One more thing to do for LwAmi 4.0

[Amizaur]

I would reccomend one more change that would make torpedo attacks much less trivial - proper torpedo seeker cone settings in elevation. I forget about this very simple but fundamental thing for a long time - that currently torpedo seeker cones are limited only in azimuth or horizontal plane. They are not limited in elevation (vertical) at all - can detect target straight up or down. The non-limited sekers have serious impact on torpedo working and gameplay, especially for air-dropped torpedos. Currently, in regard to torpedo seekers, we are playing effectively a 2D game... :-/

How could I forget about this for so long , this should be changed in LwAmi 2.0 at worst...

So let's add a third dimension to torpedo-target game.
What is needed to do:

In real life, vertical sensor coverage tends to be smaller than horizontal coverage, in older torps much smaller.

For example, for modern ASW torpedo like A-244S it is 80deg in azimuth and 40deg in elevation:

http://www.eurotorp.com/html/popa244.htm

State of the art MU-90 ASW torpedo has coverage of 120deg horizontal and 70deg vertical.

http://www.naval-technology.com/cont...iles/eurotorp/

Seems that vertical coverage is usually (for modern ones) about half of horizontal coverage.

This would mean for playable torps:

torpedo ........... current ConeAngleXY ....... new ConeAngleXY

ADCAP ...................... 45 ........................ 20-25
UGST ........................ 40 ........................ 20
Mk-50 ....................... 35 ........................ 15-20
the rest * .................. 30 ........................ 15

* (playable USET-80, TEST-71, UGMT-1, MPT-1UE)

(edit: also I would set ADCAPs cone angle to 50-55deg with a doctrine snake reduced to small 5-10deg pattern, to get 60deg effective search cone with barely noticeabe snake - just to see if it's searching or homing. Similar mod for UGST, 45-50deg cone and 10-15deg snake pattern. ConeAngleXY then could be 25-30deg for ADCAP and 25deg for UGST. Those two are the only really modern playable HWTs, the rest can be left with more narrow cones and normal snake pattern.
Non playable torps modified this way would be Spearfish (straight running would add a bit of effective speed to it), DM2A4, maybe Tigerfish... and possible future ones like Black Shark.

For bug related to higher torpedos speeds - the current 55kts limit is not neccesary absolute, in fact torpedo speeds up to 57kts are not bugged and it's possible to get little elevated but STABLE torp speed up to 68kts:

db spd..........result speed

55kts..........55kts ok, same as set
56kts..........56kts ok, same as set
57kts..........57kts ok, same as set

58kts..........59kts higher than set but stable
59kts..........61kts higher than set but stable
60kts..........63kts higher than set but stable
61kts..........66kts higher than set but stable
62kts..........68kts higher than set but stable

63kts..........46 - 69kts oscillation, totally bugged
64kts..........49 - 71kts oscillation, totally bugged
65kts..........55 - 73kts oscillation, totally bugged

(and all higher up to 145kts)

So 59-61kts for ADCAP is possible if needed, also up to 68kts stable speed for Spearfish, Type-89 and APR-3 is possible, just we have to remember that actual speed is higher than set when setting torp speeds in doctrine...

(is it true that Type-89 torp is electric one ? with SUCH speed ? then WOW )

(end of edit)


Player launched torps should get realistic seeker cones. Maybe helical search pattern (in place of current snake) could be implemented later... then "circle" switch could select between snake and helical search patterns ?


AI torps could get wide depth bands (wide depth coverage) seekers, or no limits at all (like now) but even AI launched torps should not see targets straight up/down IMO.



Of course it could take a while for us all to get used to this :-). One more thing to remeber while playing. One more factor in torpedo attack/defence.
But reward is once again more realistic and complex gameplay, with more real life tactics and creative tricks for both sides, attacking and defending.

