Periscope detections are hosed

[neilbyrne]

I'm really getting disgusted with having brief exposures of my periscope detected immediately and at very high rates of probability by merchant ships, day or night. Had one detect me last night at 4000 yards in heavy seas. This has been happening for about a week. They get to 4,000 yds and start to zigzag for no apparent reason.
I served on active duty in the USN for 31 years mostly in frigates and destroyers. I had command of a frigate, BRONSTEIN, and a destroyer, BRISCOE. Persicope detections are 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 SHAREM ASW 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 ultimately 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 less than half a dozen unalerted 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. This is not to say that I only saw three or so periscopes in 18 years of sea duty. I saw a lot more than that, but they weren’t initial detections. When sonar gets a contact, they call the bridge and CIC requesting a bearing clear or foul report to determine if what they've got is a surface ship or not. The bridge watch standers then look down the bearing sonar gave. Sometimes there’s a periscope there, but these are cued not unalerted detections. If I had to attach an unclassified number to uncued detections, I’d say a warship had no better than a 10% chance, perhaps less, of detecting a periscope that wasn’t way high out of the water and then only in daylight within 4000 yds and merchant ships would certainly do no better. At night, or in low visibility, or heavy seas, forget it; zero percent. The issues at night and in low viz are obvious. In heavy seas the lookout has two problems. First, the eye is most often drawn to the periscope feather, its wake. In heavy seas, foam presides and feathers are insignificant. Second, you can't search with binoculars because you can't steady the field of view. IJN warships had wonderful optical equipment and most destroyers had two sets of big eye mounted binoculars in the pilot house. USN big eyes run to 20X power and are useful for ship recognition, but relatively not for periscope detections because of their narrow field of view.
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.
I wrote two longer posts about ASW for Ducimus about five years ago that contained some of this. In any case, does anyone know where the periscope detection numbers reside so I can examine those and see if what I perceive is happening is in fact the case?

[Sniper297]

That I couldn't tell you, but since I've been fooling with the SH4 mission editor I found that by default every new ship I place is classed as "Veteran", with the choices being Elite, Veteran, Competent, Novice, and Poor. "Veteran" apparently means psychic, making a beeline for you from far beyond any reasonable detection range. In other words the AI cheats so I'd hate to see an Elite crew.


I too was in ASW, an AX in a heavy helicopter antisubmarine squadron, so I totally agree with your gripe here.

[TorpX]

neilbyrne, I certainly agree with your reasoning. Whenever someone posts about their scope being spotted at > 1,000 yd, I have to scratch my head. I feel the same way about the way enemy ships are able to spot torpedo tracks. It seems to defy logic.

Someone posted about the same problem a few months ago. They said the instant he put up his scope, the target started to evade. Later, he said he changed up his mod order, and the problem went away. What mods are you using?

[Armistead]

I used the keys to control the scope so I can move it as I please, this way I can leave it under the water line and just barely move it up to break water enough to see. Beats all the up and down all the way during an attack.You really need to just break the waterline with you scope in calm waters, can get by more in rougher waters, fog and night of course.

I haven't messes with files in a long time, seems there is some sim files that deal with the scope, also possible different min/max heights that may could be adjusted and I believe there's a value regarding speed, the wake your scope leaves, so be careful about speed when scoping.

Obvious, use the attack scope during the day..

Scury would probably be the one to ask about this.

[Sniper297]

I'm still working on Manilla Raid and Resupply, so I've been observing the behavior of one Fubuki over and over. The group is one Hiryu, two cruisers, and I eliminated all but one escort. Manila Bay is shallow, the spot I attack from is 120 feet deep, so there's no going deep to evade. Got three wrecks screaming the breakup sounds of tortured metal all around, but I put the scope down and switch to external view to watch - I go north, south, west, or settle on the bottom, kick out decoys, nothing changes. He makes a beeline for me every time. I changed his path to put him 4000 yards away from the group, he still knows exactly where I am and where I'm going. Changed him from Veteran to Competent, there's STILL no evading him.



