Frustrated - Can't pass torpedo tutorial

[Akela]

Okay, this is embarassing, but I cannot pass the torpedo tutorial at the Naval Acadamy. I have read every newbie guide I can find, I can plot courses and speeds from observed locations, I can plot intercept courses and set up firing positions, but it seems like I constantly run out of time and/or torpedos while running this mission. Here are some details.

First of all, I've got the realism turned up to about medium, most of which really shouldn't affect this run. Just to be clear though, I have limited everything, realistic vulnerability, repair and sensor, dud torpedos, and no external view or map contact update.

Now, just to remind y'all, you start out in the middle of 5 ships, you must sink 4 and one of the 4 must be the large C2 cargo ship. The cargo ship is rougly north of your starting position, moving NE at 2kts. (What's the abreviation for knots?) There is a small tanker rougly east of you moving south at 7kts, a Coastal Merchant to the south of you moving west at 5kts, and another Coastal Merchant to the west moving west at 5kts. There is also a 3rd Coastal Merchant sitting north of you not moving at all. Everyone starts at about 1500m away.

So I decide to leave the C2 for last, since it's not going anywhere quickly I figure I can always come back and kill it. The same thing is for the Coastal Merchant sitting dead in the water. So that leaves two of the three ships around you that must be destroyed. I decide that my first target is the Small Tanker since it is moving the fastest.

Now I have to kill 4 ships with 10 torpedos, and that C2 sometimes takes 3 hits to sink, so I figure I should try to sink the others with 2 torps each. That being said, here is what I've been doing lately.

The first thing I tried to do was just hit the Small Tanker right from the starting position. So I turn to 90 degrees, line up a shot after a few moments, and fire a salvo of two torps set to fast, from a range of about 1500km. These almost always miss, so I gave up on that plan since I can't really be wasting torps or I won't have enough to finish the mission.

So then I started driving east toward the tanker. I can bring my range down to about 700km in a few minutes and then blast it out of the water (under the water?) with 2 torps, although about 50% of the time one of them misses and I have to use a third torp to finish it off.

Now I need a second target. I have tried both the south target, and the west target. By the time I'm done sinking the tanker they are usually 2K to 2.5K away, moving away at about 5 kts. I drive towards one of them (well, not towards them, but towards where I think a good intercept point will be). This usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes or more before I can get my range down under 1K (I'm travelling at full at periscope depth) and by that time the crew starts to break down. If I miss with a torp here that leaves me pretty short handed for finishing the mission.

Anyway, I guess I'm not approaching this the right way, or I'm missing something here because I've read some faqs that say you should be able to do this mission without hardly moving at all, and others that say, "just run them down and point and click".

It's hard to describe everything that I'm trying, but based on this limited description above does anything stand out that I may be doing wrong? Or better yet, does anyone remember how their run went when they tried it?

I thank you in advance for all the advice.

Dan

[kylania]

Welcome to SH3 Dan!

First off, are you using any mods or just vanilla SH3? GW and NYGM both make ships harder to sink, so the training missions are near impossible.

My first advice to you is, if you feel confident in your abillities in general you're ready for the big show You don't have to finish the training missions if you don't want to. You'll almost never end up in a similar situation like that. At sea YOU will almost always dictate the attack patterns and setup.

A few hints to remember, you don't have to stay submerged, u-boats were designed to fire from the surface, so you can surface up to get speed to catch up with anything that's far away.

Also if you've put two into a ship and it hasn't sunk but is dead in the water, come back to it later, finish off one of the others.

[Akela]

So, I'm playing it right now and already things are going better, so I think the game knows I posted to you guys and it's caving in already.

I turned to 90, raised the periscope, found my target, locked on it, brought the boat back to 70 degress to bring it to green a little sooner, selected tube one, set the torp to fast, opened the door and waited for the triangle to go green. One torp fired from a range of 1.1km, hits and kills the small tanker. Yeah! Pause!

Now I have to decide on the next target. I should be able to get them all, right? There are two ships moving at any speed. The first is a Coastal Merchant bearing 135, 1650m, moving at 8kts! (I'd post a picutre of it if I could figure out how to do that). I don't know his exact heading yet, but it looks like he's heading SW slightly. The AOB is 117.

The other target is bearing 215 from me, is at 1680m and travelling roughly NE at 4kts.

Now it seems to me that I have four options. I have to choose one target or the other, then I have to choose whether to fire straight from here or try to close on them first.

Well, my limited experience tells me that I'm probably not going to hit them from 1600m, so I should try to close on one of them first. Since I can only travel about 8kts underwater anyway I probably can't gain on the southern ship, so I guess that leaves me with the western ship.

Should you have to plot an intercept course for a ship that is only 1600m away? It doesn't seem like that should be necessary, however, it's probably not bad to practice. I'll turn to face it and then take 3.5 minutes and figure it's heading.

