How much danger would we get in sh-4
 

As i understand it the japanese did not have a very good asw capabilaty . What was the biggest threat to us-subs in the pacific ? I liked sh-3 because just about the whole world was after your sub . Arent the japanese destroyers a laught to sneak away from? I know everything about the u-boat war . But i no very little about the situations the us subs had to face can someone fill me in?

Well I'm sure it won't be a cakewalk. If anything, it was the fact that enemy escorts had poor tactics, less so poor equipment. Besides, I fully expect it to be a bit more dangerous than reality was for most purposes. SHIII (stock), especially late in war, certainly was.

I reckon CCIP could very well be right there. The fact that the IJN didn't have any real doctrine from ASW means that the danger could actually be increased a bit over what you see in SHIII, I mean the Allied ASW was very advanced in the later years of the war but once you started to watch their tactics and guage their capabilities then you'd be able to develop tactics against them.

Whereas with the IJN every escort had different equipment sets and with no real doctrine so you wouldn't know exactly what sort of skipper you were up against until he started to press an attack. Some would obviously be better than others and without standarized doctrine you'd be guessing how they'd deploy. Pair a good skipper with one of the escorts that had radar, didn't give his position away with constant sonar pings while in transit, etc and you could wind up getting caught with the proverbial pants down. Add to that the fact that later in the war you could very well run into a Japanese convoy that had more escorts than merchants and things could be very interesting (in a Chinese curse way) for you.

The unpredictability factor makes me think that the Japanese escorts will from time to time really surprise the hell out of us. Also they'll use the sensors they have a little more effectively than in reality I'd guess since individual crew skill at each station isn't modelled I don't think, so you'll have blanket green, veteran, elite, etc. categories which'll use all of their sensors and all of their weapons at that skill level.

At least that's how I can see it happening.

EDIT: Oh and the biggest threat? Depends on the year, early in the war you'll really have to watch out for being in areas with land based air cover, I know I for one really would get a sinking feeling in the pit of my tummy if I saw a gaggle of Zekes meader over my course. Also carrier based air would be a big threat if you were anywhere near the Combined Fleet's operational area. A Mavis flying boat could also spoil your day. Later in the war I'd be more concerned with having to go in tight with the Japanese coastline; hazards such as shallow water, minefields, shore batteries if you had to run into the inland sea and a faster response time to allow ASW ships to converge on you if you get spotted would be my main concerns.

How can bad Japanese ASW make the game more difficult?:hmm: Just go deep and you are in the clear?

Depends on how you play..If you play like the guy who made the vid for SH4 then i would imagine you will get into alot of trouble.......I don't know fancy surfacing next to a BB to engage it with your DG :roll:

Japanese escorts were much better than you give them credit for. Alot of US subs only made it home because of how well built their subs were,plus the IJN made up for their poorer quality sonar,(Later in the war,in the beginning their sonar was as good as everybody elses),by developing 600lb DCs. They didn't need to be quite as accurate with those.

I really don't understand why people seem to think the japanese stunk at anti-sub warfare...must be a European bias thing. After all they did manage to take down over 40 US subs out of around 200+ that saw action so they couldn't have been THAT bad.(Out of a total of 52 losses,2 were training accidents,2 were friendly fire incidents, at least 2 were killed by their own torps and a couple ran aground).

the other explanation of this fact is that the US-fleet boats were so clumsy as the german IX class, which proved not to be useful against convoys and their escorts. Just look at the fancy conning tower of all US submarine classes.I suppose they were as streamlined as a hippopotamus. The other thing are the crush depths of the boats- they couldn't go as deep as the german ones, and it was making them much more vulnerable (time to react).
And yes, I'm European :yep: :yep: :yep:

Japanese escorts weren't terrible, their doctrine was for most of the war though so it was hit or miss on how effective they were since they didn't have the same level of training in ASW work or standard tactics that all their captains could rely on the way the American capatains could. Working together was much more difficult for IJN ships that were assigned to escort duty together if they'd never worked together before, while US escorts could fall back on standard doctrine to mesh more effectively more quickly.

