Learning manual targeting

[magic452]

Mark 14 high speed range 4,500 yards, low 9,000.

Duds are a random thing and it is possible to get 8 duds or even more in a row. Don't use Magnetic in the early war, or ever as far as I'm concerned.
Early war Mk.14s run too deep 10+ feet and when they did hit often wouldn't explode. Mid 43 most are ok.

Shooting at a less than 90° angle is just the same at a 90°. Just a little less target to shoot at. I typically set up at 60 to 70°, better for avoiding convoy escorts. If you have a good firing solution the angle makes little difference, with in reason of course. In my opinion gyro angle is more important than attack angle. Shoot as close to a zero gyro angle as possible, in other words as straight ahead as possible. The greater the gyro angle the more accurate your firing solution needs to be.

It's all about getting a good plot on the target and than getting ahead and setting up in a good firing position. The more time you spend doing this the easier the shooting gets. Don't be in too big a hurry, take your time and attack when and where you want to. Attack on your terms not his. Use every advantage you can, night time, bad weather, etc. Trail the convoy till you get the maximum advantage as possible.

Realism is as realism does. It's not what boxes you've check but how you play the game. Yes the attack map is unrealistic but not all that much if you use it right. I view it as your crew doing their jobs, don't track a target with it but check it every three minutes or so as a captain would check using the scope. If the target is where the TDC says it should be than you've got a good firing solution. You can't have your crew plot a new firing solution and compare the two so the attack map does this for you.

I fire the extra torpedo to make sure I get the kill.
Have the cams on but don't use it for an advantage in setting up a shot or avoiding DCs.

After a thousand duds I've had all the frustration real captains felt as I need. Turned duds off. Big deal that's the way I want to play, if I want some frustration later I'll turn them on again.

I just can't see why some here think everybody has to play "REALISTIC"
A new guy comes here looking for advise and than has to apologize for unrealistic game play. I did the 100% thing for a long time and found I didn't enjoy it all that much. A lot harder yes more realistic not so much as far as I'm concerned.

Realism is between your ears not on the options page.

Rant over.

Magic

[Rockin Robbins]

Thank you magic. That was refreshing. Perfect reasoning for why I don't play with map contacts off. We have severe sensory deprivation in the game anyway. Estimating angles is nerfed because we can't turn our head to look at the target. Our body has a built-in protractor for that somewhere, you know.

We can't hear properly, natural sea noises above surface are non-existent, sonar is ridiculous. We live in a dead and quiet ocean. The subs didn't you know. Heck, how easy is it to surface and just forget you are on ahead emergency until you notice your fuel is running lower than it should. You actually think that is in any way possible in reality? What would be painfully loud and impossible to avoid in real life becomes very difficult to detect in a sim.

So now you want me to run my sub with a paper bag over my head? You're going to call that "full realism?" I'm not supposed to laugh? No thanks. A real sub had a crew. This one already doesn't.

No captain would go to the sonar station, take the headset from his sonar operator and listen for himself. We are forced to constantly. No captain would run the plot himself. That's what we do. No captain would push his radar operator out of the way to measure distances and bearings off his radar screen, walk over to the plotting table, push all of them out of the way and then do all of their jobs plotting that radar position. We call it realism and try not to snicker too much.

At some point you have to decide whether you think SH4 should be more a simulation of machinery or men.

Let's not give Capn Scurvy a hard time here. Here's his position, as best as I can present it. He would do better, but here goes. First, the Capn took various ships from the catalog and placed them an exact distance from a stationary sub. Using the stadimeter, he painstakingly and repeatedly took observations based on the game's ship ID manual. What he found was that he kept getting different distance measurements for different targets!

What can cause that?

• Inaccurate angle measurement in the stadimeter itself
• Incorrect masthead heights in the target ID database
• Other unidentified and stranger problems

So what did he find? All three! The magnification in the periscope didn't correspond to the real scope. That could be fixed. Computers being organized around pixels meant that a one pixel error in positioning the pseudo-target in the stadimeter would result in a measurable error. That can't be fixed.

He took apart the entire target database, including friendly vessels and found it riddled with errors in ship length, draft, heights of masthead, cabin, nothing was correct. Some targets were nearly unhittable based on in-game identification, even on auto-targeting.

Then the wild card: Different graphics cards have given us a dizzying array of screen resolutions not contemplated in 2007. SH4 only displays as intended in 1024x768. Anything else renders relative sizes wrongly. They grossly distorted our view, and we were taking measurements from the distortions. Capn Scurvy fixed that. We can now depend on those tic marks to estimate masthead heights because we know how many degrees apart they are. Well, YOU know, if you're using OTC, I don't because I know I can't depend on them.

