Motivated but Failed!!
 

Hi,

I was very much motivated by manual targeting practices by most of you and tried to play it! Guess what?? Karl Donitz would have sent me to the gas chambers!!! All torpedoes miss. Looks AoB calculation is going wrong.. Help me out pals :wah:

You'll get no help from me, and if you did you wouldn't want it. I gave up on manual targeting years ago. I have it turned on just to get rid of the stupid triangles, but I use WE assistance and let him do all the work. :dead:

If you're using contact map updates and don't mind "cheating" a bit you can use the the protractor in the nav map to check the AoB. just check the angle between the sub and the bearing of the target ship from the ships position and then enter it. Another way is if your on a 90 degree intercept course you can estimate the AoB from the targets position. So if you have the target at about 45/315 degrees you have an AoB of about 45, at 10/350 80 and at 0 90. not perfect but works good enough on short ranges. and lots of practice. Hope that helps:salute:

I like your thought process.

There are other threads that cover it, but the easiest way to deal with manual targeting, as well as avoid some weirdness with automatic targeting, is the Fast-90 method. AOB doesn't matter with Fast-90 because you have placed the boat in a position to have a ~90 deg. AOB already. Likewise, range does not matter either as Fast-90's mathematical error does not come into play until <500 meters or >7000 meters. In each case, the error is only a degree or so.

Search for Fast-90 and practice it. :up:

Yes Sir! Thank you! I really wonder how did the real skippers dealt with this!

Months of school, then years of working up from junior to senior officer. By the time you make captain it's second nature.

I'd like to try Manual Targeting sometime. But it sounds hard. :wah:

If i did use manual targeting, i'd probably be using acoustic torpedoes as a failsafe.

Errr.. don't acoustics defeat the purpose of pinpoint manual targeting? Acoustics with manual targeting is like using a sniper scope on a shotgun.

I've been using a slight variation of the fast-90 approach, in cases where I wasn't entirely sure of the target course and wanted to allow myself a +/-5 degree error margin in my assessment of its course.

My approach is to position my U-boat in a roughly perpendicular position vs. the target's guestimated course. When in doubt about its course (and it's the whole point here!), I position myself pointing a bit more away from it.

Example: if the target is coming from your port to starboard, point the U-boat slightly more towards starboard.

I then set up the AOB on the TDC to 90 degrees (would be stb in the above example), set up speed and distance, but leave the TDC on manual.

As the target starts to pass in front of me, I lock the scope onto it (L). Still leave TDC on manual. When I visually see that it's at a 90-degree AOB angle from me, I immediately switch off the manual TDC then fire. The moment you switch off the TDC manual mode, the TDC finds the right gyro; in the example above, this should be a few degrees more to starboard vs. the target's bearing.

If you pointed your U-boat a bit more "forward-looking" as recommended above, the target should show its 90 AOB to you when it's around 350 bearing (or 010 if coming from starboard), meaning that the gyro will be close to zero, which reduces the influence of distance on the firing solution.

The torpedo is going to hit the target at a slight angle; if you positioned yourself right, and depending on target speed, this angle shouldn't be more than 10 degrees from 90 AOB, which is good enough to trigger an impact pistol.

My tip on visually determining when the target is at 90 AOB: if the target has pairs of masts (like the medium cargo in GWX), wait for the moment the left and right mast are perfectly aligned. For targets without those double masts, pick an element of the superstructure that has a flat surface perpendicular to the ship's length (can be forward bulkhead of the superstructure). When it disappears from view, that means you're looking at it exactly from the side = that's a 90 AOB.

I've been having 80-90% hit rate using this technique.

It's also worth keeping in mind that manual targeting is as much an art as science. It's not about getting all the numbers to line up perfectly, it's about getting a "pretty good" solution quickly and make up for any inaccuracies in it by either firing a spread or leaving yourself time to re-calculate.

The very first thing about it is that you want to solve most of the problems with firing solutions by not relying on the accuracy of the solution too much in the first place, but instead making up for any potential error by getting yourself into a good position before you even fire. That means either a position where a fast-90 method would work, or by matching the target's speed and heading at a distance before engaging, or by simply being close enough. You can also get a lot of mileage from not over-relying on the TDC - for example, most of the shots I actually take with "manual" targeting are just snapshots of pairs of torpedoes that I fire on 0 bearing (which eliminates any wonkiness you get from torpedoes having to turn towards the target) at below 1000m by simply guesstimating the target's speed. Most of those shots hit easily.

But yes, basically it's a mix of learning to get yourself into a good position, and learning to guess well.

Exactly why I'd use Acoustics. I hate wasting torpedoes. If I fire, I plan on sinking that ship.

But they dont always go where you aim, especially if theres multiple targets.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
Where did my torpedo go?
In between, to and fro.
Why it missed, I'll never know.

Acoustic torpedoes run too slow to be reliable beyond 1000m. Likewise, you either have to dive to get away from them or go completely silent (i.e. kill the engines) if they get stupid.