@ Sea Queen

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Kapitan

You said this in the resources thread can you explin all this please as to what you have and do alot of us are very intrested, also if you could supply it to the comunity im sure it wont go un noticed.
Cheers

Well... ya know... calculations are a part of seamanship. Navigation, for example, is intensely mathematical. One of the basic skills of seamanship for example, is being able to perform calculations on a maneuvering board. Being able to quickly come up with values such as CPA distance, or calculate intercept courses is an important skill. On the FFG it will calculate this for you, but in a submarine you have to do it yourself. I don't know how to work a maneuvering board (I'm trying to get the guys at work to teach me), but I know how to do vector algebra, so I stuck a bunch of calculations that come up frequently in my spreadsheet, and just let it run. I think in NROTC courses they show you how to do this on a maneuvering board.

There's other more complicated things too that I take from operations research and are useful for planning and scenario design. Probability of detection versus time is a good one. I put in a couple of search tactics that I use a lot, and it gives me an idea of about about how long things should go on average. You can get these kinds of things out of Wagner's Naval Operations Analysis, or Koopman's Search and Screening.

Then I also added a fun little calculation using Baye's theorem, where suppose I had cleared 95 percent of my OP AREA, and found two submarines. How confident am I that there's no more? I made this one using my own math after seeing a presentation a coworker of mine made.

Another good one to have is barrier effectiveness. Let's suppose you had a barrier so long, and you could see so far, and you were going to patrol at a certain speed, and you expected the bad guy to be going another speed. What's the probability of detecting him? This is another sort of Koopman/Wagner calculation.

Limiting lines of approach are very important. It'll tell you where you care about looking if you're screening a ship. I've noticed people tend to just sort of be random. Harpoon includes a similar tool in it's Formation Editor, but it doesn't say "this is the answer." It just hints at it. The formula is in Koopman.

Another good thing to keep in there is a random number generator. How often do you want a random number between 000 and 359, for example? People are frequently predictable. How often have you gotten hit by someone wire guiding a torpedo along a direction that he only could have guessed because he just figured out, "oh... he goes this way..." With an evasion course uniformly distributed, no particular direction is favored.

I've also been experimenting with calculating over what angles you should shoot a salvo of torpedoes given that the torpedo's seeker can see so far, the torpedo goes so fast, and the target is likely to evade at a certain speed. This is my own math, but it's just geometry and kinematics. It's a highschool physics problem, really.

I don't want to release this, though, because even though I haven't made use of anything classified for formulating it, I do use a lot of these calculations at work too, so I figure it's better to err on the side of caution. I'm also sort of skeptical of it's value. I'm trying to figure out how to integrate it into my tactics, and so far I've gotten worse, not better.

None the less, I strongly encourage you all to look into the literature on operations research for insight into the type of thinking I'm putting into these calculations. We're all sharp people here. I have a feeling it'd be interesting to see the kinds of creative solutions you'd all come up with. Some of the things in there are more useful for designing scenarios, than for playing them, but it's all fun to experiment with. Sometimes it will surprise you how things you thought were important aren't really, or things that you never thought of before are important. It'll also give you some interesting insight into why things on warships are the way they are.