Two active sonar questions

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Hello, I'm a beginner. I've played DW, SC and all the way to 688, but I have never quite managed to crawl out of the beginner slot. I might have gotten proficient during the SC era except one day, I lost the secret code needed to install it and thus the disc became useless for years...

Anyway...

1) I'm having trouble seeing the glowing blips on my active sonar, especially on the Akula's circular display. I ping and from the return (I know that the aural return does not vary with return strength in the game) I know the target is less than 10000m (sometimes even 5000m) away and it ain't small. But I often can't find the blip so I can mark it!

I use a laptop LCD monitor. Can anyone recommend any techniques I can try to either make the blips stand out a little more or just so I get a little better at finding those blips?

2) What's the difference b/w the "Omni" and the "Omni-rotational" active pinging in the FFG-7? Which one works better?

Thank you in advance.

[LuftWolf]

Originally Posted by Kazuaki Shimazaki II

1) I'm having trouble seeing the glowing blips on my active sonar, especially on the Akula's circular display. I ping and from the return (I know that the aural return does not vary with return strength in the game) I know the target is less than 10000m (sometimes even 5000m) away and it ain't small. But I often can't find the blip so I can mark it!

I use a laptop LCD monitor. Can anyone recommend any techniques I can try to either make the blips stand out a little more or just so I get a little better at finding those blips?

The Russian sonars can be hard to get accustomed to, the display method can sometime make it hard to find contacts. The Western active sonars are a bit easier to read.

Also, audio only returns are supposedly a feature of real life active sonar as well, so it is modelled in the sim as well. Depending on the acoustic conditions, some contacts may not show up well. To try to get a good feel for the active sonar, you can try dropping an active decoy and moving for some distance and then turning around and pinging it. They should show up nicely at short range.

Originally Posted by Kazuaki Shimazaki II

2) What's the difference b/w the "Omni" and the "Omni-rotational" active pinging in the FFG-7? Which one works better?

In general, the two modes to use are Omni-Rotational and Single Beam. Omni-Rotational is good for searching an area and if you get an audio only return, you can use single beam to narrow down the search area. Omni is used if your sonar gets damaged somehow, sometimes only the rotational features get disabled but the rest of the hull sonar operates fine.

[sonar732]

Something else to take into consideration for active sonar is the target's aspect. Is the bearing 90 degrees or 180 degrees from your bow?

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by sonar732

Something else to take into consideration for active sonar is the target's aspect. Is the bearing 90 degrees or 180 degrees from your bow?

Depends, both can happen. Sometimes, I do get a clickable return (I pause the game as soon as I hear the ping and search all around the rim), more often not. I know aspect plays a role, but the targets I'm pinging ain't small and I thought I was supposed to get a return anyway if it is only <5000m away (the closeness is one of the reasons I want to use active sonar in the first place).

[LuftWolf]

Are you on the same side of the layer?

What are the acoustic conditions?

[Fish]

Most the time you have the contact alreay (BB or NB), so you know the baring. Then I "sometimes" use the AS to verify the distance, no need to see the contactact in the AS display.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by LuftWolf

Are you on the same side of the layer?

What are the acoustic conditions?

Bottom limited (no layers), or I'm trying to get at a surface contact. I'd admit sometimes the bottom wasn't that deep, but again, I'm asking for point blank blips!

And yes, I've got him on towed and spherical already, but there are several contacts and it'd be nice to discriminate b/w them.

[LuftWolf]

I posted this today on the SCS Forum, it may be relevant to you here as well.

Originally Posted by LuftWolf

One reason for this is that active sonar has an optimal range depending on the acoustic conditions. Depending on the environment, there is going to be a shadow zone (used loosely, meaning an area of low signal to noise ratio specific to the acoustic conditions) between the first clear zones, one between the submarine and the shadow zone and another one after until the targets are too far away to generate a good return.

It seems in that zone you can get range information from the audio but the sonar cannot resolve a bearing and so it doesn't give you a visual. This means that at the ranges you are talking about, it is common to have difficulty with the active sonar bearing because the sound does not always travel in a direct path from your sub to the contact and back again.

I'm not sure how sonars work in real life, but Sonalysts does. And so do a few others around the community who are in the naval community, and listening to them has given me the impression that all kinds of things in sonar are predictably odd, so its not necessarily a bug when the sonar does something unexpected, it is more likely a feature of the acoustics engine.

I know that sounds terrible... :P

You should know that even within bottom limited environments, the difference in the type of floor bottom (rock, sand, or mud) plays a big part as well. I have to do some more testing with 1.03, but I suspect that a rock bottom limited environment is almost as good if not better for acoustics than the topside of a surface duct. This of course works with the idea that the bottom that the sim is calculating is more or less completely flat and featureless.