[REL] Trigger Maru Overhauled

[ekempey]

Ducimus,
Do you know if anyone has tried to model an APR-1 radar reciever, like the one the germans have in the expansion, for use by US Fleet Boats? This would be a very cool addition to the Fleet Boats now that the two different kinds of sonar are modeled in TMO.

[geosub1978]

Originally Posted by ekempey

Ducimus put a patch for the S-Boat engine problem up on his filefront page.

TRUE!
Now I can depart with my pirate can S-37!

Thanks!

[neilbyrne]

Ducimus, your eminence, I have been playing SH since the original and your TMO mod is just wonderful. You are indeed a talented guy.
I was just going to leave it at that because I did not want to alloy my praise with suggestions, but the detail of the mod and the enormous number of things that are rendered correctly indicated to me that you are most interested in accuracy and so would not mind the following. Some is just background with a couple of suggestions and maybe a question or two.
Just a little about my background so you don’t think that I’m pulling this stuff out of whole cloth. I’ve been a lifelong student of naval history and that was before I ever entered the navy. I am a retired Captain USN with 31years on active duty. Eighteen of those years were spent in ships, mostly destroyers. I was privileged to command a frigate, BRONSTEIN, and a destroyer, BRISCOE. So my actual experience of submarine warfare is on the ASW side. Or as it is jokingly called in the USN, Awfully Slow Warfare.
I was CIC and then ASW officer in BROWNSON and attended both of the associated schools in the early ‘70s. At that time, most of the US fleet was still not equipped with the Navy Tactical Data System (NTDS) which put many of our sailors at computer consoles and automated a lot of the detection and tracking functions. Ours was what was then called a “grease pencil CIC”. Even air tracks were plotted on large Plexiglas status boards called vertical plots (VPs). VPs came in two flavors, informational and tactical. The info VPs were for displaying all manner of data so the watch standers didn’t have to keep it in their heads. This was stuff like radio freqs and handset stations, call signs, threat emitter signatures, formation guide, speed and spacing, etc. These VPs were unattended and only updated as reqd. The air plot VP was only manned in exercise or real world situations when we cared about the air picture. It was manned by two radarmen (RDs), now called operations specialists (OSs). They would stand behind the plot to be out of the way and write backwards in white grease pencil. When we were training kids to do this, we would always tell them, “Don’t scrub off the whole tail.” That meant to leave enough track history on the plot’s tracks so anyone could glance up and see quickly what was going on. The marks were normally an arrow in the direction of movement and a connecting line to the last mark, like so: <-<.
ASW was never done on a VP, and to my knowledge was never done so in submarines either. We were equipped with two plotting tables. The older one was the Dead Reckoning Tracer (DRT); the newer was the NC2 which was stood for Navy Canadian plotter #2 after the inventing navy. The DRT was more reliable; the NC2 had more capability when it was working. Both used a moving “bug”, essentially a compass rose shining up from inside the table with a cross in its center representing own ship. The tops of both tables were glass and the RDs covered them with large sheets of tracing paper. In an ASW situation, the plot was manned by a minimum of four watch standers, the ASW evaluator (an officer) who was calling the shots. There was a TACOM, tactical communicator (junior officer or a petty officer). There were two plotters, north and south, junior petty officers or strikers. The south plotter was connected by sound powered phones to sonar and his job was to plot own ship (in black pencil) and own ship’s sonar contacts (in red pencil) at no more than one minute intervals. The north plotter was connected to the surface radar operator and the Anti-Submarine Air Controller (ASAC) if we were controlling an ASW aircraft. The north plotter’s job was to plot friendly ships (in blue) and their sub contacts (in red). Aircraft were not put on the plot except for helos when dipping their sonars, but any sonobouys dropped by a/c were plotted and all a/c symbols were plotted in green pencil.
A long explanation, for what is a relatively minor quibble. TMO replaced the unrealistic shp.dds red hull silhouettes with a black grease pencil mark. My experience in talking to submariners was that they also kept the tactical plot on the plotting table in the control room, not on a VP. So my vote for a shp.dds replacement symbol would be something like the “don’t scrub all the tails” VP symbology, two arrowheads connected by a line <-<. And since it’s the enemy, in red.
