Dark Waters - what am I doing wrong?
 

I'm having this problem with manual aim. Maybe you could tell me what I'm doing wrong. This is what I do:

- mark the ship twice 3:15 mins apart to get speed/heading
- set the bearing
- set range
- keep the periscope still (unlocked) and fire as the ship passes
- aim for the front tip of the ship (bow) and the center. (2 torps)

They end up hitting the center and the back end blowing off the propeller.

I've tried this a bunch of times taking near perfect measurements of everything and they always end up behind where I was aiming, as if the solution is shifted to the stern side of where it should be, meaning if I was aiming for the mid point it would hit the props or miss completely

With metric, I think you use a flat 3:00 mark. Someone will have to correct me if I'm wrong (I usually use the US side), but DW/OM defaults to using metric... I usually go for three of those marks.

@VoidsX

Did you open the torpedo tubes before firing? In case you didn't it will add a few seconds delay to your torpedoes.

3:15 is right.

There are 1,852 m in a nautical mile. A knot is 1,852 m in an hour. That’s 30.87 m per minute. We want to know how long it takes 1 knot of speed to travel 100 m to make the “map trick” work, so 100 m / 30.87 m = 3.24 minutes, so roughly 3:15.

I put my money on the torpedo tubes not being ordered prior to the shot.

As the others noted, Q opens the tubes, W shuts them. Open your tubes you will be shooting or all of them for snap shots, I always open all my tubes before any engagement, though I play baby skills. Also the ships may be changing course slightly but I'd bet the prior guesses?

Hah! I knew it! Wrong again... :har: I agree - tube doors...

Another thing to try is if you are shooting more than one, switch to salvo and set the spread. I know I also have the same issue sometime with the auto targeting. I'll set up on the bow and invariably the torp will hit amidships even with the tubes open. Wave conditions I believe can affect accuracy too. If it's stormy with big wave troughs the topedo actually is out of the water surely slowing the time of impact slightly.

Thanks all for the replies. Yes pressing Q makes a difference and there's a noticeable improvement. I managed to hit a small patrol boat 1500 m away with 2 torps, without raising scope, both hit dead on. but for some infuriating reason occasional misses on the stern side still seem to happen, but is alot more bearable now.

One of the most irritating things about all things Silent Hunter is the jack-rabbit ship starts. It's like if they have 8 boilers, all 8 are always on line, fires on full, and they can jump from 6 knots to 9 knots inside of 1000 meters... that is the next most common method people miss by. I have locked onto a target before and left the scope up, and watched them do this, so anything shot for the rear mast only stands a good chance of missing behind. In the same vein, they have brakes as good as Bugs Bunny has in Hair Brakes, and can stop short of a dime from 1200 meters, no matter their speed, so anything shot at the forward mast only, will miss forward. Very frustrating. If you shoot one at the forward mast, and one at the rear mast, they kind of seemingly don't know what to do, which is where you'll see them turn on that dime when stopping also, and the torpedoes "comb" them... :har: The DD class is the worst offender. My big question is "how do they see the electric torpedoes at 600m anyway? :hmmm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaIFLR8xLJY

phwew!

lurker (original OM author) did attempt to fix that with a lot of the ships, but it is still there, since it is a basic game AI function.

yep!

and how do they detect my periscope @2000 meters after 1 second of exposure while the boat is still AND then open fire with deck guns a moment after detection?

amazing reactions, eh?