SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - View Single Post - Are missions supposed to last so long time?

Quillan · 04-06-07, 09:09 AM

I finished my first patrol last night. I was ordered to patrol the Marshal Islands because "it was suspected that the Japanese might be using the islands to build up another fleet". I sailed over there from Pearl, got in close to about half the islands in the grouping, found nothing, and eventually headed on to the patrol location. I hung out there for 48 hours, found nothing, then headed on west. I saw a lot of contact reports southwest of Guam and Saipan, so I went to that area and sank a couple of ships. After a bit there, I was down to 55% fuel so I decided to push it a bit and sailed over towards Formosa. Along the way I sent in a status report, and got a new objective with it: Patrol the Luzon Straits.

This area was a lot more active; I had many hydrophone contacts there, even stumbled across a "task force". What a joke; one destroyer and two medium gunboats. I sank the destroyer anyway and sailed off. A number of single and tandem freighters sailed through the area, both large and medium, and at the end I came across another task force composed of a large passenger ship and 4 destroyers. I sank the troop carrier with 2 torps from 5500 yards. In the end I was out of torpedoes and dangerously low on diesel; I had to put in at Midway to refit. I made it back to Pearl on February 12th, 2 months and 2 days after leaving.

As a side note, I got the message "We're out of diesel!" when I was at 4% fuel remaining. The final total was an absolutely insane 56,900 tons of shipping; the sub aces list when I made it back to port only listed two others, the highest of which was just under 10K. About half the ships I sank were either chasing down a radio contact or my air search radar picking up a surface ship and about half were things I picked up on the hydrophones, so even adjusting for the unrealistic targets that way I sank way too much shipping.

On a further side note, the air search radar does detect aircraft, but it displays them as surface contacts. It doesn't seem to work under heavy time compression. The hostile air contacts I got on my way back from Japan were all visual sightings by the watch crew rather than radar contacts, however it picked up the aircraft around Pearl and Midway just fine at 2048x speed.

04-06-07, 09:09 AM	#23
Quillan Samurai Navy Join Date: Apr 2005 Posts: 579 Downloads: 2 Uploads: 0	I finished my first patrol last night. I was ordered to patrol the Marshal Islands because "it was suspected that the Japanese might be using the islands to build up another fleet". I sailed over there from Pearl, got in close to about half the islands in the grouping, found nothing, and eventually headed on to the patrol location. I hung out there for 48 hours, found nothing, then headed on west. I saw a lot of contact reports southwest of Guam and Saipan, so I went to that area and sank a couple of ships. After a bit there, I was down to 55% fuel so I decided to push it a bit and sailed over towards Formosa. Along the way I sent in a status report, and got a new objective with it: Patrol the Luzon Straits. This area was a lot more active; I had many hydrophone contacts there, even stumbled across a "task force". What a joke; one destroyer and two medium gunboats. I sank the destroyer anyway and sailed off. A number of single and tandem freighters sailed through the area, both large and medium, and at the end I came across another task force composed of a large passenger ship and 4 destroyers. I sank the troop carrier with 2 torps from 5500 yards. In the end I was out of torpedoes and dangerously low on diesel; I had to put in at Midway to refit. I made it back to Pearl on February 12th, 2 months and 2 days after leaving. As a side note, I got the message "We're out of diesel!" when I was at 4% fuel remaining. The final total was an absolutely insane 56,900 tons of shipping; the sub aces list when I made it back to port only listed two others, the highest of which was just under 10K. About half the ships I sank were either chasing down a radio contact or my air search radar picking up a surface ship and about half were things I picked up on the hydrophones, so even adjusting for the unrealistic targets that way I sank way too much shipping. On a further side note, the air search radar does detect aircraft, but it displays them as surface contacts. It doesn't seem to work under heavy time compression. The hostile air contacts I got on my way back from Japan were all visual sightings by the watch crew rather than radar contacts, however it picked up the aircraft around Pearl and Midway just fine at 2048x speed. __________________ We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.