Next, I’d like to go into sub detection by escorts with sonar, visually and later with radar. Here I have a lot of experience, and it is very difficult. This is why between us and the Brits, we built 1600+ destroyers/escort vessels in WWII. There is strength in numbers, because the individual capability just sucks. In ASW School, we were taught the capabilities of all the sonars then in the US surface fleet. There were still some WWII ships active, mostly old FLETCHERs and SUMNERs, that hadn’t been through the FRAM (Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization) refit that installed newer systems. As I recall, these old girls had the SQS-46V sonar. We did a day or two in the attack trainer using this system. In absolutely beautiful water, isothermal (no layer) to 400ft, it had a reliable detection range of 2000-2500yds. Now remember this was the best sonar we had toward the end of WWII. In worse water, it was less. And a good rule of thumb about subs below the layer is that range across the layer is no better than 33-25% of range above the layer. The IJN had nothing better than this, and in my research in Morison’s 15 volumes History of USN Ops in WWII and Roscoe’s histories of US Sub & DD ops, I never found a sub detection at greater than 2,500 yds on active sonar, and most IJN detections were at 2,000 or less. On passive sonar, those sonars could detect thermal (steam) powered torpedoes pretty well but close. The only condition when a sub on her battery would be vulnerable to passive detection though was if she were cavitating her screws, normally at 7kts or more and only above 150ft, or at 15kts or more above 300ft. Deeper than 300ft, water pressure keeps the cavitation bubbles from forming.
Max sonar speed for WWII ships was 12 knots and it was not graceful degradation above that. Go faster, and you were deaf as a post in both active and passive.
OK, so that’s sonar detections. How about visual? Very hard and you get lots of false contacts. For most of my time as a junior officer, seniors kept telling me that periscope detections by lookouts were a training problem. Then I got a look at about 30 years of exercise results and the opportunities vs. detection numbers were just dismal. Obviously, I can’t put classified numbers out here, but suffice it to say that the US Navy has finally decided that this is a job for a machine.
A warship has about seven folks looking out full and part time. Three are full time lookouts, port, stbd and aft. Then you have the OOD and JOOD who look out when they can. Last you have the two signalmen who are supposed to be looking out when not signaling; although, in fact, they hardly do. The lookouts have 120 degree sectors that do not overlap. The officers, when they are looking, normally search the forward 180 degrees. The aft lookout has no one else looking where he searches and his primary responsibility is to be the last line of defense for a man who falls overboard, so often he is searching in the near field which the others are not.
In eighteen years of sea duty, I saw three visual periscope detections that actually turned out to be submarines. Now admittedly, we weren’t worried about being torpedoed, and so our attention was less focused than that of our WWII brethren, but still, not great. That doesn't mean I only saw three periscopes in 18 years; I saw a lot more than that, but only three or so were initial detections. Whenever you get a sonar contact, sonar calls CIC and the bridge. The bridge watchstanders immediately look down the bearing of the contact. Sometimes, there's a periscope there, but these are cued not initial detections. If I had to attach an unclassified number to uncued detections, I’d say a ship had no better than a 10% chance, maybe less, of detecting a periscope that wasn’t way high out of the water and then only in daylight within 4000 yds. At night, or in low visibility, or high seas, forget it; zero percent.
Surface search radar, until the relatively recent advent of one and two second scan rates in systems like SPQ-9, was only a little better than visual. This was mostly because with six to ten second scan rates, everything as small as a periscope looks to the operator like sea clutter. And we didn’t get good at sea clutter rejection features until after the war. Plus radar sea return clutter is worst right where you’re wanting to look, within 6kyds of own ship.
So there I was last night in my S-40, west of the Ryukus, in February ’42. I was at periscope depth closing on a firing position, ahead standard, for a lone SHIRATSUYU Class DD who was off my port bow at 5000yds. He was doing 12kts on a course of about 340. The sun was setting behind his port quarter; time was like 1700. The thermal layer was at 150ft. He had been tracking right down his DRM (Direction of Relative Movement vector) and then at 5000 yds, he suddenly altered course right at me. At that range, I have no idea what he could have detected.
I'm running the U-boat missions add-on and TMO v1.5.
Along this line, do we know what the sonar/visual detection ranges are for the various settings in data/sim/cfg that you refer to in your FAQ?
Once again, I want to say, you’ve done a spectacular job with TMO. These are admittedly little things, and I thought you might enjoy the background. Bravo Zulu is the navy signal flag combination that means Well Done; in your case exceptionally so.

