Enemy A/C south of Midway OR tale of 48 single engine planes 2000 miles from a base

[scrag]

Okay - this is simply stupid - I was jumped by no less than 30 pairs (yes pairs) of Zeros or Vals starting south of Midway (within sight of the island) and continuing to the central pacific. It felt more like frogger as you sit there and get overflown by pairs of fighters and dive bombers ABSOLUTELY STUPID!!!!! Yes there is no carrier as it would have been blown out of the water (within sight of Midway late 1942) .
I am patched to 1.3 and was wondering if this was a bug?

[tater]

There is no reason at all in game why a CV (or 3, or 4) could not be there.

The fact that you saw vals pretty much proves there was at least one CV nearby.

tater

[Ducimus]

Ill bet i get exact opposite complaints in TM 1.6

[tater]

Heheh.

The problem with the planes in stock (from CVs) is that since they have such huge range you see a zillion planes, but you could be many hundreds of miles from the CV.

In RL, unless sending a strike out, you'd be lucky to see ANY aircraft as far as 2-300 miles, and those would be strictly recon planes. Even those would be based on likely action with the enemy, not SOP.

Any sort of constant CAP for CVs would be within visual range of the TF. I have thought about BP-cloning the CV planes, and dropping the range to 50nm or so to be "CAP" planes. Course the CAP would need to be reduced to 1 plane (unless it's squadrons, then they all need to be 0, IMO)

Then at least if you saw them, you'd know you were CLOSE.

tater

[Ducimus]

I still want to know how many planes are considered a squadron since in stock, airbases have like 9 or 10 squadrons of various planes.

[tater]

Seems like it must be planes, the numbers used on the CVs are VERY close to the actual plane counts on carriers. If they are squadrons, CVs have about 10X too many planes on them. If they are squadrons, the airgroups need to be 2 of each type of plane.

tater

[scrag]

The weird part was that I started encountering them just outside of Midway - significantly after the Battle of Midway. Then on a line between Midway Island and Hokkaido Japan it looked like frogger (2 planes flying one way and often encountering more flying the opposite direction). BTW the range of the Val was around 915 and the Zero was around a 1000 if the pilot new how to lean the engine appropriatly - something I would not ever expect in an AI as it would be a waste of time here. A Carrier Battle Group???/ Unlikely - never had any contact and the nearest IJN Assets were thousands of miles away. Anyway - based on what I saw and behaviour of the A/C I am wondering if it was a bug.

[tater]

No, it was a carrier.

One, the game very simply deals with aircraft, they have a radius, and inside that radius it "rolls a die" to see if you encounter any. Once spotted, the die roll is weighted, so you'll see a lot (nevermind that CVs never flew all their planes around at extreme range in a search pattern, lol).

Two, the Val extreme range is set to 750 in stock I think.

The stock missions might be poorly designed, but it's not more complicated than that.

So it's not a "bug" per se, but it is a problem with the game---one that can be modded pretty easily.

tater

[Renesisfury]

Had the same issue, followed the planes along their return flight path, was not able to find anything, no sound contact or anything else. So if I understand correctly, if the carrier was within Val or Kate range I should have been able to pick them up on my sonar?

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by Renesisfury

Had the same issue, followed the planes along their return flight path, was not able to find anything, no sound contact or anything else. So if I understand correctly, if the carrier was within Val or Kate range I should have been able to pick them up on my sonar?

Not necessarily. Planes can fly a lot further out than the range of the hydroplane noise their carrier group makes. It wasn't unheard of for the Japanese to base Vals and Kates on shore airstrips too, although that can't be the case around Midway.

[tater]

This is a BUG.

They are coming from the carriers set to attack Midway.

What happens is this. The game has 2 types of groups. "Scripted" are units placed into a group by hand. They appear on a certain date, and head on their way. "Random" groups are set to spawn with a % chance on a date and time, with a % chance for each ship in the group.

Random groups do not exist until spawned.

The scripted units have a bug. While the ships do not appear until the date/time they spawn, their AIRGROUPS do. So you have all the Midway CV force's planes flying around spawning out of thin air.

This bug is in stock, and to some extent in TM since the Midway group is still scripted.

RSRD doesn't have this problem because he uses a random group for Midway (random only in name, all the right ships are there with the spawn %s set to 100%). The trade off is you are limited to the formations that SH4 will generate. The stock Midway is horrid, period, no redeeming qualities, plus it has this airgroup bug. ICL/TM has an accurate Midway (the formation of the Kido Butai is accurate, with a 7km spacing, and a guard DD a few hundred meters astern of each CV aligned with the Port side of the flight deck), but also has the airgroup bug (the changes in CV airgroups mitigate this to near zero though). RSRD has a somewhat accurate disposition of ships, and no problems associated with scripted missions.

