Maximum Effort
 

Interesting scenario.

I'm look at that merchant thinking man, he's moving awfully fast, and he's coming right towards me. So i move to let him pass. He turns into me. I move again. He turns again. AHHH He's chasing me!

Using the gator, this became a real sprint and drift (well still 20kts), type race. Evade the ship, get the sub, rinse and repeat.

It's going to be a real pain (undoable?) in the Seahorse, who's top speed is 1 knot less than the pursuing ship.

My only try in this mission so far ended rather hilariously. For some odd reason, within the first 2 minutes of the mission, I got reports of "loud explosion" on the sub's bearing. I then found it on my HF, but it wouldn't pick it up as contact. It soon became very apparent to me that the sub was dead and gradually sinking deeper and deeper... blew itself up? What happened? I have no idea...

I then spent some time running from the merchant and getting no points, until finally deciding to give up :dead:

As for evading the merchant, I highly suspect that the ACTUV is far more maneuverable than the merchant. So even if you are slower, you should be able to dodge him and force him to overshoot.

Dodging and overshooting is easy.... It's keeping him outside that 500yd exclusion zone was the tricky part.

Fighter pilots have a saying... "rate kills." And that freighter's turn rate sucks. Even worse, it's rotational momentum is horrible.

ACTUVs that are not the Seahorse can do an OK job turning inside him and outrunning him. "Get on his tail and stay there" more or less... a two-circle fight. It's easy but it's time-consuming.

But what's better--and vital for the Seahorse--is to trick him into turning one way and then going the other. It'll take him a few minutes to get out of that turn, and that's time you can use to get as far away as possible and regain contact. It takes a little more planning ahead than a two-circle fight but it pays off very quickly.

I just went faster, and turned inside his attempts to cut me off from the sub. It might not have been the most elegant, or most fuel saving way of dealing with it, but it worked.

The sub ran towards a car carrier. I ran after it, dodging the car carrier. The tanker however, with it's horrible turn rate, was just getting out of a turn, and wasn't so lucky.

"Explosion on the bearing of Master 5!"
"Explosion on the bearing of Master 8!"