Worlds Fastest Tutorial TDC torpedo video

[Able Brown]

Thanks for the video but, being fairly green, m I am not sure I get how you can manually target the staditomer range without identifying the mast height in the recogition manual. Is there somewhere that the height is enetered without the manual?

[Dignan]

Cpt Maxim,

This is very intriguing. I'm interested in what you've got here but am having a tough time following exactly what it is you're doing from your video. Could you explain the steps you took to get your firing solution, step by step? Is this a legit targeting method or is it just exploiting a glitch/programming loophole in the game? Thanks.

CAPT Dignan

[Rockin Robbins]

On your first firing your AOB was off by way too far to get a hit. Your input showed you looking at the stern quarter when the AOB was MUCH closer to 90º. Not having a masthead height meant that the range findings were garbage. You NEVER entered target speed at all, instead relying on the game's auto speed and course function, which was messed up by your failure to know what the masthead height was.

In short, any hits at all were pure luck. I did love your video technique. Maybe hurried, but clear and well executed, with the exception that you called left right. That's something that's all to easy to do and the video clearly showed that you were spreading left. You need to make some more videos!

Interestingly, what you did was historically a lot closer to how real submarines operated, with about the same resulting hit percentages as happened in the real war! They had basically no idea what the mast heights were, and used their recognition manuals to misidentify their targets or simple rules of thumb on deck height to estimate masthead height.

The Japanese were very crafty, knowing how that was done and camouflaging their boats to make them look a different size than they really were, usually to make them look larger than they were to mess up our range finding ability. It worked well, leaving tonnage overestimated by double the real size of the typical target. It would also make the estimated range twice as short as it really was. That would also make estimated speed half of what it really was. You can call that a clean miss.

American sub captains weren't UTTERLY stupid. They assumed errors in their targeting and set up spreads of way over 100% of target length. Of course, if you're spreading torpedoes across a length greater than what you are shooting at, that means you've willingly wasted some torpedoes to get one or two to hit. That was the price of victory and they paid it, but probably not with a smile.

Final judgment: a technique full of flaws, just like the real submarines in WWII! Your hit percentage was about what they could expect for non-radar targeting. When Dick O'Kane's radar went out, he sent a sarcastic message back to Pearl, saying in effect "there goes half of my torpedoes--wasted!" Coincidence? NOT.

[Loudspeaker]

I think it was fun to watch your video, and as a skipper you sure are blessed with plenty of good luck, which is not bad at all

However, I strongly recomend the TDC tutorials made by legendary Werner Sobe in this thread: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=146795

[TorpX]

Originally Posted by Able Brown

Thanks for the video but, being fairly green, m I am not sure I get how you can manually target the staditomer range without identifying the mast height in the recogition manual. Is there somewhere that the height is enetered without the manual?

In recent versions of RFB (and maybe other mods) one can drag the mast height ring to any value you choose. This is very handy as one can keep it at a default value of, say 90 ft., and make preliminary calculations on this basis, before you are close enough to identify the target ship.

[Loudspeaker]

Originally Posted by TorpX

In recent versions of RFB (and maybe other mods) one can drag the mast height ring to any value you choose. This is very handy as one can keep it at a default value of, say 90 ft., and make preliminary calculations on this basis, before you are close enough to identify the target ship.

Thanks for this splendid hint.