destroyers sonar are efective in shallow water??
 

Long story short. I was sent to do some photo recon on a port. I approached very quietly, took some photos and turned around to make my way out. But a damn destroyer aparently saw my scope and came after, pinging me as hell. droped a decoy, turned to starboard and tried to slip away, but took a charge and started flooding slowly. So after running at full speed for a couple of secs, I stopped everything, gently posed the sub at the bottom, went to the hydrophone and tracked that mf. He started going back and forth, pinging here and there and then suddenly he came right after me!

3 more charges and I was history :down: .

Is sonar efective in shallow waters? My sub was right at the bottom, I thought I would be completely transparent this way :damn:

yes.
Try going 3kts and using silent running when you spot a warship. And stay away from him.
Photograph the harbour from 8kms away.

You do that on stormy nights! You know, when you literally have to be NEXT to the ships to photograph them. I had to emergency back in order to avoid ramming a docked destroyer!

I wonder how a destroyer would handle such a situation where there's literally no room for him to pass overhead depth charging...

Sonar works because the metal of the sub reflects the sound of the "ping" back to the hunting ship. The sea and mud / sand etc just absorb the sound and reflect nothing back. It can be affected by water density, salinity and temperature - hence thermal layers etc. - , but it works at optimum in shallow water. Essentially - and sorry for your loss - as soon as a DD locates you in shallow water, you're lit up like a Christmas tree and are, basically, toast

How can we determine the depth under the keel via active sonar, then?

There is something called "bottom return", which unfortunatly is not modeled in the game. There are numerous accounts of both german & american subs bottoming out to avoid ASDIC.

That IS how our bottom finder sonar works in the fleet subs, it pings the bottom (with a different frequency than ASDIC uses) and listens for the echo. Now the bottom type DOES affect this (in real life of course) but sadly again, this is not modeled in the game.

I wish it were though because "bottoming the boat" is a very good technique in shallow water especially. The S-38 account that CCIP posted is a prime example of that.

That is EXACTLY what I was trying to do, digitizedsoul.
The theory is very sound to me. So I did the right thing (btw, I took the idea from Das Boot :up:)

This part of the game is flawed then.

That is sad if Ubi didn't bother to model in the effects of 'bottoming out' your sub in the game. To me the whole point of a simulation like this is to be able to act exactly as you would in real life and have somewhat realistic results, without having to stop and think about whether they bothered to model that particular part of reality into the sim.

I wonder if it would be possible to mod in something like this? Not very likely I suppose, since that part of the AI would probably be fairly hardcoded in.

nomad_delta

Right now bottoming out kills you. You get collision damage that sinks the boat faster than a really accurate DCing.

Bizarre that softly landing on wet sand does damage to my sub, but being rammed by a warship doesn't even scratch the paint (and blows up the warship).

Argh, that's even worse. I guess there's nothing about this mentioned in the upcoming 1.3 patch bug list, either.