Very few enemy ships spotted.

[Vortex]

In the early war before radar I seem to able to avoid air attack pretty well by submerging only later in the day (I've kind of settled on 13:00 when I'm near air bases, patrolling the Southern Jap Coast, etc.). My theory being that it takes the planes awhile to get on station. But maybe it's all just been dumb luck?

Also, my experience has been that crash diving will save you 3 times out of 4 (or so), but that fourth time he's going to be close and you're going to take some machine gun hits at a minimum before submerging. Although still perhaps escape without taking any damage even then - or not hehe.

Battling air with guns? To my thinking this is ahistorical and not smart (although I believe the Germans experimented unsuccessfully with it). But maybe if you're in extremely shallow waters...

[Haukka81]

I raise this bit, i love the good things in RSRD and Tmo but i would pay real money to get more random ships etc.. Some kind optional mod, between stock hyper trafic and RSRD 0,0001% random ships

[Red Devil]

am patrolling the Marshall Island in USS Drum; not even seen a darn ghost ship!!

[Armistead]

really, if you play rsrd and study a few historical maps or the me, you can stay busy fighting large groups one after the other. course, then the problem becomes not enuf torps...

[Haukka81]

Originally Posted by Armistead

really, if you play rsrd and study a few historical maps or the me, you can stay busy fighting large groups one after the other. course, then the problem becomes not enuf torps...

I know but its too much cheating. Like my sub captain have time mahicne to get Convoy maps from future

Takes away all fun and suprises (IMHO)

[TorpX]

I feel the same way.

I like the having the possibility of finding big targets, even though I usually don't.

If you always are able to sink big, juicy targets, the game becomes rather too easy.

[Armistead]

Originally Posted by Haukka81

I know but its too much cheating. Like my sub captain have time mahicne to get Convoy maps from future

Takes away all fun and suprises (IMHO)

In that it does. I played a few years before I got into the ME, but doing that to mod it. That is the one failure with RSRD, play long enough you know where to go and wait. If you are a fan of history, also easy to get involved in the big battles....

I recall one fun battle and I wasn't looking for it, one night the Shinano came my way. It felt like history. I was able to get a few torps in it and slowed it to 17 kts. It was outside the Bungo. The vet DD's held me down and it got way ahead when the DDs left me to rejoin. I was way behind it, but catching up going through the Bungo, but no doing an end around there. Got picked up on radar and back came one DD. If I dived to avoid the Shinano would escape, so I went to scope depth and did a DTT and hit it, but didn't sink it then. I was able to later due to slow speed and the chase was on. I barely had it on sonar and feared it would despawn as it went through the narrows. Had to dive and flank through there to avoid shore guns, surfaced and chased. Can't remember bases, but it was going through the sea north or Bungo east. I chased, but couldn't get around, but got on the flank. When I got about 20 nms from where it was obviously going to port and despawn, being flank, I fired 10 torps at about 5000 yards and got 2-3 hits. Those slowed it to a dead crawl. The escorts looked but I was far away, reloaded, snuck in to about 3000 yards on the surface and gave it 6 and sunk it.

[Threadfin]

I don't necessarily agree with the 'cheating' assessment. Submarine staffs, and skippers, knew the routes the Japanese were using. That they didn't always take full advantage of this information is puzzling. Blair in Silent Victory makes the argument that submarine staffs spent far too much time and effort placing their boats in the wrong locations, that too much time was spent patrolling off well defended ports in relatively shallow water, when they would have been far more effective patrolling bottlenecks like the Luzon Strait, and I agree. The codebreakers in the Pacific were amazingly effective and accurate. They knew where the ships were in general, and where they were sailing.

Now, if you're a role-playing skipper, and I count myself among those, you will patrol where you're ordered to patrol, but that doesn't necessarily place you in the best locations. The Marshalls for example are on the periphery of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and it makes sense that patrols in this location will see fewer contacts than areas located more centrally.

Why the staffs didn't make better use of their boats for the majority of the war is now left to speculation and debate, but surely there are locations that are more likely to develop contacts than others. If we ignore for a moment the need for having 'eyes' all over the Pacific, and look at the US submarine force strictly as an anti-shipping arm, the boats could have, and certainly should have, been employed more imaginatively in the deep water bottlenecks. It does not make much difference whether you encounter the ships near their termini (I looked it up) or somewhere along their routes, except that the latter are better suited for submarine operations, and surely the US submarines would have been far more effective than they were if they had been concentrated in those bottlenecks.

So my point is that the Americans could have exploited the intelligence they had more effectively, and it's not a stretch to play RSRDC with this knowledge at hand and exploit it. But if you are attempting to play it 'like it was', then weeks spent patrolling the open ocean with few contacts, or spent in 'dry holes', is the result. There are those among us that actually enjoy this aspect of submarine sims, and I personally have no issue returning to base with little to show for all those weeks at sea.

However, if you want action, all you need to do is patrol these bottlenecks and you will have all the targets you could want. If you are playing RSRDC it's just the nature of the beast that contacts can be hard to come by in the first 4 months after the start of the war, depending on your assigned location. But by the time Java falls around March/April of '42, the Empire is at it's limits, and the merchant routes are being fully utilized.