Immediately torpedo depth settings become much more important, just as enable distance, and the best thing is that it would make work of AIR players more difficult - they would detect submarines just as before, but would be much harder to actually kill them, without good plan - just dropping torps on their heads would NOT work everytime :-D. Currently torpedos can detect sub even straight down - if torpedo is circling horizontally at 100ft and a target is
1000ft below - no problem, it sees it and dives. After change, it wouldn't see it as it would be outside it's seeker cone in vertical. To kill it, you'd have to know/guess at what depth it is or launch straight running torp at some distance to cover all depths bands by seeker... or use another tricks. ASW torpedo doctrine could be set to not circle at constant depth, but if target is not detected, slowly go down in a spiral pattern to check greater depths. I believe some ASW torpedo settings in real world does just this - search in a spiral going down. So torpedo dropped with shallow setting would eventually search deep too, but before it gets there spiraling it gives time for sub to get some distance... Or maybe to surface rapidly ABOVE torp search patter while it's turning away... (look at doppler to check this) ? :-) Many new tricks possible.

As a sub driver, you can be much more creative in evading dropped torps - as real life limits are put on torpedos, some real life tactics for getting out of their cone not only in azimuth but also in elevation (vertical) are working.

Killing subs from air platforms was just trivial in stock game. We made it a bit more realistic by setting more realistic parameters to sonobuoys and torpedo seekers. But it's still very easy, no art at all IMO, no skills needed, just drop a torp very close to target, best on it's head, and he's toast and his only defence are randomly working decoys... Now after setting limits to vertical field of view for torpedo seekers, we can bring it once again little closer to reality.


P.S. For people that like sources, here's one that is related:

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/MONITO...-4/joseph.html

"Guidance

Although sound travels very great distances through water, its erratic path makes underwater warfare very difficult. Water is in fact a hostile medium, the surface of the sea acts as a mirror and in shallow water seabed can also reflect sound.
Active Torpedoes seekers operating near the surface or in shallow waters must therefore be designed to counter such effects. As active detection relies on the Doppler effect to distinguish the real target from surrounding clutter, it follows that a hovering submarine may almost be impossible to detect.
A submarine that detects the active "Pinging" of a torpedo seeker will normally try to escape at top speed, but increasing the speed of the torpedo causes noisy water flow over the acoustic head.
One way to get around this is to run a heavyweight torpedo out to the vicinity of the target at high speed (transit speed) and then carry out the final-attack phase at a speed low enough to make the active seeker effective.
This solution was chosen for the US Navy’s Mk 48 and the Royal Navy Spearfish. As these HWT are wire guided the seeker can transmit target data back down the wire to the parents submarine fire control system. In effect it becomes an off board sensor, and incase the wire breaks the torpedo can be programmed to switch to home on seeker-data only.
The maximum speed at which the sonar is usable has improved in recent years as a result of better signal processing and Dome shaping. A Torpedo acquisition range is set largely by its ping rate, while the aspect angle of the seeker defines the band depth which it "sees" at any moment.
Torpedoes with narrow depth-bands usually follows helical search path/patterns whereas those with broader depth bands will seek a greater volume at any fixed depth, usually following a Sinuous (snake like) pattern.
Against surface targets passive seekers can be used, because the ship emit considerable noise from propellers and bow-waves, but is no longer considered good enough to home onto modern diesel-electric submarines (SSK) even when they are snorkeling and therefore making maximum noise.
To improve detection it would be necessary to go to lower frequencies with long wavelengths, too long for torpedoes seeker, This reason led the US navy to believe that active seeking was the only way to counter SSK. Both active and passive seekers are limited to the higher frequencies and so have relative short ranges. Wire guidance is therefore necessary to extend the effective range by providing midcourse guidance.
In its simplest form the wire provides a one way link to allow the torpedo to be corrected, but most modern torpedoes uses a two way wire to allow the torpedo to feed back its own data to the fire control system. This allows the operator to defeat countermeasures such as bubble screens or noisemakers."

by the way, may be interesting read, but I don't have time know to try it:

http://www.its-noesis.com/publicatio...do_defense.pdf

also

http://www.its-noesis.com/publicatio...rwater_aaw.pdf

and maybe the rest?

http://www.its-noesis.com/publications/pdf/

[Fish]

Sweet, sweet music!