My personal plan is to experiment with something a little crazy to get the best of both worlds, but I need to test it.

tater

[-Pv-]

Considering the aircraft ranges. it's not that likely you can hear a task force even after cruising in that direction for a long time based on sighting aircraft which might be up to 750 miles out from the TF.

I had a recent mission between Australia and Timor where the air was flooded with aicraft. There were no less than 4 within radar in the air constantly for days. The flight paths were also very confusing. Turned out I was near a carrier task force AND land based aircraft. I eventually intercepted the TF but it took severals days. Only near the end did I detect them with sound when I finally picked up the escorts and flanked in to investigate.
-Pv-

[tater]

One thing my air mod does is grossly reduce aircraft ranges, particularly on CVs.

In reality, there are 4 types of typical RL air ops that we need to think about:

1. Maritime Patrol. This is the biggie. H6Ks, H8Ks, and G4Ms (G3M Nells, too, if we had them) flying around looking for shipping. This should be SINGLE PLANES, never the 2 plane elements we see in game. Never.

2. ASW Patrol. Similar to 1, though in addition to radial patterns, you might see them with convoys, or flying along the convoys routes. These groups might actually be multiple planes, too.

3. CAP. This would be fighters (maybe some VBs for a TF) orbiting a CV/CVBG within visual range (at altitude) of the TF, or within visual range of the airbase (if land-based).

4. Airstrike Groups.

Discussion:
# 4 first. Why? Because the only time you'd EVER see large numbers of planes with bombs on them is a strike group heading to a target. Period. Some sort of CAP or ready planes on the ground or CV might attack a submarine, but NEVER more than a very few. Never. Any large group of bombers would be on their way someplace, and they wouldn't attack you (they have bigger fish to fry), or they are RTB, and have no bombs.

# 1 is pretty well represented by the airbases/airgroups/airstrike.cfg we have now, including long ranges, except the 1-2 plane thing, they should ALWAYS be alone. I added Maritime Patrol sairbases that have only the right kind of planes for this.

# 3 is easy to mod (I did) by making "BP-clones" of the CV planes, and setting the range to 40-60km. CV airgroups were made much smaller. A given CV might have 3 planes in the air at any time. I added a couple VBs to keep players honest. Lurker used the dummybomb idea to get A6Ms to strafe. I might add those in next rev.

#2 is not added explicitly yet, but I have a few ideas I need to test.

I think that using the stock aircraft ranges except for units that were solely maritime patrol outfits is a mistake. The CV air groups should never be a full RL load of planes. There is zero chance that a CV would be able to prosecute a sub with more than a couple ready aircraft. Remember that to launch or recieve planes a CV TF needs to turn into the wind, too. CVs with no planes at all is more realistic than stock SH4, for example. 3-5 is OK for CAP as long as the ranges are dropped to no more than maybe 20-30 miles.

tater

[Steeltrap]

Yeah, aircraft are screwy in SH4. They were also screwy in SH3, just differently.

Tater, I don't know what similarities exist between SH3 and 4, but NYGM did a great job with getting aircraft to strafe you. Perhaps you could ask? Pardon me if you've already done so - just trying to be helpful!

All of this brings home to me how irritating it is that SD radar is so horribly done in SH4. It was one of THE most crucial tools US subs had (well, both SD and SJ in fact). I keep saying it, to no avail, but SD should:

- be A-scope.
- never give a bearing to a contact. It never did in any version in WWII US subs.
- the report you receive should be "SD contact, 'x' miles, closing/steady/moving away". As things stand now you do one of 2 things:
1. dive every time you hear 'radar contact' and know it can't be SJ radar (either because you haven't got SJ or you can't find anything on the screens), or
2. turn on map contacts, in which case the contact will be plotted exactly and show as 'extremely fast'. This helps in that you know it's an aircraft, but is completely wrong in every other respect.

If the developers want to work on something that is egregiously wrong and crucial to the whole experience, here is a good place to start. That they've not addressed it makes me think they can't.....

If you've not guessed, this is one of my pet hates about SH4. Sure, the German radar was crap, so getting it right isn't such an issue, but radar was arguably the single greatest advantage USA subs had in their war against Japan....for it to be so screwed really ticks me off!!! (consider that Dick O'Kane relates encountering one, ONLY ONE, escort with radar in his entire career in Tang, while even corvettes in the Atlantic had radar at a comparable time....think of the implications of that for the submarine attacking a convoy - it's pretty staggering!)

Getting back to the original topic....I also encountered the aircraft bonanza around Midway in a career....I just rolled my eyes and spent the best part of a week in game submerged, popping up for air periodically.

Cheers

[Powerthighs]

Excellent info.

I agree with you Steeltrap regarding the SD operation (and the sub physics) being the two primary issues that aren't just annoying, but have a large negative impact on the gameplay itself.