

I also fire spreads regardless of what I think my solution is like since they would have in RL.

Wasting only half would make you the best skipper in the fleet in RL (by a long shot since 70% failed in RL).

YMMV.

tater

Then that just goes to show you the lack of realism present in SH4. I typically come back from the patrols with all objectives completed...average of 10k-20k tonnage....ALWAYS have over 75% of my reserve torpedos.

How abnout this. Use the hardcore torpedo mod, and for the first year of the war, set your fish 10 feet under the keel. The fish will run another 10-12 feet under that, and none will hit.

Welcome to RL for the USN, 1942 ;)

tater

I'm not talking about depth. I'm talking about the approach, and the gathering of information for the TDC. It seems that some people still miss when using this sytem...reguardless of mods.

Everyone's not the stud on the TDC that you are I guess.

:lol:

Putting aside the stud deal, some people may not be as patient to get in a 100% guaranteed shot. Some do not understand the mechanics fully. Some do not understand when to use fast torps or slow torps. Some like to keep on trying the magnetic exploder that is a big failure in itself. Perhaps you just have a good grasp on all of the above and do well. If this is the case, help those that ask what your secret is. I see one thread today getting some attention of convoy tactics. Personally, I suck for the most part. 97% realism, outside view only:D. Straight up vanilla with textures added and the sinking mechanics mod. No more and no less.

Tater has a point, and wonder if this can be modded in. The skippers were ordered to use the magnetic exploders. Perhaps a mod that will only allow magnetic to be used until the date that Lockwood said to stop using them and use impact.

It has been claimed that this is, in fact, hardcoded into the game, and that the selector switch is not functional.

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=120328 (post number 20 and later)

I assume I am just a "rogue" commander, who lies in his logbook about his detonator settings. :cool:

Hmmmm....I will have to mess with it. Usually I set depth at the shallowest and they work on impact.

read my signature:cool:

that's because the Contact Influence setting is not "contact-influence" but "contact/influence"...as in it will either explode on "contact" or via the magnetic "influence" trigger.

I may be incorrect, but my reading seems to indicate that selecting a trigger was not as simple as flipping a switch in real life. From what I can recall, all of the torps had the magnetic triggers installed, and that was how they were fired. To disable the magnetic trigger the torpedomen had to take the thing apart and doing so was forbidden by the Navy for quite some time. A few enterprising skippers disabled them anyway and were much more successful with their attacks. They would of course not report that they had disabled them and would have any unused torpedos repaired on the way home. Ironically, their success was actually seen as proof that the magnetic exploders worked since they were afraid to be honest about violating orders.

Apparentlly I must be doing the wrong thing still trying to work on it and trying to full understand the proper or rather best way to approach and intercept. This part eludes me somewhat. Naval sim games are farely new to me. I got SH3 beginning of the year and just got SH4 couple of months ago. There are some very good post on this forum that help folks like me. Sorry but the USAF did not teach proper naval tactics, approaches, and interception at least not on ships.:smug:

oowwww snap:ping:

I have read much the same! Hell, if I was the skipper I would have told the torpedomen to change the exploder. I'm not risking 70 mens lives over a 10 dollar magnetic exploder.

the mod would have to force you to set the torps to run deep, as the "contact influence" setting allows for detonation upon contact and not just magnetic influence. As it is, the only thing the switch in the game does is disable the magnetic exploder (IF the switch actually works, which seems to be debatable). So even if the switch is disabled in a mod or doesn't work to begin with, you can still run the torps into the target as opposed to under it to avoid some of the problems with the magnetic exploder. The real life exploder had a contact trigger as well (IIRC), so it would be unrealistic to disable this in game, but it would force you to aim for magnetic shots if you could do this.

The problems of the Mk14 were solved in this order:
1) running deeper than set
2) magnetic exploder either not working at all or causing premature detonation
3) contact exploder not working when hitting the targets in the 90-degree range because of a weak firing pin.

So the mod you suggest would need to have, essentially, four different versions of the Mk14:
1) an early war model where the contact exploder is either completely disabled or strongly gimped to either force or encourage you to aim under the hull, along with a random depth error between 10 and 25 feet and a magnetic exploder with X% failure rate
2)a mid-early war torp that runs at the correct depth but with the same exploder problems.
3) a mid war torp with the magnetic exploder completely disabled but with the contact exploder working the exact opposite of the one in SH3: you will recall that in SH3, the exploder was only reliable withing X degrees of 90 and that oblique shots would often fail to explode. Simply flip that over, and you have the Mk14 contact exploder.
4) a mid-late war torp with no problems, but still with a Y% failure rate (as nothing was ever really perfect).

I don't know how easy this would be to mod. The best case scenario is that you can create separate torpedos with varrying levels of supply, to simulate the availability of "fixed" torpedos. But if that's too hard then you can probably just have a mod that tweaks the torp performance at various dates but I don't know if you can actually mod how the exploder works.

but they did teach you when you use a sand wedge and when to use a pitching wedge, right?

Of Course:lol: Help me improve my short game

All of the above is true. there was no switch to turn magnetic pistols on and off. There is even some question as to whether the Germans had such a switch. Some skippers did have their chiefs disable them, but it also required recognizing that that was the problem, and having the skills to actually do the job; otherwise every one of them would have done it.