[porphy]

You guys are incredible... truly amazing mod-effort


Cheers Porphy

[Molon Labe]

Sounds great, and with the ATCM, it won't have a serious balance or playability tradeoff.

[LuftWolf]

I've got this "on the fire" guys.

Thanks, Ami.

I knew there was a reason I was waiting to do the final physics edit to the database. Wow... I've got a lot to do.

No problem, eh?

Cheers,
David

[LuftWolf]

In terms of the snaking design, here is how I have it designed right now.

The ADCAP will not snake in active mode at all, and will have a wide aspect seeker. In passive mode, it will retain the wide seeker dimensions, but with a wide snake pattern of about 45 degrees.

The UGST, Spearfish, and DM 2A4 will have a reduced to 15 degrees. All other torpedoes will retain 30 degree snake.

In terms of modding the APR family function... I dunno, with the speed range bug in 1.03, I can't really have it loitering about, so it will probably have to be simply a very fast, very loud, deep diving torpedo, so it's good news about the extra speed we can get. In terms of the APR used in the Stallion mod, I like the idea of having it be a straight runner, if only to have it differentiate from the SS-N-27, and since it's all hypothetical anyway... I feel we can take this liscence.

The vertical limits on the torpedo seeker sounds like a wonderful change. I also like the idea of giving the AI a bit of a hand by not limiting it quite so much for them. However, this does raise one question, in which catagory do the torpedoes for the FFG AI MH60 and SUBROCS fall? If the torpedo seekers are reduced for these weapons, they will go from being marginally effective to not really effective at all (which of course is why they aren't really carried in a non-nuclear navy).

The torpedo seekers are the last thing to do on my list of torpedo changes... so we've got a bit of time to think about these issues.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by Amizaur

(is it true that Type-89 torp is electric one ? with SUCH speed ? then WOW )

Looking at NavWeaps - there aren't many sites that list anything on the Type 89...

From a plausibility standpoint, I find it incomprehensible that you think it is more likely that a Japanese electric torpedo can do 20 knots more than the DM2A4 that is 10 years newer (and both use silver-zinc) than the idea of a Russian middleweight electric torpedo that is almost three times the mass of the Mu-90 and has more than three times the non-warhead mass (250-50=200 vs 720-60=660 - which goes into things like propulsion and the battery space) might just be able to crawl out 7 more km than the Mu-90 at slow speed.

Other sources suggest it is thermal, which is much more likely considering the speed and range involved.

Probably, you fell into Tony's (webmaster of NavWeaps and Warships1) old anti-plagiarism canary trap:

Since I started these weapon webpages in 1997, I have occasionally come across other websites that have plagiarized their content. Let me offer a friendly warning: On each of my webpages, there is a deliberate error in the data in one place or another. These errors are trivial, but they make it quite easy for me to detect copying.

It is not there anymore, but was when NavWeaps was still the weapons pages of Warships1.com - and the pages hadn't been updated that much since then - mostly pictures added but if the text changed substantially I never saw it happen.

The "silver-zinc" stuff is almost certainly the set-trap. As an aside, I'm pretty sure the set-trap for the Russian Post-WWII torp page is most likely the "solid-fuel turbojet" for the APR-3 (maybe a solid fuel driving a pumpjet, but a turbojet?) It seems like the mistakes are deliberate set absurdly so as to snare stupid, lazy copiers but not lead honest, smart people into ingesting false data.

I entirely agree with the elevation idea, BTW.

Originally Posted by LW

The APR-3 torpedo payload of the Stallion will run straight along its launch bearing (relative to the path of the missile that fired it) with a vertical snake.

Of course, the Stallion will remain a ballistic missile.

