DW Frustrations......help (LONG)
 

PLEASE LET ME SAY BEFORE GOING ANY FURTHER, I AMNOT ANGRY, UPSET, OR SAYING THERE ARE/WERE BUGS WITH ANY MOD, etc. THIS IS NOT A GRIPE SESSION. I'M HERE TO LEARN.

Hey gang. I stayed up all night last night playing DW.:rock: I must say overall, the immersive effect felt good, but it's either been so long since I've played, or whatever that near the end of every mission it just seemed to end in frustration.

I love the Akula. Can't help it. Seawolf seems too arcadey for me. 688i, been there done that already with Janes../sub command.

Ok, so I have the following mods installed. DW/1.04/LWAMI 3.9/ and a few eye and ear candy things.

Ok, a lot of my frustration came from the simple fact that at certain missions, I could "classify" a contact, and be precise with it. What I mean is, the "Filter" would have the contact narrowed down to like maybe 3 possibilities.......and thru logic and brains, I could humanly exclude the other two options. Not a bad thing. Other times, the "Filter" would absolutley have it locked down to ONE possibilty. It was as if I had a proffesional crew onboard that knew what the heck they were doing. Other times, the "Filter" would give me so many choices it was impossible to classify a conctact precisely. I mean, yes, I could determine if it was surface or submerged, but that was about it. Didn't matter what I did. Turned the boat and waited, turned again, broadband, narrowband, didn't matter. I must have had at least a good 10 "possibilities" according to the filter. :damn::damn::damn: Call me old fashioned, but I like to KNOW EXACTLY what it is that I am about to send to the bottom of the sea. :salute:

The best example I can give you of above is last mission, I kid you not, I was less than 3,000 yrds from a submerged contact, and I COULD NOT get the filter to narrow anything down for me, no matter what I did. I find that utterly unnaccptably ridiculous. All these fancy sonars and computers these boats are supposed to have and it can't tell me what something is at 3,000 yrds? Come on......:down:

Which brings me to my next frustrations. Weapons themselves. Ok, I have a submerged contact. I know it's hostile. I have ID'd it, and done everything in my power to classify it, but I deffinately have it labled as hostile and it is red on the NAV screen. Clearly labled M01 or M02 or so on for the TMA. I have a good TMA solution. I go to select 65cm torp on "M01" and it will not respond. I have to do a "snapshot". I found this odd. Wish I could be more specific with this one but.....I felt like I had done all the necessary steps it just would not lock on so to speak. Had to resort to snapshot. :damn:

Next up....Autocrew TMA. I do everything else myself mostly. Does the autocrew TMA suck as bad as I thought it did? I was patient. Zig zagging the boat, trying to give as much info as I could to the TMA computer. But even when I felf like the TMA was dead on the money......showing truth later showed that not to be the case. It was just close. But nothing to be proud of IMHO. Any tips to help Auto Crew TMA? (Yes, I plan to re-learn this myself which I'm sure will make a huge difference)

Last. For you experienced skippers. I have never been able to wrap my head around this problem. Ok, I'm a Nuke submarine boat. Supposed to be quiet and sneaky and everything. My "Target" is at 90 degrees, and the TMA is showing he going away from me >>>>>>>> @ 19 knots.
Currently he's some 20,000+ yrds away. Two fold problem!!!!
Am I just supposed to kick her in the arse and chase that sucker down, cavitation and all? (Shallow water)........thusly showing my butt to the entire world? .......Too far away to get a 100% lock down classification, and too shallow to launch a missle torp cause I tried that once and the missle (yes the one with the torp that goes active on impact with the water) released the torp, but must have just gone right down into the mud because the water was too shallow??????? Does that happen?

So whatta you do?

And one last one..........I had a submerged / hostile/ fired apon it. I felt like I had set the torp accurately as far as ceiling/floor,,,,etc....
It went active, found the sub, and promptly began doing circles around it.
TWICE it even went RIGHT THRU THE HULL of the sub as if the sub wasn't even there. Like a graphics glitch we all get from time to time in any video game. You know what I'm talking about. It was weird.

Please advise.

Frustrating, maybe, but that's life. How many lines did you have? Because that's what the filter goes by. If you only have two lines, which is common for a sub (even close in), then you're not going to have it narrowed down very much. You'll get your good classifications on the louder targets that give you more frequency lines.

