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NFunky · 10-29-09, 06:44 PM

Hey Nexus7, good points about hostile air cover and such. I do think one of the biggest problems with DW is that my scope/masts can't be detected, so I try to play as if they could be as much as possible.

I guess I am having a bit of a problem when it comes to classification, especially in scenarios where there are surface hostiles mixed in with the surface neutrals. I generally try to have a tentative classification and rough TMA before a contact gets within 10 nm if possible when driving a nuke. When driving a Kilo of course, it's whatever range I can get out of the scope and little sonar suite which is often slightly less than 10 nm.

I was playing a scenario whose title escapes me ATM, but it invovled the interception and sinking of a Chinese cargo ship near Panama. The scenario starts me out with very little info other than that there is a cargo ship in the area with some warship escorts, but no general position is stated or marked on the map. There is what seems to be a plethora of contacts at the start and it took me about half an hour just to sort all these out from their mirrors and one another. Because they were basically all between 90 and 200 degrees, they tended to have tracks nearly on top of one another which made classification EXTREMELY difficult. I don't really have time to turn off the filter and go through the whole list for every contact, so, knowing there were no other subsurface vessels out there, I simply classified most of them as unknown surface. The only ones I could pick out right away were the ones that were pinging, but even so, the track were all so close in bearing it was hard to know which TA contacts to merge with the active intercept tracks. So how do you guys deal with situations like this? I was unable to pick out the cargo ship for about two hours, by which point I had traveled at maximum tactical speed to a point SW of my start in hopes of spreading the contacts out a bit without getting too close. However, even with this maneuver many of them stayed stubbornly close on the TA, though they did shift about a bit. It seems there are just some environments where there are simply too many contacts clustered together to make manual sonar operation anything but a nightmare. And there really were only about ten or twelve ships in the scenario, they were just all in the same area.

In RL, I would assume a sonar operator would have more time to pick out and classify each contact as they would not all be appearing simultaniously at random ranges and speeds. A real sub would be in transit to the location of the intercept and so would pick up surface traffic as it came into range in a much more gradual manner. I would also think that in RL I would get at least a rough idea of which direction to look in for the Chinese convoy and more likely an estimated transit path. Oh well, this one is more the scenario designer's fault than DW's.

10-29-09, 06:44 PM	#20
NFunky Machinist's Mate Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 127 Downloads: 3 Uploads: 0	Hey Nexus7, good points about hostile air cover and such. I do think one of the biggest problems with DW is that my scope/masts can't be detected, so I try to play as if they could be as much as possible. I guess I am having a bit of a problem when it comes to classification, especially in scenarios where there are surface hostiles mixed in with the surface neutrals. I generally try to have a tentative classification and rough TMA before a contact gets within 10 nm if possible when driving a nuke. When driving a Kilo of course, it's whatever range I can get out of the scope and little sonar suite which is often slightly less than 10 nm. I was playing a scenario whose title escapes me ATM, but it invovled the interception and sinking of a Chinese cargo ship near Panama. The scenario starts me out with very little info other than that there is a cargo ship in the area with some warship escorts, but no general position is stated or marked on the map. There is what seems to be a plethora of contacts at the start and it took me about half an hour just to sort all these out from their mirrors and one another. Because they were basically all between 90 and 200 degrees, they tended to have tracks nearly on top of one another which made classification EXTREMELY difficult. I don't really have time to turn off the filter and go through the whole list for every contact, so, knowing there were no other subsurface vessels out there, I simply classified most of them as unknown surface. The only ones I could pick out right away were the ones that were pinging, but even so, the track were all so close in bearing it was hard to know which TA contacts to merge with the active intercept tracks. So how do you guys deal with situations like this? I was unable to pick out the cargo ship for about two hours, by which point I had traveled at maximum tactical speed to a point SW of my start in hopes of spreading the contacts out a bit without getting too close. However, even with this maneuver many of them stayed stubbornly close on the TA, though they did shift about a bit. It seems there are just some environments where there are simply too many contacts clustered together to make manual sonar operation anything but a nightmare. And there really were only about ten or twelve ships in the scenario, they were just all in the same area. In RL, I would assume a sonar operator would have more time to pick out and classify each contact as they would not all be appearing simultaniously at random ranges and speeds. A real sub would be in transit to the location of the intercept and so would pick up surface traffic as it came into range in a much more gradual manner. I would also think that in RL I would get at least a rough idea of which direction to look in for the Chinese convoy and more likely an estimated transit path. Oh well, this one is more the scenario designer's fault than DW's.