The sonar buttons are bugged, You have to use it manually.
You have to be close enough to a target to see the ship type on the little notepad upper right of the wheel thingy in the hydrophone station.
When you have a contact, sit in the station. Ask the operator to report nearest contact or find it yourself. Dial it in and when you see the ship type in the upper right corner notepad, push the little button on the lower left corner. It will send a ping and give you the exact distance to target.
It's real handy if you have multiple targets. You can figure out location, heading and speed of targets if you ping them a few times. It's works great in poor visibility.
About using enemy sonar to determine where they are, well, not that I'm aware of. If there is a way I'd like to know. All I do know that if the enemy is pinging you, it's already too late. You just know you need to hide, quickly.
Radar detector is just that. It detects enemy radar signals and gives you a bearing on it. The distance depends on the model, as the war progresses, the models get better. (I'd get one of these before getting active radar.)
For the active radar, my experience has been that if you have the 16k visibility mod, on the surface in daytime clear weather, the watch crew will usually spot a ship right around the same time the radar operator does. If you are using default or 8K, radar will detect things a little sooner, but now very much. It's strength is at night and in very bad weather, that's the only time I ever use it.
The hydrophone and sonar are far more usefull to me than the radar equipment.
About the sonar/radar coatings, I don't know exact numbers but, when you get to the timeframe in the war when these are available, you already need every bit of help you can get, so get it. Even if it's only a 50m difference, it might make all the difference.
If you're asking for hard coded exact numbers, you won't find them for most things. That's one of the strengths of this simulation. Many of the variables are actually variable, making them very random. It may not work the exact same way twice.
|