Oh, good. I almost feel like Christmas now - I'm getting a bunch of wishes solved at once. The vertical snake sounds really good because as it is, we can't set which side of the layer a SUBROC's torp drops in

Originally Posted by Onewolf

Anyway, bottom line for me ... the introduction of a vertical limit sounds like an interesting addition, however I would vote for a more expanded seeker cone on the air dropped torpedos (hey they are already at a disadvantage because you never have a wire) to keep the balance and avoid rendering the platforms ineffective.

As a sub driver, I think the fact you can be right over the top of me (and AFAIK I won't hear you because we IIRC disabled it to avoid hearing missiles as they flew atop the water or somethin) and drop your torps at point blank range plenty of penance for the fact you don't have a wire.

[LuftWolf]

Well, since the Japanese don't export their technology, to the best of my knowledge, they are free to upgrade whatever they want at any time and any price and no one would know the difference.

Germany, Russia, and the United States (to some degree) have export considerations that are factored into their design.

The Type 89 might cost an absurd amount of money per round, I dunno what the major limiting cost factor for an electric heavyweight torpedo might be, but I wouldn't count out the capabilities of the Japanese to engineer warmaking equipment.

[LuftWolf]

Your source is pretty good there is seems Kaz.

I'm actually going to go with the Type 89 being thermal, and I'm also going to reduce it's snake pattern.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by LuftWolf

Well, since the Japanese don't export their technology, to the best of my knowledge, they are free to upgrade whatever they want at any time and any price and no one would know the difference.

Actually, the failure to export is not really an advantage. The ability to export means lowering costs due to economy of scale and the ability to get someone else to test out your weapons - maybe even in real combat without any "personal" risk to yourself.

They are also limited by how they have 1% GNP, and that everything in Japan costs so much, exacerberated by how they deny themselves economy of scale to preserve the production line - weapons crawl out.

The Type 89 might cost an absurd amount of money per round, I dunno what the major limiting cost factor for an electric heavyweight torpedo might be, but I wouldn't count out the capabilities of the Japanese to engineer warmaking equipment.

I won't count them out either. In fact, if it can do 30km at 70 knots with a thermal motor, that's already a very impressive capability. In kinematics at least, it will be clearly superior to the early British Spearfish (23000 at 60+) and pre-ADCAP Mk48 (32000 at 55), not to mention the UGST, and arguably superior even to the later variants of either (whose estimated range capabilities are not as well defined, but there is only so much you can do to increase efficiency in a basic design and fuel and the drag will go up immensely due to the increased speed, so it'd be a nut to chew just to assume they can keep their old ranges at their new max speeds).

What turns "impressive" into "ten foot giant" is the idea they can do it with electrics, with silver-zinc batteries no less...

[LuftWolf]

Well, I already said that I think it is indeed a thermal torpedo and will model it as such.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Well, I can't see you reply while I'm replying myself. Maybe next time I'd push the Refresh button to check before committing.

[Amizaur]

I don't know if Type-89 is electric torp. I find hard to believe that this not newest weapon could get 70kts on electric batteries and with a good range!
The best current electric HWT the Black Shark is capable of 50+ kts (not more, you can't get enough power output from batteries to get more) with good range, and it's batteries are for sure more modern than those of Type-89. So for me either it's not electric or doesn't have such speed...

Oneshot - to check depth of sub target, maybe overfly it few times at different alts and see where you stop getting MAD signal ? And with spiral search pattern (circling and going down) you don't have to know exact tgt depth, just if you set correct depth torpedo will get there faster, without spiraling. I would vote for realistic seeker cones for air dropped torps.

LW - to be sure we are thinking about same things :-)
I think you are talking about spiral pattern going down and up ? Helical is straight but "snakeing in both bearing and alt" like a horizontal screw, something like very streatched horizontal spiral... for air dropped it would be spiral I think - it would circle but descent all the time slowly, or second option is to simply increase depth after each circle by 100-200fts or so.

