Standard speed was fast. The slow speed was removed later.
Ships did fire past 2000 yards sometimes, particularly if they knew they'd not get another try. There are many examples cited in Blair of them throwing a spred at targets at extreme range (usully something overlapping like a convoy or TF). A few even got hits. Obviously this wasn't SOP.
The default game has the wrong arming distance for torpedos, so if you are playing with them properly modded, 500 yards is cutting it close for a 400-450 yard arming distance. Stock game arming distance is 200 or 220m. Way too short.
After determining their fish were screwy, they also fired spreads just to make up for failures. Hit %s without using a mod like hardcore dud torepdoes will always give screwy results (compared to RL). Many of my best setups end with a "klunk!" not a "boom!"
As for targetting errors, yeah, thsi is a failure, IMO. It's too easy to hit, frankly. If you bother to take time, you can hit a huge % of the time. In RL, this would have been vastly more difficult because you'd not instantly know it was one of 6 (8, 10, whatever) merchants. You'd likely have misjudged the displacement, range, etc for lack of data.
I'd like to clone a bunch of the merchants and very slightly alter them, and not make accurate rec manual changes to go with them. Make it hard to narrow most ships past maybe 4 equally good choices, any one of which being wrong would result in a single MOT torpedo missing the target many ranges past point blank.
tater
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