I'm not so sure that the mid to late war US subs gave much if anything away to the German ones when it came to absolute maximum depth, the US boats could dive pretty deep as well but had lower tested depths. If you compare the test depths on US boats to German ones then yeah the Germans had an edge, if you look at how deep a lot of US boats regularly went during combat and came back without any problems then it's not so clearcut that the U-boats had a better depth capability.

Another advantage the US subs had even with their fancy conning towers was those towers were packed with electronics which were far better for most of the war than their opponents'. That gave the US subs a big advantage against the IJN escorts, especially if the sub had radar and none of the escorts with a targetted ship/convoy did. The US skipper could plan his attack much more effectively since he'd have more time to be able to set it up.

When comparing sub ops in the Pacific versus the Atlantic, depth becomes a much bigger factor.

While you'll engage plenty of convoys in the open (and deep) Pacific, there are many tasty targets that steam through the countless "between island" routes that may only have 100-200 feet of depth to them. When playing SH3, I hardly ever had to worry about the depth under my keel unless I was running the channel or approaching Bristol or something similar. The southwest Pacific is much different.

When convoys move between areas like the Phillippines, Indonesia, or the Solomons, you're talking about thousands of islands of varying sizes that have shallow water between and along them all. Even though they were behind the USA in radar and sonar tech, the Japanese weren't stupid... and they kept their ships and routes in shallow waters whenever they could. Early in the war, Japan would run her supply convoys directly to their destinations... many times without escort at all. As the war went on, however, they started sending them along the shorelines (a convoy from New Guinea bound for mainland Japan, for example, could hug Indonesia and the Phillippines and be under constant air cover and near regionally-based destroyers that could be called out of harbor... all in addition to being in dangerously shallow water).

On top of all of that, throw in some defective torpedo firing pins and you'll get just a little taste of the frustration that US Sub Captains had to endure while being depth charged at 175 feet!

JAPANESE ESCORTS ARE NOT TRASHES!!!

(a) Japanese has got a heavy depth charge which means that it can crash the hull of a boat easily

(b) Japanese planes in early war period, still, lethal

(c) Most of your operational areas are shallow. You can get trapped between the DD and the bottom of the sea EASILY

Don't make a conclusion too easily. You will suffer and REGRET

http://www.diggerhistory.info/images...-g4m-betty.jpg




Dont forget about the betty's

Japanese A/C weren't all that effective at sub killing. What they were good at was pinning the sub down until DDs/DEs could arrive. Which I guess is how they nailed the Wahoo.

Supposedly the Japanese used an early form of MAD on some of their aircraft later in the war...not sure how well that worked out for them.

It all comes down to tactics really..Japanese AC and subs were quite capable of inflicting serious damage to Allied subs and merchants, however the high command wanted them to concentrate on warships due to the japanese Doctrine that they wanted the one decisive battle, to bring the US to settle for piece talks.
When used correctly..look what happened in the indian ocean from march 31st to april 10th 1942
Combatants
Allied Forces
United Kingdom
Austalia
NetherLand

Axis Forces
Japan

Allied Strength 3 carriers, 5 battleships, 7 cruisers, 15 destroyers, 100+ planes, 30 small warships, 50+ merchants
Japanses Strength 6 carriers, 4 battleships, 7 cruisers, 19 destroyers, 5 submarines, 350 planes

Allied Casualties 1 carrier, 2 cruisers, 2 destroyers, 1 AMC, 1 corvette, 1 sloop, 23 merchant ships sunk, 40+ planes destroyed

Japanese Casualties 20+ planes destroyed

I do not believe we will be in too much danger. Many of our subs were running in shallow water because the convoys were hugging the coastlines. This made it dangerous but from what I read, especially towards the end of the war, our subs ran the surface with impunity. Heck, one sub submerged only once on a 49 day patrol. I'm not saying the Japanese did not sink some of subs but I would say that their equipment to locate submarines was not quite as good as what the Allies had on the Atlantic.

I am far from sure that the game will model this but a critical problem that the IJN had in ASW was that their depth charges were constantly set far too shallow. Thier own boats were not deep divers, and they assumed that the USN boats had the same properties. Early on the USN noted this fact and they made an extreme effort to ensure that the IJN never discovered this. Essentially, if the US boat had time to get deep it was safe. I remeber reading this a long time ago in "Take her Down", or maybe "Take her Deep", by Dick O'Kane.

HB