That happens because you're trying to assign a weapon to an invalid contact type. Submarines are not eligible targets for wakehomers. Try using an acoustic homing torpedo.

aTMA is usually pretty damn good, better than a player could be against most targets. The programming is rather sloppy, though. Instead of using some sort of geometrical algorithm, aTMA more or less just reports the location of the contact with some amount of range error built in, which gets smaller over time. Manuvering will throw it off again, but it will stabilize again in time (and possibly more accurately or more quickly after the manuever, not sure). So really, there isn't much you can do to help aTMA. You can do plenty to help yourself though, the most important thing being to get two legs, at least one on a lagging course from the target.

Honestly? Let him go. Why risk trading an Akula for a smoke boat by playing on his turf?

If you have to kill him, then do an end-around attack, positioning yourself in deep water where he's going to come out of the shallows. And if that's not an option, then you could just let him pull away until he runs out of space (shallow water implies there's a coast around) and then catch him when he can't run anymore.

Come to think of it, 20kyd isn't that far away. If 19knots is the best he can do, in theory you could get a torp to him as far out as 26kyd. Was that with the same wakehomer you snapshot at a submarine? If it is, I'm a little surprised that it didn't just completely ignore the target, but I'm not at all surprised that it didn't work out the way it was supposed to.

Ok, so what would you do in this situation? Let's just call it a hypothetical where there are 3 subs in the water, Me, hostile, and another friendly sub, and I'm very close to both of them and can't distinguish which one to blow up?

Doh!!!! Quite possible, as I said, last night was first time in quite a while I played. I just did the quick missions, can not remember honestly. Going in for another session now, will try to keep better track of this and report back.


I think I understand what you are saying maybe, however, I could also be reading into this.....it sounds maybe like you are being a little jerkish??? Like I don't know what I'm doing, so you are not surprised that it didn't work out?
Could you clarify this a little cause I DO NOT think you are being jerkish, but it kinda reads that way . (to me)

thank you much for your responses. It sounds a lot like I just don't know what I'm doing (which is a very good thing) and just need to learn/practice.
Vs the alternative of "yeah, all this stuff is bugs in the game".

From your answers it sounds like the sim/game is playing just like it's supposed to and I can live with that :up::up:

That depends on whether you can make a distinction by getting another line. You haven't said how many lines you were getting when you were having this problem.


I'm asking you a question. Was the behavior you reported from a wakehoming torpedo?

Mono,
It's ok. I honestly don't remember how many lines I was getting. And if I just throw a number out there, it would only lead to bad information for others.

As for the torpedo, I'm afraid it's the same situation. I can't remember. As I said, it was very late, I was up all night. :salute:

However, in another forum, at another site, I found a post by you regarding LWAMI 3.9 and Akula Vs 688i, etc.....I read that post and it has explained a lot. For the most part, I think I'm ok now.

I think I may heave read you were in shallow waters. Towed array can bottom out and be useless for you in these situations. If you are sure you are dealing with a hostile but cannot classify it, then just send a couple of snapshots his way. That will do the trick if you need to take em out.

You will need to optimize the TA scope over speed to overcome sonar blackout(drag). Better chance surviving if you try maintaining stealth, rather than go in guns blazing. Even better, try masking your signature in neutral traffic(if any) then listen and obtain data on assumed hostiles. If there is a thermal layer, use that to your advantage also. :03:

Try keeping the speed ‘quiet’ then stream / retrieve TA for optimized performance. If you are using the neutral as cover, match it’s speed and shadow its movements and try to optimize for a larger scope. :yep:

Snaps are suicide against more than one ‘assumed’ hostile, especially hostiles at the helm of ASW torpedo capable platforms. :know:

Be best(and wise) to try and locate(at least) / class 1st and attack on valid data, not a hunch. Against multiple assumed hostiles, you are going to have one shot at initial survival; make it count.

:salute:

In close quarters fights with 1 hostile 1 unknown or frendly sub if you need to shoot quiclkly use 50/60 Hz discrimination...
if 1st line is on 60Hz it is USS ship
if 1st line is 50 Hz that ship is russian or something else...

very simple ,very effective..tested in multiplayer maps ! :yeah:

I'm new to all this, but regarding the 50Hz vs 60Hz are you referring to the lines in narrowband sonar?

Yes.