That's true. Minimizing the time it takes before you can begin your search is a big deal because it means the AOU surrounding your initial detection will be as small as possible so your odds are greatly improved.
Also, keeping a helo ready to go is always a good idea. I'm not sure if the classic edition of Harpoon has the custom ready times feature, though, so sometimes you have to be careful. Sortie rates can become absurdly high in that game, if I remember correctly. Custom ready times and the DB2000 did a lot to get the numbers more in agreement with reality.
Creating a buoy barrier is not necessarily a bad idea, particularly if you want to protect specific area. It doesn't even necessarily have to be massive, either. You might put a modest barrier out there that had a sort of middle-of-the-road likelyhood of detecting a transiting submarine, and combine it with a submarine barrier on one side and a minefield or a DDG on the other side. The probability of any one of the assets detecting and destroying the submarine might be iffy but all of them together are almost certain.
One of my gripes with Harpoon is that the sonobuoy inventories of warships appear to be basically unlimited so unrealistically dense barriers become a possibility. Another gripe I have is that as far as I can tell, only the aircraft laying the sonobuoy field can monitor it, which isn't realistic and makes it hard to develop tactics for turning over an area from an MPA to a helo, say.
But anyhow, in real life there exist no single ASW silver bullets. It's the combination of a lot of different platforms, each of which might not detect a target with any certainty by itself, but in combination, they make it very difficult.
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Originally Posted by MarkShot
Thanks, SeaQueen.
What I found after quite a bit of playing around with HCCE is that the most important thing is time:
(1) If you have anything in the air with buoys still on board, then dettach from the group and get them their quickly.
(2) When building your formation, don't put everything in the air. Keep 1 or 2 on ALERT-5 ready to press a contact as soon as you get one.
(3) Get to the spot a little faster ... the game will default to cruise, but instead crank it up to military.
* Manage your helos well such that once you have contact don't let it be broken.
I have not done any analysis, but it looks like due to the three dimensional behavior TIME by AREA that search space grows exponentially with time. So, properly handling time appears that it can halved the scope of the problem. Beyond that, I have been going outside in ... although many Pooners also spoke of creating a buoy barrier between your SAG (the target) and the contact as a defensive measure.
Thanks, again.
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