I know a lot of tricks to fool ASW operators, but I have to change him to Novice and place him way outside sonar detection range when I start the attack to get an even chance of actually evading this poltergeist. Periscope exposure and noise are irrelevant, the AI cheats.

[Armistead]

Haha, the AI doesn't cheat, it just follows the values set for it. It takes time to understand those values and how to deal with them, but the AI, even difficult settings like TMO or worse can be defeated..

[Ducimus]

I probably shouldn't respond to this because it deals with modding, (and my new SOP with modding is, My hands = off), but a couple off the cuff responses:

brief exposures of my periscope detected immediately and at very high rates of probability by merchant ships, day or night. Had one detect me last night at 4000 yards in heavy seas. This has been happening for about a week. They get to 4,000 yds and start to zigzag for no apparent reason.

I know some merchants have passive sonar. I thought about removing that in TMO, but was told that was historically correct so i left it in. Although the heavy seas confuses me. However, if your using RSRD, that probably altered something I did in ways that I did not intend, anticipate, or account for. Not a dig on the author of RSRD, it's just when you go overlaying mods on top of another large mod, the results are a caveat emptor situation. I take no responsibility beyond my own work.

I served on active duty in the USN for 31 years mostly in frigates and destroyers.

You know, there is absolutely no way that a former Air Force Construction Engineer with slightly less then 7 years TIS is going to have the knowledge of ANY former naval personnel regardless of specialty or TIS. Just sayin'. Hell, I have to constantly refer to a rank/grade chart when looking at Naval ranks because they never made any sense to me.

In the end, any game modification about naval warfare will probably best be done by people with experience in that area, and the technical expertise to do it. I had the latter, but not the former.

I wrote two longer posts about ASW for Ducimus about five years ago that contained some of this.

Five years ago is a long time ago for me. I honestly can't remember. Maybe I missed it. Maybe I was being pigheaded and just didn't pay attention. Maybe I just took what was said from an anonymous person on the internet with a grain of salt. I dunno.

I ran out of time, patience, and motivation; but I did my best. There's nothing else for it.

[neilbyrne]

Ducimus, TMO is a great mod which I've enjoyed for a long while. You did a wonderful job which I could in no way duplicate. I wouldn't know a line of C++ if it was floating in my breakfast cereal.

Thanks for all your work. Fair winds and following seas.

[Ducimus]

You don't need C++ knowledge unless you delve into the shader files. As programming goes, id say maybe having an idea of the basic principles of object oriented programing could help, but probably isn't required. Any mind that works mechanically, or simply having the will to do it, can mod this game with the tools available. (notepad, winmerge, S3D, Gimp, etc)

[Sniper297]

Yeah, I don't think anyone is pointing fingers at TMO specifically, I get psychic escorts with telescopic X-ray vision in the stock game. And there's nothing wrong with the Air Force, they're ALMOST as cool as the Navy.

My latest test I cruised on the surface right up to a couple battleships within 1000 yards at night without being seen, but these are part of the WIP career mod I've been working on for a year so I'll have to check if I changed all the enemy crew ratings to novice and poor while I was barking up the wrong voice tube.

"Sniper, you too and I'm retired so call me Neil...please."

Aye Aye, Sir!

[Sniper297]

Nope. Before looking into Aanker's idea I had set some of the tin cans to novice and poor, but the Kongo BB was set for the default Veteran crew. The difference is in the sim.cfg visual hack, at night I motored up to him within 1000 yards on the surface before whacking him with a couple of fish, in the daytime I get to about 4500 yards and he starts throwing everything in his shot lockers at me and I gotta pull the plug. While poking around in the mission editor I reset the poor and novice destroyers to competent and veteran, see how much of a rough time they give me with that.