About APR-3 - the reason it searches without starting up it's engine is first that it has limited range, and even more limited running time, so it searches falling gravitational in the water. If it did few circles on engine, it would probably burn out fuel before intercepting target. Second reason would be that active seeker would have very limited range at speed of over 70kts (wahsed out), but it can detect far when torp is slowly descending gravitationally, that's why so big (for Russian torp) det range up to 2.5km probably. When it detects target it starts it's engine and runs for intercept, quite possible that it reaquires it only from shorter range at full speed.

So I would try to emulate the real way it works, it's a pity that we can't set a buoyancy for torpedos then it could fall down slowly without engine... all can be done probably is emulate torp fuel and range limits by doctrine calcs and run it first at 10kts or so searching, only after detection set max spd and count range (or rather mission time) from that moment. I'm not sure than very fast but short ranged APR can be usefull in straight running mode for SUBROCs, and what if it falls bahind or by side of the target ? And if you set it to fall short, it may be too short for it's small range...

To prevent very fast torps (over 55kts) from doing strange things while turning, you have to increase it's database turn radius slightly, untill it behaves correctly. If you remember there was a problem with stock 65kts Type-40 torpedo, not only the torp speed bug was showing, but it was doing "vertical snake" while running sometimes, couldn't stabilise on it's depth...
Little (10-20%) increase of turn radius corrected the problem.

For ADCAP active seeker without snake the cone would be 60deg horizontal and 25-30deg vertica... What is wide snake in passive mode for ? To see it's passive ? OK but why wide ? Passive seekers in db always had wider cones than active, but 60deg (+/-60 so 120deg) like for active seems more than enaugh, if you want snake pattern to show it's in passive mode, maybe left the 30deg snake, not wider ? It's already limited in speed to 40kts in passive mode, 45deg snake reduces effective speed significantly... By the way, I set active speed limit in doctrine to 55kts, if you allow ADCAP to have higher max speed (some people estimate it for 63kts based on ADCAPs engine available max fuel flows) then it would be transit only, after active enable it would slow down to 55kts anyway :-). Maybe I would make it to speed up to max again when homing and tgt being closer than 1000yd (from this range it should keep target track even slightly washed out).... hmm nice idea, you'd see that torp is going for kill by observing terminal speed change

About Naval Weps and anti-plagiarism canary trap: the APSET-95 entry with absurd values can be this just well :-) also some torpedo calibers are off (easily noticeable error).

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Amizaur

ADCAP ...................... 45 ........................ 20-25
UGST ........................ 40 ........................ 20
Mk-50 ....................... 35 ........................ 15-20
the rest * .................. 30 ........................ 15

* (playable USET-80, TEST-71, UGMT-1, MPT-1UE)

I am under the impression that the the vertical pattern of signal excess for a torpedo's sonar depends less on the beam patterns of the torpedoes and more on the sound speed profile. Hence, a searching torpedo in a surface duct of appropriate cutoff frequency might potentially detect anything in the duct out to a certain distance, one set below the duct might have a shorter detection range against targets on the same depth or above it, and a longer detection range for targets underneath it.

[LuftWolf]

SQ, I believe there are absolute aperature limits on the vertical dimensions of the torpedo seeker along the lines that Amizaur is presenting... however, within the depth band of the seeker, what you are saying is correct, I believe.

Two more quick things I wanted to run by you guys.

I am changing the loadout of the FFG AI MH60 as follows: ASW will load 3 Mk50's, this configuration is for use in deep water; ASuW will load two Mk54's and one Penguin ASM for use in the littorals, and Strike will load eight Hellfires for use as strike missiles or ASM's, and I am changing the parameters of the Hellfire to allow these missiles to be fired more than one at a time, since now the MH60 can only have one Hellfire in the air at once, since it makes more sense in the context of the mod for the Navy to have the true fire and forget version of the Hellfire, so that's what I am modding (rather than the lazerguided version modelled now).

Also, I am thinking of restoring the range hardcap on the SW WAA array... SQ or anyone else, do you know if there are absolute range limits on WAA arrays that are worth simulating in the context of DW?