Question of the day. Surprise torpedo evasion.

[Bellman]

Russian ambushers totaly immobilised by intimacy with ice !

Trying to think of the Western it reminded me of - '' Ambush at Deadmans Gulf'' ?

Lucky to survive with my 3 48s enroute as the plug was pulled !

[Oberon]

Man I'm looking forward to getting stuck into this....should only be a matter of weeks now...then you guys get a new target to sink

[Kapitan]

1) bellman was out of range by a fair few miles think the distance was around 34 miles.

2) i was already dead before he fired a thing lol i ran aground the depth went 12m to 0 in a second.

[Sgian Dubh]

Originally Posted by Kapitan

Correct firing in every direction because you simply can is not a tactic at all, in fact its a rather stupid move, if you have a half decent skipper he could work backwards from all them torpedos and work out where you are.

So now you have 8 torps in the water and some one has fired at you, instead of waiting for a pure contact you have given yourself away and now your open to be sunk.

I agree, but there seems to be a certain presence that is satisfied with sinking something, anything and is not overly concerned with ownship survival.

In fact, that is really the point in a number of ways. You shouldn't "win" in MP if ownship is sunk, regardless of how many you sink yourself. I don't want to go into the mechanics of how to correct this because I only have a few vague ideas myself.

I think it is ironic that I have diverted my own thread

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Sgian Dubh

I have no problem with someone putting multiple torpedos into the water for a single, detected and resovled contact. I have a big problem with some one in a Seawolf launching 8 ADCAPS in 4 equidistance bearings away from ownship and hopings that one of them latches onto something.

You'll have a hard time presenting a case where a board of inquiry would absolve a skipper for firing torpedos across the compass spread because "They had to be out there somewhere.".

I spent some more time thinking about it today, and the problem is actually fun to work out. Let's suppose you just had a bearing to a target (ex. TIW call). Let's also suppose that you knew the search rate of your torpedo. Let's also suppose you knew about what speed the bad guy would try to evade at (for example, his maximum silent speed). What spread of torpedoes would exclude the target's possiblity of escape (neglecting countermeasures)?

It's actually a pretty easy problem to solve. Using reasonable inputs and making different assumptions about the target evasion speed, it turns out that the Seawolf in DW firing a full spread of torpedoes can have perfect coverage all the way out the first convergence zone! FABULOUS!

But that's neglecting countermeasures.... It also assumes that you make an assumption about how fast your bad guy is going to evade at. He might surprise you. That can work both for or against him. Outside of the "no escape" zone, where at least one torpedo is guaranteed to home on you neglecting countermeasures, the torpedo effectiveness falls off as 1/R.

If you have a little bit better idea of where the guy is than just a bearing, maybe you don't need perfect coverage all the way out to the first convergence zone. Maybe you'll double up torpedoes and along the different bearings you calculated so that his countermeasures are less effective.

I'd argue that this is actually an EXCELLENT tactic, particularly since you know your target will detect your launch (he'll get a TIW call too) and evade.

So... I'm not saying that shooting a single spread of torpedoes in a 360 degree pattern is optimal. It's cheesy and fun (everyone needs to try it at least once in their life), but Kapitan is right, it's not the best tactic in the world.

It is a problem, to be sure. I guess the bottom line is to learn who to dive with that matches your style and preferences for the game. This is the single issue which make me skeptical about spending too much time in MP play.

Like I said, I feel like most of the problems with MP realism are driven by the fact that the scenarios themselves are contrived. It's mostly because the distance scales are all wrong. They're just bizzare to me.

I remember one person argued that a good scenario should be designed entirely with the 10Nmi scale on the map. Anything larger was wrong. What? In the game, people detect each other on the order of tens of miles. So now the search problem is massively simplified so the whole thing is about torpedoes and countermeasures. Exciting? Sure... but it's not realistic. Then they do things like pack as many playable platforms as they can into that same distance scale. So... now it's not just with no search problem, but it's utter chaos.

The outcomes of these scenarios are unindicative of anyone's skill level. Anyone is as likely as anyone else to win or lose, regardless of skill. It's just that particular roll of the dice.