[Armistead]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

I probably shouldn't respond to this because it deals with modding, (and my new SOP with modding is, My hands = off), but a couple off the cuff responses:

I ran out of time, patience, and motivation; but I did my best. There's nothing else for it.

Damn, so you're not gonna make a mod to please everyone?

[Sniper297]

Ran another this morning, this one started about midnight (career start it's random). While tweaking this to try to balance between player choice of S-18, Porpoise, Salmon or Sargo I came to the conclusion that the S boat would arrive at his first engagement about 2 years after the sunken US fleet had rusted away. So I added three torpedo bombers to help the surface fleet, they usually get two or three small holes in the first BB (Kongo) to soften him up a little. Doesn't usually help much, even DIW he makes scrap iron out of any light or heavy US cruiser that comes within range.

But this time surprise surprise, them three TBDs actually SANK the Kongo with them itty bitty mark 13s. Okay, so there's a group of 1 Takao and two light cruisers coming in behind, go to decks awash and see how close I can get to them.



2000 yards at 12 knots, they can't see all that spray?



Inside 1000 yards, them lubbers are all asleep. Fire one, fire two!



At least the light cruisers woke up and started hammering away when the Takao blew up, but I still think the lookouts should have seen SOMETHING at 2000 yards even in the dark. I can see sneaking up to 1000 yards from a merchant ship in the dark, but not a man-O-war.

[Visual]
Detection time=0.8 ;[s] min detection time.
Sensitivity=0.07 ;(0..1) min detection threshold double detection time.
Fog factor=1.2 ;[>=0]
Light factor=2.6 ;[>=0]
Waves factor=2.0 ;[>=0]
Enemy surface factor=150 ;[m2]
Enemy speed factor=18 ;[kt]
Thermal Layer Signal Attenuation=1.0

[Radar]
Detection time=1 ;[s]
Sensitivity=0.01 ;(0..1)
Waves factor=1.0 ;[>=0]
Enemy surface factor=5.0 ;[m2]
Thermal Layer Signal Attenuation=1.0

[Hydrophone]
Detection time=5 ;[s]
Sensitivity=0.07 ;(0..1)
Height factor=0 ;[m]
Waves factor=0.7 ;[>=0]
Speed factor=15 ;[kt]
Noise factor=0.7 ;[>=0]
Thermal Layer Signal Attenuation=2 ;[>0], 1 means no signal reduction, 3 equals signal reduction to 33%

[Sonar]
Detection time=10 ;[s]
Sensitivity=0.009 ;(0..1)
Waves factor=0.5 ;[>=0]
Speed factor=15 ;[kt]
Enemy surface factor=100 ;[m2]
Lose time=30 ;[s]
Thermal Layer Signal Attenuation=2 ;[>0], 1 means no signal reduction, 5 equals signal reduction to 20%

That's what I'm running now, maybe the light factor needs to be adjusted downward?

[Leon West]

Forgive me, but I think I'm just really bucking for that "Stupidest Question of the Year" award. It's so shiny!

Erm, anyways, the above code looks like a lot of work has gone into it, and I would really like to give it a try with my game, but sadly, I don't know which file to edit. Can someone please point me in the right direction for this one?

Thanks in advance.

[aanker]

Originally Posted by Leon West

Forgive me, but I think I'm just really bucking for that "Stupidest Question of the Year" award. It's so shiny!

Erm, anyways, the above code looks like a lot of work has gone into it, and I would really like to give it a try with my game, but sadly, I don't know which file to edit. Can someone please point me in the right direction for this one?

Thanks in advance.

It is easy - there are no silly questions.

The file is sim.cfg
It can be opened with Notepad a plain text editor - NOT Word or any formatted text program.

Values I posted here make a night surface attack possible under the right 'use your common sense' conditions/situations.

Here is the post:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...6&postcount=20

sim.cfg is in:
Silent Hunter Wolves of the Pacific\Data\Cfg\sim.cfg

Be sure you back your file up so you don't lose it.

Happy Hunting!