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Originally Posted by compressioncut
Sprint and drift for suface ships is very difficult because there are so many other concerns occupying the powers-that-be that you really have to dumb it down. We've tried it and it is preferred but man it's pretty theoretical. That's why the 5/50/5 rule is about as complicated as it gets, except maybe in tactics manuals.
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I don't doubt it, I think I said as much too. I think just keeping a very high SOA so that limiting lines of approach are narrow, and putting "expendable" screens as far forward as possible, such that they cover the entirety of the arc subtended by the limiting lines of approach is probably the only real way to create an "optimal" ASW screen.
The mathematics of how long to sprint and how long to drift in order to catch a given target leaves very little room for error. It's not like barrier searches where departing from the mathematically optimal search tends to make only a little difference unless the search was basically a bad idea anyhow. I wonder, then, why it's mentioned so frequently as a tactic in historical works (WWI and WWII). Was there a historical situation where the other concerns which make it meaningless today weren't such an issue? Or maybe those histories are incorrect? Maybe WWII convoys crept along at a snail's pace. Who knows?
*shrug*