He spent hundreds of hours fixing the mechanics of the simulator. When he was done SH4 was as mechanically perfect as he could make it. I'm going out on a limb and telling you that will be as mechanically perfect as SH4 will ever get.

Now you could use conventional stadimeter targeting, ID a target, shoot one torpedo and hit the target wherever you aim every time because the mechanics were right. You did your job and got a boom.

But some loudmouth (me) jumped in and yelled "But that isn't how it was!" The WWII captain didn't have a magic book that contained every single ship in the ocean, whether friend or foe. The magic book they didn't have didn't have the perfect length, masthead height and tonnage either!" The flawed book they really had contained (contained??? It was RIFE with) errors in every category. Some was wrong because of lack of info. Some was wrong because we relied on published Japanese info. Some was wrong because of alterations after hostilities began. For instance, how difficult is it to saw 10' off the top of a masthead?

"As a practical matter," the loudmouth screamed irritatingly, "it was impossible for the US Navy to rent every Japanese vessel, both merchant and warship long enough to take it to San Francisco to get a crew of ship surveyors to swarm all over it, take those perfect measurements and then somehow get the Japanese to sign papers giving up the rights to make any alterations to that vessel later in the war. Scurvy, that is what you've done and you want me to call that realistic!"

So what do you want? Simulation of mechanical perfection? Simulation of decision making processes? Simulation of result? Simulation of behavior? Welcome to simulation hell! For every "Yeah, but..." of mine, the Capn has another equally valid "Yeah, but..." of his own. And behind it all, making both sides' arguments a joke is that Magic ID Manual, containing every single ship on the ocean. Real subs could ID perhaps a third of the targets they saw, and were wrong 50% of the time even then. They frequently claimed double and occasionally claimed half the actual tonnage of the ship they sank. None of this is possible with our Magic Manual.

So there we are. OTC or not to OTC? Take your choice. I'll not give you a hard time about your choice, but I will tell you what the assumptions behind the mod are.

What I want to know is, if we rented every Japanese ship, why didn't the just meet with an unfortunate accident while in our custody and then we wouldn't have had to fight about it?

Rant over. It's hard to do both sides of a rant.

Originally Posted by hatemf90

Well no.. I didnt fire stern and bow torps, i fired 4 from the bow, repositioned then fired another 4, non of them even reached the ship, and the plotting wasnt that far off. I guess it was just a really unlucky moment.

it is so rare to have that many torpedo failures that i would think its more likely the only answer is you hit something you didnt see like a sub net or sand bar or if it was long distance a dock might have been between you and the ships but you must have hit something. (sunken ship if in shallow water)

torpedos failures did happen and magnetic torps sometimes exploded half way to the target (thats why i only use contacts) but not 8/8 that way way too much unless some mod your using screwed with the dud/premature failure rates

[twm47099]

Originally Posted by hatemf90

Well no.. I didnt fire stern and bow torps, i fired 4 from the bow, repositioned then fired another 4, non of them even reached the ship, and the plotting wasnt that far off. I guess it was just a really unlucky moment.

For learning manual targeting, I recommend the Admiral Christie dream settings - Turn dud torpedoes off in the options. Once you learn manual targeting methods, and there are a number of different methods to learn, you can go back to frustrating yourself and seeing how frustrating (and deadly) it was for the actual skippers. But wondering if your technique is correct or if it's something in the game isn't helping you.

I also play the game with the assumption that I'm the captain, and the other crew on board aren't there so we can have a good game of poker or shuffle board. A number of real skippers made a point of having others handle the details of the attack including making the periscope observations -- Mush Morton being one of these using O'Kane to make observations.

However, other posters are correct, that we have too much "accurate" information. For example, O'Kane on Tang consistently greatly overestimated ship sizes which would have thrown off his periscope range and speed estimates (if speed was determined by successive periscope observations). But he was very successful - it seemed that he estimated speed from sonar noises and bow waves. Again not as accurate as we can, but generally accurate enough for the attacks he made (distance, angle, and spread).

Tom

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by magic452

A new guy comes here looking for advise and than has to apologize for unrealistic game play.

My comment was aimed specifically at yours in the post just above mine. I don't care how people play, and usually encourage everybody to play the way they want. I personally don't use manual targeting at all, so I can hardly be accused of being hardcore about my realism. I agree that it's about how it feels, not the specifics.

Your comment was dismissive to anyone who feels differently, so I responded in kind.

[Jimbuna]

The bottom line for me is....play the game the way you get most enjoyment from it for yourself.

None of us is as clever as all of us.

[Rockin Robbins]

It sucks! There isn't any right way to play. But we can all fight about all the ways that are wrong!

Make your choices, play the game and if you had fun you did fine!