What the H !!!
 

So there I was, it's Dec 23, 1941, and I'm 100 or so miles S.E. of the Bungo Straight waiting for Nagumo's 1st Fleet as he returns from the Pearl Harbor attack. Finally, after playing SH4 for years, I have at least 4 fleet carriers in my sights, when all of a sudden, THEY DISAPPEAR, just gone, vanish without a trace.:wah:

I run SH4 1.5 with RSRD v550 with the patch, and that's it. So what the H!

It is programed to spawn and de-spawn at certain points. You happened to be far enough down that point to actually see them disappear. See what happens when you play the camper?

Camper? I arrived there around 0130 or so on the 23rd and the vanished a little after 0600.

I was near a port (Whatever that one on the north coast of the Philippines is), nice shallow water. My hydrophone operator started going crazy, calling out "Warship, Bearing <X>! Closing!" over and over again. :o I used the external camera to take a look, and there was a task force of cruisers with a whole pack of destroyers, heading right for me. Any wayI headed to get out would take me through the shallows, past the destroyers. :dead:

"What the hell", I thought, "I'll at least take out a cruiser before they get me!" :arrgh!: I waited for the right moment to strike, watching those sonar lines creep closer and closer. I came up to periscope depth, raised the scope, and sighted on an empty ocean. :06:

It was kind of a letdown after preparing for the final battle. :-?

The game lacks the capacity to have a convoy or task force split up and head into port. Either they disappear or they all stop where they are and sit there forever. Disappearing probably seemed the better option.

One of the problems of trying to adjust real life events, with known real life time, is that the game Mission Editor doesn't have a good way of judging when you'll arrive at a specific point to commence the authentic action you would expect.

Although RSRDC comes as close to reality as anything else has done, there are still gaps in time when specific events (like planes spawning for an attack) had to be "placed" within the mission so the attack was reasonably on time. This means the ships delivering the attack had to "spawn" at the approximate time and place, in order for the planes to arrive as expected (like their arrival at 7:00 am Dec 7, 1941). This is almost impossible to do knowing the game world isn't really accurately protrayed....a nautical mile isn't really a nautical mile, or a knot of speed really isn't a true knot of speed. They are "relative" to real world distance and time, but not expected to be accurate.

A huge problem for Lurker was trying to have the Pearl Harbor forces leave at the approximate time, yet arrive on station thousands of miles away, at the correct time. It's my opinion this can't be done. Trying to judge time travel is almost impossible with the Mission Editor. So, you leave point A at a specific time.....wanting to arrive at point B at a specific time, is nearly impossible knowing distance and time traveled are only "realitive" to the real world, neither are accurately protrayed in-game. Actually, within the Pearl Harbor mission (and any other historical mission) you'll find dozens of times where the forces are spawned, disappear, then re spawned to match specific known coordinates and time frame. It's not Lurker's fault......he above anyone else did a spectacular job in putting together the events as close to possible. Yet, if you're at the right place, at the right time, you'll could be near a spawn point that puts a historical group nearly on top of you......or they disappear just as quick.

we know how you feel, I did about the same and my 4 torps were just 100m or so from sending that big carrier to the bottom and poof, gone, nothing there, and torpedos wasted :/\\!!

we all get screwed like that at some point, that's why I gave up trying to follow targets and get ahead of them, I take my shots and let them go because it drives me crazy to do all the work of getting ahead of them again and setting up only to see them disappear before I can sink them.

it sure would be nice if the game would not unspawn or make things disappear from the game when you are in the area but that just how it is