[geosub1978]

OK! The new version is quite a big challenge!

Nevertheless, I believe that DD detection ranges and the lethality of the aircraft are overestimated!Ducimus is it allowed to adjust them to more reasonable values?
Normally a submarine making 3-4kts submerged cannot be detected passively. So what would be the values of sim.cfg in that case?
Is the aircraft lethality also included in sim.cfg???

[Suicide Charlie]

Ha, I'm still used to SHIII so when DD's are near by I'll switch to specific speed control and set it no higher than 3kts and have no problem taking it down to 1-2kts. I do notice that IJN ASW capabilities seem much behind what Brit and American forces seemed capable of, at least from a Silent Hunter point of view. The RPM's for the two different engine technology has a bigger part in this as well. I guess American boats could put out a higher speed with a lower RPM or at least that's what it seems like in game.

I'm not a modder, but your background history was really cool. Thank you Neilbryne and hello to another San Diego resident!

And now for my true reason for the post. I finally grabbed UBM the other night so I could go ahead and get the latest versions of my favorite mods. After installing TMO and then RSRDC and starting a campaign I noticed a couple of things.

1. My station controls were all over the place. The F1-F12 functions were all jumbled up and switched around. I don't recall ever reading about this change in the FAQ or changes, so I figured it has to be a glitch. As anybody else run into this? I've uninstalled and reinstalled both mods in order, but I haven't been able to see if it worked yet. Just lookign for some experience on this.

2. Sitting at my dock in Pearl Harbour and making preperations to leave I kept hearing this annoying buzz/whine. After finally figuring out where my Bridge station button had to relocated to I figured out it was coming from the band. Missing sound file?

I know these can't be bugs or a real common thing I'm just looking for some experience on it and to make sure that a re-install of the mods should fix it or if I'm going to manually dive into the files and fix something myself.

Biggest bum out on UBM so far is that it makes your old save files incompatible. I was so damn close to a 100k patrol too and my second outing and still had plenty of time to seek out both the Coral Sea and Midway battles...

[Powerthighs]

[QUOTE]1. My station controls were all over the place. The F1-F12 functions were all jumbled up and switched around. I don't recall ever reading about this change in the FAQ or changes, so I figured it has to be a glitch. As anybody else run into this? I've uninstalled and reinstalled both mods in order, but I haven't been able to see if it worked yet. Just lookign for some experience on this.QUOTE]

This is by design, Trigger Maru remaps the keys away from the default SH4 configuration. I believe it remaps them to SHIII layout.

[geosub1978]

Originally Posted by neilbyrne

As I recall, these old girls had the SQS-46V sonar.

It was and still is, the SQS-23 !

[cgjimeneza]

Op Monsum does remap the keys to sh3, sort of
TMO and RSRD keep the keys quite close to stock sh4...

[Suicide Charlie]

It there anyway that I can map them back? I just got used to the SHVI config and erased the SHIII layout from my brain. I also don't think I have my print out for the SHIII set up anymore anyways.

[neilbyrne]

Not correct. With perhaps a few exceptions, only the FRAM recipient ships got the SQS-23. In fact, and I'm away from my library, I believe it was only the FRAM I's, all of which were GEARING Class that got the 23. There were a few GEARINGs, 33 SUMNERS and I believe a couple of FLETCHER DDEs that received the FRAM II conversion, but they did not get the 23. In those days the 23 was paired with the ASROC installation because it was thought, wrongly as it proved out, that the 23 could reliably detect out to ASROC's original range of 10,000 yards. And only FRAM I ships received ASROC.
I served in two FRAM Is, HENDERSON (DD-785) as an enlisted SM3, and BROWNSON (DD-868) as an ENS and JG. BROWNSON, or "BROWNEYE" as the crew called her, was an exception. In 1970, she was equipped with the first SQQ-23 (PAIR) and served as test ship for same the whole two years that I was aboard. PAIR was almost a whole new sonar. It had enormously better signal processing than the straight 23 and had a very capable passive side which the straight 23 did not. For me it was great; we did almost nothing but straight ASW ops for that whole two years. PAIR went on to be installed in the ADAMS, FARRAGUT and LEAHY Classes.
For the WWII ships that were not FRAMed, their sonars were upgraded as catch can and as $$$ were available. Many got the less capable SQS-29 as I recall, but a lot still had the 46V when they went to their reward. One possible exception here, and I'm guessing, is ships sold abroad under the Foreign Military Sales Program (FMS). A lot of SUMNERs and FLETCHERs went to FMS after they reached end of service life in the USN. In some FMS cases, if the buyer country wants upgrades and is willing to pay for them, it can happen, but this is on a case basis. In any case, in '71 when I went to ASW school, they were still teaching the 46V although only for a day or so. Kind of a, "You won't believe how far we've come" kind of thing.

[ekempey]

Originally Posted by Suicide Charlie

It there anyway that I can map them back? I just got used to the SHVI config and erased the SHIII layout from my brain. I also don't think I have my print out for the SHIII set up anymore anyways.

Go into JSGME and de-activate TM, go find the stock keyboard config, copy it. Re-activate TMO, paste the old keyboard map over the one inserted by TM.

[Suicide Charlie]

Originally Posted by ekempey

Go into JSGME and de-activate TM, go find the stock keyboard config, copy it. Re-activate TMO, paste the old keyboard map over the one inserted by TM.

Thank you good sir.

[ekempey]

No problem.

[Suicide Charlie]

Hmmm... Guess my next question is what file is that located in. I found something called "SHcontrollers." But, it's an ACT and I'm not sure what to open that with.

[ekempey]

Hold on, I'll find it.