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Old 12-23-21, 12:28 PM   #7
Treetop64
Torpedoman
 
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Bay Area, California
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kondor999 View Post
I know this thread is ancient, but I feel like the loudness of the Mk 48, even before it's activated (160db!) is essentially a game-breaking giant bug.

It ensures that you can only very rarely do a true dog-leg sneak attack, because the enemy sub will nearly always hear the incredibly loud torp and do an immediate counter-launch down its bearing.

This is why Cold Waters is so inferior to Red Storm Rising, where such sneak attacks were the core gameplay element. In Cold Waters, instead of careful surprise attacks, everything quickly degenerates into a swirling underwater "dogfight" with torps everywhere.

By lowering the noise of the Mk48 down to a more reasonable 120 or 130db (prior to going active) and 180db (full speed - because I really doubt a torp is louder than a MOSS decoy at 200db), suddenly you get the sub game we all wanted.

Now you can launch a Mk48 in passive mode, guide it carefully into attack position via a dog-leg, make it go active and watch as the enemy fires a spread vs the incoming torp - but away from your subs actual position.

This is vastly more interesting and (I feel) more realistic than watching a November somehow magically know exactly when I've fired a Mk 48 at extreme range in passive mode (which is how the game plays as-is).

I've gone through and adjusted all the torp loudness values, making the electric ones quite quiet and the Otto-cycle ones louder - but never louder than an *entire mid-80's nuclear sub* prior to activation.

The result is a much better game for sure, and likely a much better simulation was well. Kudos to Killerfish for making all these files edit-able, but they lose points for rating the Mk48 at 160db/230db to begin with, which (as I've said) pretty much kills the game for me.
It's not unreasonable for the Mk48 to be as loud as they are represented in-game.

IRL Mk48s and the later ADCAPS are in fact exceptionally noisy torpedoes. This is a notable drawback and chief characteristic of the type. An effect of their corresponding high performance.

IIRC, it wasn't until the ADCAP Mod-6 (a late modification that wasn't deployed until after the SSN-21s were already in service) that the ADCAP's noise levels were thoroughly addressed without impeding performance. The result was an even higher performance torpedo with better sensors that ran quieter than legacy models, though relatively it still runs loudly for a modern torpedo.
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