Poor seamanship: a lesson learned
 

Alternative thread titles:

Bungle in the Banda Sea
Don't Lose the Wind Gage in Your S-boat!

TMO/RSRCD, my first career. 2nd patrol in the S-boat. Left Surabaya in Feb '42 with orders for the Molucca Sea. Two weeks in an S-boat is a long time. To patrol, you must use sonar. To use sonar you must dive. To travel, you must surface. It is tedious, always diving and surfacing, always wondering how many hours you may afford to use time compression without checking your sonar.

Two weeks in the Molucca Sea produced two airplane sightings and not a single sonar contact. Finally, I got the OK to patrol elsewhere, but with an expected pending base change to Fremantle, could not afford to wander very far.

The small passage between Buru and Ceram at 127.20E, 03.20S looked inviting, but three full days produced nothing. Finally, at sunset of the third day, I proceeded due south into the Banda Sea. 50 nm south of the pass, with a strong 18 m/sec wind coming from over my right shoulder at 340 degrees, I got a sonar hit. Target was SE, range unknown. (I pinged but those long-range pings are terribly inaccurate; orders of magnitude inaccurate).

I surfaced and hit the throttle, diving again in about 10 minutes. The target was still south but had moved substantially to the west. I interpreted this to mean that the target was moving on some course substantially due west, at something like 10 knots, and plotted an intercepting course.

Surfacing again, I proceeded for about 30 minutes before diving to check sonar. But .... I overshot the target! Somehow in the dark night and the monstrous seas, the target had moved to my north. It was close enough to capture visually, and was moving north at about 12 knots into the very passage I had abandoned mere hours ago.

I turned the boat to follow, now into the teeth of the storm --- but could make no more than 10 knots. The merchant sailed away..... It struck me that, had this been real life, I would have been the laughing stock of the submarine command. My feeble example would have been grist for the mill at the Naval Academy.

I take two lessons: (1) at first contact, take a deep breath. Stay submerged until fixing, with some confidence, a reasonably accurate speed & course for the target; (2) if your ride is a dinosaur, beware the wind gage. ;)

Haha,

If you have your save for Feb, go sit in the small pass above Timor...Trying to remember the date....maybe mid Feb, but per history RSRD has the large TF making it's run into the Indian Ocean, Timor is the place to ambush it in the pass, you can't miss it...bout 5 carriers, 5 BB's, numerous others, maybe 30 ships in all...

Oh, and a few Jap convoys come through there, so let em pass and save your torps... You know the TF is getting close when you start seeing carrier planes clearing the way.

If you have time, try to get back to Java by Feb 28, a large 50 ship plus invasion force comes through, er, prolly 50 nms NW of Sura, another large invasion force is the harbor right of ..,,mmmm Metok I think on March 2.

Good info, thank you. I'm into March now. Surabaya has fallen, or is about to fall, but I'm headed into the Java Sea. Your info will be useful when I get killed, and start a new career. :)

Well, if you're brave, that same group goes into the indian ocean, but heads to Singy coming in the long pass from the West and exits Singapore east on the home leg, if you sit outside Singy in April, it should eventually run over you......

I am impressed about you playing this seriously, diving for hydrophone contacts etc. With an inexperienced crew I spend most of the time on the surface, though, because those noobs really do a terrible job at the gear. Only once very 24 hours, usually at night, I dive to listen (remember to dive below periscope depht). I make a slow 180 degrees turn. I never pick up any noise, but at least I can go back to bed and call it a day, I did my duty with this wonderful equipment provided to me by the president and his glorious US Navy.

But there is one thing that annoys me terribly much. I like to play the most realistic way possible, and yet I have an average of 10.000 - 20.000 tons sinkings each patrol. It's almost German scoring - with a fleet boat in the pacific! In my opinion there are way too many targets moving around out there compared to how it really was.

Ok, I am a good shooter and seldom misses. In real life they got 1 sinking for every 12 torpedoes fired. Statistically. It's about 4 torpedoes per sinking with me, I guess. Believe it or not - I want to have long and boring patrols to at least reflect real life, but usually I am in the middle of a swarm of jap ships :DL

Well, that was my 25 cents for now.

TMO/RSRDC reduces the stock density of merchant ships to something more realistic, but it's true that we still do a better job in the game than skippers did in real life. The developers and modders probably feared that a more "realistic" ship density would create a game too boring to play.

I take the sonar patrols seriously, with the view that if I do my job for four patrols, I'll get a Porpoise upgrade, and deserve it. [This is a feature of TMO; I think 3 good patrols suffice in the stock game].

Ah --- thanks for the tip about diving to below periscope depth. Read that somewhere else, too. I haven't been doing it, but will start.