Map Contacts
 

Hello Kapitans!

I am playing with the latest GWX mod, and I am confused by occasional map updates that suddenly ‘appear’. A single ship token will suddenly appear, which was not spotted by my watch crew, and neither was I given a radio contact report for the contact.

How are they deemed to have appeared on the map? What was the source of the information, to put the update on the map as a random contact?

Cheers.

Welcome aboard!
 

I think it simulates radio direction finding. That means that your u-boat radio operator intercepted radio message and found out a bearing from which the signal was coming

Plausible!
 

That makes sense now that you mention it. I’ll assume the programmers built it into the game. In my experience it usually turns out to be a ghost, and have learned to ignore it. Anybody else with a different experience?

And thanks for the welcome Aktung Bby. A long silent run indeed! Those silent runs are even better than the real thing ‘ey? My uboat moves in mysterious ways, no? If only we could submerge until the end of the world. Hehee :Kaleun_Cheers:

Re: Contacts...
 

Ahoy, kopout... :Kaleun_Cheers:

That depends...

How far off from you they are... taking that into account, sometimes even close ones.. may or may not be there when you get close to where you 'should' intercept them... that goes even for the further off ones.

I have taken time to figure out where they should be at a given point of My boat traveling to an intercept point... got there & find something... sometimes not....

It's basically a crap shoot... sometimes ya get lucky... :D :up:

sometimes the shark eats you... :yep:

Hope this helps...

Gute jagd, ihr himmelhunde

M. M.

:Kaleun_Salute:

Exactly :up:
When the radio operator technician was good enough, he could intercept enemy radio message and find its location using the DF antenna (big round antenna you can raise on deck)

:Kaleun_Salute:

If it is just a line then it would simulate the radio direction finder. As the circle antenna would not really be able to give you distance, only direction. Signal intensity would be quite hard to transform in to a distance, since the many unpredictable factors in radio wave propagation. That's why the big thing is triangulation, directions from different stations intersecting near the source. From a single Uboat or ship, the best you can do is simply move towards the line. That loop antenna can actually not distinguish if the radio source is in front of it, or if it is behind it. So you really would have to consider both directions.

If you get an icon on the map with course and speed and time indication then it is just a radio Intel report. Imagine there being German scoutplanes or simply BdU telling you what it found out from whatever sources it got. Convoys get radio messages as text accompanied with them. You know, the ones that show up in some menu. Single opportunity ships just show up on the map, bit still have those details when you hover or click on it. Speed being show as a rough estimate range.

If you see an icon on the map fairly close to you then it is likely within visual range and a sighting of the crew, or radar if you have it. It doesn't show speed or time, or course as text. At best you could tell course by the way the icon is pointing.

I've noticed that sometimes they can be vague locations and the direction they are travelling from these map markers can be slightly off. Othertimes I've noticed that they are highly accurate, I always presumed they were either spotted by other U-Boats, FW-200 Condors or otherwise found through intelligence given to BdU as they work in a similar way to convoy reports.

Course is shown as N, NNE, NE, ENE, E, ESE, etc. But their actual course is within 11.25 degrees of either side. If the icon shows a tail then it is likely correctly showing the angle. But many considered that too easy for a challenge and modded the tail out of the icon.

When you look into the mission editor and how waypoints are defined then they can actually have random position offsets inside a waypoint area circle. And if the waypoints are close enough together then it does appear to us they have a large scale zig-zag pattern. But with random sequence. As they can also fork and choose between two next waypoints based on random chance.

For intercepting I create an ice-cone drawing along it's course. With the ice-ball being the max hydrophone range (34km), and it's center being 175km away from the initial report position. If I cannot meet the target, or be in that circle, before the target is expected to be there then I won't even bother chasing it.

I also increased the range those reports are shown around me as I found it unlikely those radio messages would be limited to an area around me of 250 km. Too easy to intercept also. I wanted a bigger search challenge. So made it 750km, but you can change it as you like: SilenthunterIII\data\config\contacts.cfg

I didn't think the rdf/radio transmit interception worked in the game and that the loop was purely a graphical item ? I've never noticed it work anyway and recall long past discussions of others stating the same.

To be honest. I don't think the game has a way of doing radio direction finding. I've never seen a line from a contact other than by hydrophone or visual. I was just expanding on how RDF works in general.

Maybe radar emission detection works in a similar manor by providing a bearing. But I never got to that stage in the game. Or witnessed it in videos.

Yes unfortunately rwr's provide an ahistorical bearing to the radar(s) in question. Heck, one can track a convoy with them better than hydrophones if desired. :haha:
I tried raising the minimum height on the rwrs to only pick up aircraft but that didn't work out.
They also unfortunately do not differentiate the historical different allied radar wavelengths.