I posted this today on the SCS Forum, it may be relevant to you here as well.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by LuftWolf
One reason for this is that active sonar has an optimal range depending on the acoustic conditions. Depending on the environment, there is going to be a shadow zone (used loosely, meaning an area of low signal to noise ratio specific to the acoustic conditions) between the first clear zones, one between the submarine and the shadow zone and another one after until the targets are too far away to generate a good return.
It seems in that zone you can get range information from the audio but the sonar cannot resolve a bearing and so it doesn't give you a visual. This means that at the ranges you are talking about, it is common to have difficulty with the active sonar bearing because the sound does not always travel in a direct path from your sub to the contact and back again.
I'm not sure how sonars work in real life, but Sonalysts does. And so do a few others around the community who are in the naval community, and listening to them has given me the impression that all kinds of things in sonar are predictably odd, so its not necessarily a bug when the sonar does something unexpected, it is more likely a feature of the acoustics engine. 
I know that sounds terrible... :P  |
You should know that even within bottom limited environments, the difference in the type of floor bottom (rock, sand, or mud) plays a big part as well. I have to do some more testing with 1.03, but I suspect that a rock bottom limited environment is almost as good if not better for acoustics than the topside of a surface duct. This of course works with the idea that the bottom that the sim is calculating is more or less completely flat and featureless.