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Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat
Radar - based on my reading, Samuel Morison's History of U.S. naval operations in ww2 and Clay Blair's Silent Victory, IJN ships never carried an effective radar, certainly not one that ever had any practical effect in any battle, does anyone one have solid evidence to the contrary?
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Theodore Roscoe (in United States Submarine Operations in World War II) states that IJN surface ships didn't start getting radar (10cm) until early 1943, and that they started with their capital ships (BB Hyuga getting the first, apparently) and didn't really begin equipping escorts with radar until September 1944 (p.211).
Roscoe also indicates that airborne radar was only installed in Japanese medium bombers in the Fall of 1943, with a special squadron of radar equipped (but obsolescent) planes formed for convoy escort duties in December 1943, with widespread deployment of radar-equipped planes not coming until Fall 1944 (p.211). He states that the Japanese airborne radar, when it was used, was reportedly able to detect a sub at a range of 12 miles, and toward the end of the war they were making a significant number of night contacts on subs. Japanese doctrine supposedly called for radar to be used only at night or in low visibility, prefering visual searching by day - not sure how that would/could be reflected in the game. They also sometimes turned their radars off, even at night, fearing Allied radar detectors would give away their positions.
Roscoe indicates that shipboard radar detectors were introduced as early as 1942, and most escorts were equipped with them by the end of 1944. These detectors apparently had directional capabilities. Radar search receivers were not installed in Japanese aircraft until late 1944 (and even then not in many ASW aircraft), but these were not actually capable of "homing in" on Allied submarine radars.
Roscoe did indicate that the RDF network was good enough to allow the Japanese to fix a sub's position on just about any radio transmission (other than perhaps ones used in short range between subs in line of sight) - within a box about 100 miles square. Apparently, this might allow for some re-routing of traffic away from areas where subs were thus known to be operating, but was of limited use operationally in terms of letting the IJN dispatch surface vessels or aircraft to intercept the sub (unless the sub was close to an airbase or port during daylight when it broadcast).
There's a lot more info in the Roscoe book about things like aircraft equipped with what sound like MAD devices (able to detect submerged submarines by flying over them at low altitude), merchant armament, depth charges etc. - not sure how "objective" or accurate the information is (first printed 1949, and still tinged with some less-than-PC attitude), but it's an interesting read in any event.