Any comments so far will be appreciated. Next post in 10 minutes or so.

Dan

P.S. I presume the southern boat is moving at 8kts because I just sunk this tanker?

[Akela]

First off, are you using any mods or just vanilla SH3? GW and NYGM both make ships harder to sink, so the training missions are near impossible

Great question, yes I left out some important information didn't I? No this is just a vanilla install. I've downloaded GW and Tonnage but I haven't implemented either one yet. Also, I'm running the 1.4b patch.

My first advice to you is, if you feel confident in your abillities in general you're ready for the big show You don't have to finish the training missions if you don't want to.

LOL, now you are really going to think I'm dumb. I'm so pedantic it never occured to me that I could just start playing the game without finishing these missions. ROTFLMAO. Still, now it's become a matter of pride.

A few hints to remember, you don't have to stay submerged, u-boats were designed to fire from the surface, so you can surface up to get speed to catch up with anything that's far away.

Oooo, now that's an interesting idea that maybe should have been obvious. If I surface though, won't they automatically detect me, turn away and run leaving me with that annoying stern shot?

[TarJak]

Akela, If you can finish the torp tutorial with GW installed you are ready for the big show! Sinking ships within this mod is meant to be harder but if you aim just right you can scupper them with a single shot.

Don't feel bad about it there are some older hands that are still finding out new things about this game even after more than 12 months playing it, myself especially included.

Don't worry too much about their "evasion" techniques. They may zigzag a bit but they are too slow to stop you catching em and killing em.


Gute Jagd!

[Akela]

TarJak and Kylania, thank you for your encouragement and advice. I think I'm about to finish off the second target.

I decided to take out the ship to the west. It was about 1680m away and appeared to be headed away from me but since I don't have an auto-updating map I decided to take the time to figure it's course. Unfortunately, I don't know how to figure a target's course while moving, so I turned to face the target and brought my boat to a stop. By that time the target was at a bearing of 347 with a range of 1950m. Three minutes and 15 seconds later it was at 353 with a range of 2388, so a few moments on pause with the nav map let's me figure his course at 330. The speed checked out to be 5kts, just what the periscope display was showing.

At this point I'd like to mention that, as far as I've been able to tell, there doesn't seem to be any way to save this game during one of these missions. I certainly hope that's just a limitation with the Naval Academy missions, but right now it's a little annoying because I sure would like to be able to experiment with various courses of action without giving up my first kill. But since I can't figure that out I'm forced to do a lot of thinking before I take a course of action because I'm not going to be able to go back.

I decide that I proabably won't hit the ship from here, based on the distance and angle involved. I think it's possible that a lot of the frustration I've been experiencing with misses has been because I've taken shots with yellow triangles. Based on Kylania's excellent suggestion about running on the surface, bolstered by TarJak's encouragement that, even if they spot me and run it ain't so bad, I decide that I'm going to try to run a box pattern to get ahead of this fellow and nail him from 90 degrees. I turned my boat to 330, hit the afterburners and took it to the surface. (While I was at it I lowered the periscope because I didn't want the other Captains to laugh at me for running flank on the surface with my periscope up.)

It took about 15 minutes of running on the surface to catch up with the Merchant. During that time I've learned that the crew of the merchant ship is either asleep, drunk, or both. At this moment I am 1200m directly port of them, running on the surface at flank speed, and my little submarine is still green. They probably dumbed this down for the tutorial. I wish I had tried this a week ago. Thank you Kylania, thank you, thank you, thank you!

At this point I have to give up for the night. Since I can't figure out how to save the game I'm leaving the computer running because I'm NOT giving up this run now! This is the best I've done in weeks! When I get up tomorrow my plan is to run a little further ahead, turn to 240, wait for him to go green and fire torps until he's dead. Hopefully it will take only one.

Thank you all for your help.

Dan

[THE_MASK]

Look how close i am at night on the surface and not detected there are 5 destroyers ahead of the convoy not far away. A little surprise awaits if you stay surfaced when the torps hits though.

[AVGWarhawk]

If you are getting within 2000m or less, the intended target is as good as dead. What I do is manually dial in the speed of the merchants. Normally they do 7kts. I dial that in. I position myself to be somewhere around 90 degrees to the target. I never use magnetic, only contact on the torps. That is just me I guess. Once your intended target has come into your settings before letting the torps go, fire away. Make sure those doors are open because you will loose three seconds on the run time of the torpedo and probably miss. I like to position myself so I can sit and wait for the victim to come to me. That gives me plenty of time to get my settings where I want them. Once done, I kick back and wait for my numbers to match and watch the fireworks.

