Quote:
Originally Posted by Julhelm
Historically the Soviets were unaware of blade rate and LOFAR which was a closely guarded secret in the West. For quite some time they were also unaware of rafting, which explains why they didn't pay much attention to quieting. When designing the November, the comparable US subs were the very noisy Nautilus and Skates, and the comparatively noisy Skipjack. They incorporated rafting in the Victor II and Charlies, so clearly they were aware of their noise disadvantage by then.
The sensor figures are derived from me setting up the cited trial scenarios and running them through our sensor model. For instance, Trout Cheek was set up using a Kotlin DD as the reference destroyer at 85db ambient noise. When you do that, you end up with a Trout Cheek that performs much like a BQR-2. The BQR-2 will still detect the November at twice the range the Trout Cheek can detect the Skipjack because Skipjack is a good 12db quieter, which is in line with the performance you quoted.
The detection ranges in the game also conform to reality, especially in the 1968 campaign. The famous Batfish trail was against a noisy Yankee class while the Batfish was fitted with a towed array, probably BQR-25 or TB-16. On the other hand, the Augusta collided with a Delta 1 it had failed to detect. Through Polmar we also know that Victor III could detect 688 class, and we know that perididcally Soviet boomers could penetrate out into the Atlantic without detection. We also know that on occasion, surface forces would detect intruding US submarines and harass them with small depth charges.
In the game, the US subs generally have a >10db advantage against same generation Soviet nuke subs. This translates to half the detection range using similar sonars. Only with the Victor III are the stakes more even, and in the case of Sierra, in their favor.
If the US player has too much of an advantage over the Soviets, they cease to be a credible threat and the game becomes much more unrealistic. It is possible to have a perfectly historically accurate simulation that is unrealistic simply because the player has prior information that was never available those who did the fighting back then. Having competent adversaries places you in the right frame of mind.
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To piggy-back on this, it can't be stressed enough the game-changer that the Akula was when it came out, Soviet submarines went from being predictably and dependably detectable to seemingly able vanish without a trace.
While the Sierra class did come first and an argument could be made that the Akula MAY have additional / enhanced capabilities (not much of an argument in terms of the later boats) but lets not forget that the Akula essentially came into being as a cheaper, steel Sierra which could be built in much larger numbers.
Sierras and Akulas (and to a lesser extent the Victor IIIs) were scary boats and caused a lot of headaches in the mid-to-late 80s. Lets also not forget that the Seawolf / "Ultimate COLD WAR ASW" design was basically created in response to these developments.