Quote:
Originally Posted by John Pancoast
Does the level of this affect both visual and submerged attack prowess, one or the other, or neither ?
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Yes on both counts. Crew ratings with any given individual escort naval vessels hold hands with sensor effectiveness. Couple that with advancing technology as the war progresses, and you experience an effective in-game curve that approximates events in WWII ASW warfare.
I can only speak with authority for GWX files and end-result game-play though. Otherwise, NYGM appears to do a very good, and arguably superior job of approximating that curve too. NYGM employs additional visual sensors on various vessels as well and IIRC, Stiebler introduced Magnetic Anomaly Detectors
via the Hsie fix mods??? I'm fuzzy on the Stiebler add-on MAD bit as I only ran across it as I was running out of steam just a couple of days ago.
During the final days of GWX 3.0 construction, Jeff-Groves (formerly Privateer here at SS) and I talked about employing MAD as designed by him, especially since GWX contains the first K-ship blimps in SH3, also built by Jeff. (The first use of MADs was via the U.S. Navy K-ships.) We just didn't have enough time or steam left to test them properly.
You can read a bit more about magnetic anomaly detectors at U-boat.net.
https://uboat.net/allies/technical/mad.htm
Controlled sensor testing in SH3 can drive a wooden man insane with its monotony... which may explain the odd facial twitching I have from time to time. Collectively, Cdre Gibbs, Ref, and myself deciphered sensor function and went at it with a similar methodology that was employed by NYGM devs. They engaged in a similar process albeit with different people involved. In one such stretch of testing, I stayed at it for a little over six months.... making one micro-adjustment at a time with each and every sensor, their progressive variants both ASW and U-boat, and logging responses in each environment/game state, and their combinations. This is not to mention further weeks of testing and exploration. I did most of the dog-work during the development of GWX 2.0 as Jimbuna can attest. I certainly bent his ear often enough, that I thought he might apply a shovel to my head in Houston. He didn't have to though, as Neal's glass door to the back yard proved to do the job nicely.
In SH3, it isn't good enough to just apply approximate historically accurate entries to SH3 files. You must on occasion balance matters against limitations of the SH3 program, all other sensor behavior, and elements such as depth charge behavior etc.
Anyway, I had no intention to ramble so much, I could write about sensors in SH3 for days without stopping, but the twitching gets pretty bad.
In all seriousness and regardless of whatever the latest SH3 sensor controversy of the week might be, I think I am in many ways most proud of the dog-work I did on the sensors as delivered in GWX. It wasn't something shiny or pretty, but it, works very nicely in reproducing the expected technological and crew experience curve found in the Battle of the Atlantic.
I certainly can't describe the awesome feeling I had towards the end of sensor testing/development, when in the mid to late war settings, I
consistently observed escorts and/or hunter killer groups in SH3-GWX first detecting, then holding contact, and appearing to direct other destroyers/ASW vessels to carry out depth charge runs while employing ASDIC. Before, this behavior was rare and just looked all wrong visually. Before modification by GWX, crew ratings were all over the place and sometimes even backwards. Before GWX and NYGM, you could basically drive your U-boat up to a destroyer, start banging on the hull with a ball peen hammer, and he MIGHT react to you.... maybe.
The GWX Dev Team added over one million lines of campaign code alone, bearing the above findings in mind and employing other elements consistent with that. However, that's another story and the true experts on GWX campaign files don't really hang out here anymore.
I hope you found this useful, John.
(Holy crap, why did you write so much, KL. A simple 'yes' or 'no' would have spared you all that twitching!)