[Wisq]

Originally Posted by Aktungbby

Wisq! After a three year silent run!

Haha, yeah, I've been lurking now and then but haven't had much to post. Sub/naval sims aren't getting the love they deserve these days.

Originally Posted by banryu79

For DW, there is an old thread by Dr.Sid that examine the whole thing, here: DW sound propagation model measurements

EDIT: I think you could find very intresting this thread too: Underwater acoustics for dummies

The modeling of the sensors/acoustic environment in SHx is crude at best if confronted with DW... But that's fair, IMO.

Even so, after a year playing SH3 I recently starded the desire to improve a little the "hydrophones aspect" in SH3. I installed the "New Sh3 Hyprophones layers by Rubini v2.0" mod and that made the trick for me. Nothing revolutionary, mind you, but something very worthwhile IMO that give the game more substance

Nice, thanks for the links! I'll have to check out the current mod situation for the SH games … I imagine it's changed some in the years I've been gone, especially since there hasn't really been a worthy successor.

Originally Posted by SilentPrey

It doesn't sound to me like that mission has any civilian traffic modeled.

Oh, yeah. Sorry, I should've clarified: My confusion was that 8 NM seemed like a short distance to not be able to hear a surface ship (even a military one), not just "where are all the contacts?"

Personally, I suspect they said "you're trying to escape, civilian traffic will just make your life easier, we'll say it's a quiet day and/or they already told the civ traffic to scram". Or they just forgot.

Modern warships probably are MUCH quieter than WWII merchants. However, DW has a hardcap on passive detection range. LwAmi removes it but I don't know about any of the other mods. The LwAmi manual doesn't say what the hardcap was but it's very possible that eight miles is outside of it.

Oo, good point. I forgot that I was running vanilla, not LwAmi. I was so excited just to finally be able to run it again (having discovered the Direct3D hack that lets it run on Win8).

Originally Posted by Mike Abberton

Primary sensors to locate targets were generally lookouts (esp. German and Japanese) and Radar (US). They traveled known shipping lanes/hunting zones and received steering guidance from other sources.

I do recall that standard (game) procedure (once you reached your patrol area) was to putter along for <x> hours on the surface, then dive and check for contacts, then surface and repeat. Particularly in bad-weather situations. But yeah, being unable to stay submerged for too long — or be in any condition to fight if you did stay submerged for long and then picked something up — certainly made the eyeball, radar, and radio the primary methods of acquisition.

Of course the game distorts our perception of modern warfare a bit by generally starting us off semi-near (close to or in sonar range) our targets/opponents. There is no open campaign mode like in Silent Hunter 3 or 4.

I think even in the modern warfare, there would be a lot of steering guidance given to subs either in mission orders or on the fly through satellite communications on where the targets are. In a conventional WWIII scenario (like Red Storm Rising), a Russian nuke boat is probably going to find convoys through external means (communications), not drive around solely looking on their sonar displays.

Makes sense. Certainly today, I'm guessing we'd have planes and satellites doing the target-finding, and subs would just be treated as a strategic and tactical support resource rather than the primary hunters.