Tracking Active Sonar Contacts
 

There are times when I am trailing a surface ship but I occasionally lose passive tracking because I need to speed up. Most of the time warships have active sonar on 24/7 but the minimap doesn't display the approx. location of the track (but I do see yellow bearing lines). Is this intended behavior? Shouldn't the contact remain on TMA?

Second question, does this apply to the AI as well? If I use active sonar, does the AI still have to work to get a firing solution or does the AI automatically know my accurate location?

This is most apparent when using the 1968 subs that have much worse sensors.

I think it is intended behavior, yes. Better tracking of active intercepts is an idea that's been raised but I don't think the devs have reached a conclusion on if or how to implement.

As for AI, they get an accurate bearing from your ping and will typically send a torpedo down that bearing as soon as they hear it, I don't think they get anything more specific than that.

The funny thing is, you get TMA solutions with ESM, which has much lower bearing accuracy, while you don't with active sonar intercept. That's exactly the opposite in real life.

Depends on the ESM package and a number of other things.

Active Intercept can only do so much - making it's bearings into a solution takes time, but no more so than passive bearings from the SA, so I do agree it should be being used for TMA purposes. Ranging data, maybe not so much.

I will be very surprised to find out that any submarine ESM mast can produce a bearing accuracy that can be a basis for TMA computation.

Be surprised. As I said - it depends on the package.

welcome aboard firsttime poster!
 

Tracking Active Sonar Contacts
 

Interesting. A submarine ESM mast? What accuracy are we talking about?

And regarding the era of CW, I don't suppose any western Submarine had something like that in the 80's (ESM accurate enough for an accurate TMA solution)?

Depending on your definition of it you could argue that ESM has been a thing since they had radar detectors at the end of WW2.

This is just supposition on my part but I would guess for an ESM mast, bearing would probably be pretty important as well as some type of analyzer to gauge signal strength and probably give you some idea of detection values i.e. if whatever is bouncing these radio signals off of you is getting a strong enough return back to have pin-pointed your location. I'd say all that would come before actually being able to figure out an exact location where emissions are coming from.

I think you read my reply out of context. It's clear that ESM systems existed well before the Cold War. However, my question was in reply to Shadriss, and was about the bearing accuracy of such systems and whether it was sufficient to base TMA solutions on them.

I'm far from being an expert here, but aircraft RWR can give an accurate bearing. I'm sure ECM systems on submarines is even more sophisticated.

ESM would be enough to get a bearing if nothing else I assume? Perhaps with two sensors on the same mast, you could use the geometry to get a range estimate but it would not be hugely accurate.

I think that the most important aspect of ECM signal apart from bearing is the signal strength. Sure, it won't tell you the exact range but it can help.

ESM should give you more information than is currently available in game. Not only will it give you a pretty precise bearing, it should tell you what kind of radar it is (base on frequency and pulse rate and other info) which would allow you to narrow if not nail the exact platform, and once you have that info, you can estimate range based on the signal strength.

You can get the bearing and narrow or ID any platform using active sonar the same way. Range however will be much harder and it would depends a lot on the strength of the surface duct, the strength and depth of the layer, your depth and a bunch of other things.

All true, I should know as I operated one on a sub :Kaleun_Salute:
However, I doubt that you could find a submarine ESM mast in the cold war era that gave a bearing accuracy that could be used for TMA analysis. TMA requires accurate bearing measurements, and a sub mast ESM bearing accuracy cannot provide that. I doubt that in the Cold War there were ESM masts that could provide an accuracy better than 5 degrees and I'm being generous. With 5 degrees variation you simply cannot do effective TMA. Sure you can very roughly assess the range based on the received intensity level, but that's very susceptible to all kinds of environmental variables. You could also determine very rough courses or maximum ranges based on the bearing variation over a long periods of times but that's barely meet what we usually refer to here as a firing solution TMA.