[Akela]

Woohooo! This is great! The Coastal Merchant is also sunk with a single torpedo. I kept moving a little past him, turned the boat to 240, rigged tube 1 for fast running, opened the door, and let him have it when his triangle went green. Range was just under 1km. I've been banging my head against the bulkhead for 2 weeks now and all of a sudden this seems easy!

Since this is going so well, I've decided to get greedy. I only need the C2 and one other, but I've decided to go after all three. The Coastal Merchant to the south is 6.3 klicks away, moving at 5kts. I guess he slowed down a bit. He's my next victim.

I'm 18 minutes into this scenario, based on the time stamps on the messages. It seems to me that in previous runs my crew has fatigued shortly after catching the second ship. I don't know how long into the mission it was (I was running underwater then, so longer than now). I'm not sure when/if to move crew around. There are only 4 rested guys and a couple of officers. Everyone in the electric rooms seems to have moved to the diesel room, which is fine. No one is showing any exclamation points. What do you guys normally do? Do you move crew before they fatigue, or just take care of it after they fatigue? How long should these guys last?

Time to plot an intercept course. I'll post again in a little bit.

As always, thanks for the helpful suggestions. You guys are great!

Dan

[Akela]

...and I hope I did it correctly. The point seems a long way away, 11+ klicks. That should take me almost 40 minutes to reach. [edit] Correction, that would take me 40 minutes to reach at 1kt. I'm travelling at 13kts, so only a few minutes.

One thing that's weird. I'm over 5 clicks away from this merchant, and everything seems the same as before when I was running down the previous merchant, except now for some reason my little visibility indicator is turning yellow, then orange, then red. I can't figure out why it stayed green last time and is moving to red this time. There isn't a lot of time between the two so the lighting shouldn't change that much. I don't know, it's weird.

[AVGWarhawk]

I do not know what to tell you on that. I have not used the color thingy for quite some time. I play at 79%. Weapons officer assist and outside view (eye candy) only.

[kylania]

Wow, crew management.. that's a toughie.

Personally I've switched to using the NYGM sized crew in my ships, which is less men than you'll find in GW. I have full set of officers, three 4 man watch crews and two crews for everything else. Also a 3-4 man Torpedo crew depending on the size of the boat and two medics.

I try to keep everyone in quarters unless they are actively on shift. One officer and the torpedo crew will usually be in the unused-at-the-time engine room since you don't lose fatigue there.

Every few hours I'll swap the crews and rotate in the next watch crew. This keeps everyone mostly rested. I usually do this at 0800, 1600 and 0000. GW 1.1a has a different fatigue system so you can run them a little longer, maybe two changes a day or so? I'm still trying to figure out the best way of doing that.

[robbo180265]

Originally Posted by Akela

...

One thing that's weird. I'm over 5 clicks away from this merchant, and everything seems the same as before when I was running down the previous merchant, except now for some reason my little visibility indicator is turning yellow, then orange, then red. I can't figure out why it stayed green last time and is moving to red this time. There isn't a lot of time between the two so the lighting shouldn't change that much. I don't know, it's weird.

Hi Akela
I'm pretty new to the whole thing too. What you're describing is the Angle on Bow indicators. It's quite complicated but it is covered in the community manual. Basically you should try to get yourself at as close to a 90 degree approach as possible. so that the side of the target is flat as the torpedo hits(please someone bail me out and explain it better) . The numbers that have AOB next to them need to read 000 (or as near as possible) then the triangle will go green

Probably the best thing to do is read the community manual it has a large section all about torpedo attacks, and will make a lot more sense than me!!

http://www.communitymanuals.com/shii...itle=Torpedoes

[Akela]

He changed course on me!!! The $@&#$%^% [loosely translated: "worthy opponent"] has radically changed course 20 mintues into my pursuit. This sucks. Who knows where that C2 cargo ship is now, somewhere an hour behind me.

It's a good thing I was watching the guy or I wouldn't have noticed the course change. The AOB dropped from 100 to 0, so I guess that means he turned directly north into me. He can't have seen me, I'm submerged now and my visibility indicator is green. I've managed to close the range to 1400m.

How do you insert a picture into these posts?

[Akela]

After a brief, amusing, interlude where he was headed straight for me and I was backing up and turning trying to keep from getting accidently rammed, I managed to kill him. Unfortunately, I spent 4 torps doing it. My first attack was a salvo of two that he happened to turn away from right at the last minute and they both missed. I prepped a second salvo of 2 and one of those hit, sinking him. Now I'm headed back to the last point I marked for the C2 cargo ship. I've got 4 torps left but...

...no one to load them. The crew has worn out. I had to send the captain down to the engine room to get the deisels going again. Well, that's okay, I've got a long run ahead so I can send most of the torpedo room guys back to their bunks for a while.

This game is so extremely cool I can't describe it.