The Sibutu Passage, Makassar Strait, the northern approach to St George's Channel near Rabaul, Luzon Strait and the western and southern approaches to Truk are among the best spots in the campaign. Deep water and heavy traffic. Personally I think I have sunk more ships where the Makassar Strait meets the Celebes Sea than anywhere else, but then again I like to be based in Australia so I find myself there often.

Good story Armistead, never have seen Shinano myself (nor Yamato or Masashi), well at least as far as I could tell!

[Red Devil]

I too noticed the Silent Victory comments in my own reading of this masterclass of sub documentation. The early theatre commanders did not seem to have much in the way of tactical awareness. These men ran pre war battle desks and spent most of their time directing classes, not actually learning IN them. By contrast, Captain Walker RN was the most successful u boat hunter/killer in the world during WW2 because he took time to attend pre war ASW courses when it was 'not fashionable' to do so. It proved his worth when he went back to sea as a flotilla Captain.

As correctly stated deep water bottle necks would have been ideal trap sites, and the open ocean and Sea of Japan off Honshu must have been riddled with shipping.

Turn of the coin though and range would have been a problem too, how far can a sub driver take his boat before he reaches the PONR?

[Armistead]

Originally Posted by Threadfin

I don't necessarily agree with the 'cheating' assessment. Submarine staffs, and skippers, knew the routes the Japanese were using. That they didn't always take full advantage of this information is puzzling. Blair in Silent Victory makes the argument that submarine staffs spent far too much time and effort placing their boats in the wrong locations, that too much time was spent patrolling off well defended ports in relatively shallow water, when they would have been far more effective patrolling bottlenecks like the Luzon Strait, and I agree. The codebreakers in the Pacific were amazingly effective and accurate. They knew where the ships were in general, and where they were sailing.

RSRD uses very few contact reports, been nice had he included more.

I seldom do patrol zones, most are shipping lanes for singles, although several are timed for something big to come through. The problem is the timing is often off due to code or the way you travel. Simply, you leave base and rush to your patrol star and the timer goes gray, so you leave. It could another day or two before what comes through there does...

[Threadfin]

Good points Red Devil, as there is little doubt that outmoded pre-war doctrine hamstrung the submarine force. There was little in the way of innovative thinking, and what there was mostly due to increasingly younger skippers.

But in the command structure, the men who were trained in the inter-war period were entirely too cautious and rigid in their thinking. As is well known, peacetime exercises put the most emphasis on remaining undetected. Actually putting torpedoes on target was not as important.

In the war, the inertia resulting from this thinking took a long time to overcome. But once it was, and the torpedoes made right, effectiveness improved in spades. It's interesting to wonder how the war in the Pacific might have gone if the sub force, tactics and weapons that were employed in '44 had instead been available from the start.

How long might the war have lasted had boats been sent to the right areas with proper weaponry?

[Threadfin]

Originally Posted by Armistead

you leave base and rush to your patrol star and the timer goes gray, so you leave.

Well of course that is down to the player isn't it? I could complete my objective, then go sit outside Truk for the rest of the patrol. But I don't. It's all a matter of choice in my opinion. There is no reason a player could not remain on station, or request a new objective and get shunted around at the whim of SH4ComSubPac. It is down to mindset of the player and what he is looking to do, or how he chooses to play.

[Armistead]

Originally Posted by Threadfin

Well of course that is down to the player isn't it? I could complete my objective, then go sit outside Truk for the rest of the patrol. But I don't. It's all a matter of choice in my opinion. There is no reason a player could not remain on station, or request a new objective and get shunted around at the whim of SH4ComSubPac. It is down to mindset of the player and what he is looking to do, or how he chooses to play.

Point is, if you're playing RSRD, numerous times something nice is coming through your patrol star, just remember traffic is on it's on time, not that of the star. If you're gonna do your patrol zone, try to get there early and hang around a few days after the star goes gray, you might get lucky.

Myself, I don't do patrol zones unless they're close by where I want to go or happen to be on the way. Too much single traffic and I long ago stopped sinking singles unless a tanker or such.

I long ago edited RSRD, probably added 100 more convoys with more randomness just to confuse myself. The special missions are absent or fubar in RSRD, so I added about 10 for the bases I like. I made Truk the fortress it was. Have one special mission for a photo recon, cept mine is a lil different in that subnets basically protect the ships. Forget going in on the surface, got elite shoreguns, radar, coast watchers, searchlights, etc. Placed several minefields as well. But what gets me is having elite subkiller groups patrolling in and outside. I know the map well, but never was able to get in and out alive. I once did get in on the surface during a storm, but couldn't take pictures, so had to wait til weather cleared, but died trying to get out.

[Red Devil]

If I find that the mission did not take consideration of fuel usage, I ignore instructions and go to where I want. I nevr get my hand smacked!!

[Armistead]

I remember once in stock, I docked in Manila after a quick patrol before the base fell. When I loaded for next patrol, my mission was a photo recon in....Manila. The date was such the Japs took Manilla loading the game. Thankfully I chose the option to spawn outside and not by the dock....Stock was so FUBAR