Never thought this would work

[misha1967]

So there I was, in the middle of the Baltic, when finally I picked up a contact on the hydrophone. Full of zest and zeal, sturm und drang etc., I surface to give chase, only to find that the weather is blowing up a storm, the fog is so thick you can't see your finger if you stretch out your arm and it's raining on top of it.

Never one to give up, I put in a rough intercept course based on the info from the hydrophone and plow my way through the waves. Now, obviously I know that I won't be able to see the target unless I'm parked on her deck, so what to do?

That's when it struck me: Why not try a "fast 90", only instead of waiting for the target to appear in my crosshair, wait for the hydrophone guy to call out the same bearing that I have on the UZO with the gyro at "0?" If his bearing matches mine then, logically, the target would be in my crosshairs if I could see it, no?

So I set up a course perpendicular to the target's, guessed its speed to be the 10-11 kts they usually travel at when alone, programmed the TDC as usual with an AOB of 90 degrees, locked it in and turned the UZO until the gyro read "0". Then, when the hydrophone guy called out the 14 degrees my UZO was bearing at, I let loose with an eel and waited.

And I'll be buggered if it didn't hit!

Not something I'm going to try again if I can avoid it, but this time it worked.

[Trevally.]

I hope it was not a Red Cross ship

Nice job

[misha1967]

Originally Posted by Trevally.

I hope it was not a Red Cross ship

Nice job

Thanks, Trev. You know, that thought actually did occur to me the moment I gave the order to fire. "Holy moly! I don't actually know what I'm firing at!" So I slowly advanced to the position where the targeted ship would have had to been to find out if I had just committed a war crime but, thankfully, it was a legitimate target.

By the way, and this is a testimony to the graphical excellence of SHV in spite of all of the things that Ubi did wrong (but what do you expect from them?), seeing that sinking ship suddenly appear out of the fog about 200m away was, to say the very least, an eerie experience. It looked so real.

[Dogfish40]

Good Call Misha!!
Love this game (Sim). It allows you to think, get ideas, and throw the dice.
I have had the pleasure of chasing ships in heavy fog, it's such a Rush.
I manned the deck gun and went that way. After getting the last bearing and surfacing. I went ahead full and nearly rear-ended this thing. It came out of the fog so fast, it was HUGE! The Fog is very realistic to me, especially after modding.
Anyway, that idea of yours was cool, I'm glad you hit the target.
Gute Jagd Herr Kaluen!

[misha1967]

Originally Posted by Dogfish40

Good Call Misha!!
Love this game (Sim). It allows you to think, get ideas, and throw the dice.
I have had the pleasure of chasing ships in heavy fog, it's such a Rush.
I manned the deck gun and went that way. After getting the last bearing and surfacing. I went ahead full and nearly rear-ended this thing. It came out of the fog so fast, it was HUGE! The Fog is very realistic to me, especially after modding.
Anyway, that idea of yours was cool, I'm glad you hit the target.
Gute Jagd Herr Kaluen!

Thanks, Dogfish. It was basically just a matter of math and logic to me, coupled with the knowledge that trying to attack in heavy fog and heavy seas was a long shot anyway, but I wanted to try it. Worst case scenario, I blow a torpedo and don't get anything for it.

What I really love is that, as you mentioned, I could apply basic logic like that and the sim actually models it accurately enough that it can work.

After all, I didn't do anything that a real skipper couldn't have done. Your hydrophone operator can certainly tell you what bearing a contact is on very precisely and that's all that you really need as it needs to match your "lead" on the target. The other data I used was the range, of course, which a real operator ought to also be able to provide you with within reason, which again, bearing plus range, gives you an approximate course. And the beauty of the "fast 90" in the sim as in real life is that you have a lot of leeway there. You don't HAVE to get the course (and thus the AOB) exactly right as your target is presenting its full profile at impact, you just have to be in the ballpark. Obviously you won't be as precise in your targeting if you're off a bit, your amidships attack might be closer to the bow or the stern, but it will still HIT.

And you can get that, the course, with just the bearing and a rough estimate of the range, marking those off on the map several times and then finding the best approximate straight line. In real life as well as the sim. Guessing the speed? Well you get that too that way. The rest is just trusting your hydrophone operator to get the bearing right so it matches your lead, whether you can actually see the target or not, and the bearing is the EASIEST thing to get right with a hydrophone.

No different from doing an ILS landing in an airplane. If the instruments and readings are correct, you don't need to be able to see the runway.

But most of all, it was applying all of this "real life" logic and seeing it work in the sim. That really blew me away.