A curious thought on DW passive sonar detection range

[Molon Labe]

Originally Posted by Frame57

Hmmm! I wish I were a Sonar Tech, so I could add to this. But I was assigned to our 'tracking parties' while on the A-fish. We had no problems at all finding outbound boomers from the former Soviet Union. We would track em for weeks and make SSP's on them. I seriously do not think this game comes close to reality for many reasons. I cannot get a boat to perform anywhere near as well as our old cluncky 637 class boat did. It makes me wonder if they modled the sonar after paper cups and string attached to the hull.

Get in the editor and change the acoustic conditions. You can get a 2nd, maybe even a 3rd, CV contact on a clunky old boomer.

[Frame57]

Originally Posted by Molon Labe

Get in the editor and change the acoustic conditions. You can get a 2nd, maybe even a 3rd, CV contact on a clunky old boomer.

What! Me doing that is about as likely a filling in for the Neurosurgeon.

[Molon Labe]

Originally Posted by Frame57

What! Me doing that is about as likely a filling in for the Neurosurgeon.

As I alluded to earlier, DW doesn't give you that many options to vary the acoustic conditions. It's not difficult. 95% of the variability is the SSP, and you only have 3 choices. It's a drop down menu, not brain surgery.

[Dr.Sid]

Originally Posted by feld

Dr. Sid,
Have you ever been able to confirm that terrain blocks sound propagation in DW?
-feld

Never tried .. and I can't try now since I don't have DW installed on my new notebook (but don't tell anyone).

As for us changing DW's propagation model .. it's hardcoded so forget about it.

[Molon Labe]

Originally Posted by Dr.Sid

Never tried .. and I can't try now since I don't have DW installed on my new notebook (but don't tell anyone).

As for us changing DW's propagation model .. it's hardcoded so forget about it.

In a simple line-of sight-way, yes. But I'm about 90% sure it doesn't do anything more complicated, for example, you can still get CVs in 500 feet of water even though the bottom should prevent that from happening.

[Dr.Sid]

Yes .. depth has no effect, that's sure thing.

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Molon Labe

As I alluded to earlier, DW doesn't give you that many options to vary the acoustic conditions. It's not difficult. 95% of the variability is the SSP, and you only have 3 choices. It's a drop down menu, not brain surgery.

Maybe what we really want is not so much a real-time state-of-the-art sound propagation model, as the ability to enter real-life meteorological and oceanographic data from online databases, and use an off-line sonar model to generate a family of prop-loss curves to represent an environment that we've provinced off ourselves during scenario generation.

[Molon Labe]

Originally Posted by SeaQueen

Maybe what we really want is not so much a real-time state-of-the-art sound propagation model, as the ability to enter real-life meteorological and oceanographic data from online databases, and use an off-line sonar model to generate a family of prop-loss curves to represent an environment that we've provinced off ourselves during scenario generation.

Even if you had the outside database information, wouldn't you still need a high fidelity sound propagation model that utilizes that information during the simulation? Even if you could download data and plug that into the acoustic conditions of a DW scenario, you're still stuck with 3 low-fidelity SSPs and not many variables to use to tweak them. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a cool tool to have, but it seems like this would be a complimentary* improvement, not a substitute. Or am I misunderstanding the proposal?

*And one which would be a great feautre of a dynamic campaign engine!

[feld]

Originally Posted by SeaQueen

Maybe what we really want is not so much a real-time state-of-the-art sound propagation model, as the ability to enter real-life meteorological and oceanographic data from online databases, and use an off-line sonar model to generate a family of prop-loss curves to represent an environment that we've provinced off ourselves during scenario generation.

Concur. Being able to define the SSP in "boxes" like the wind and current would be great. But we would be re-writing the DW SONAR model, I think, b/c it applies the same SSP over the whole 600 nm x 600 nm mission area. The new model would be the "range-dependent" proploss I referred to a few posts back.

Mission designers can work around this by choosing the SSP for the area where the preponderance of the ASW action will take place. That works ok as long as there's only one applicable SSP type. But this might not be the case, especially if the mission you're contemplating takes place over a large area, like a Theater ASW campaign or a Red Storm Rising-like convoy escort mission. The acoustic conditions in the littorals are also highly variable over large areas and so more "modern" naval missions involving submarines can be tough to do well.

-feld

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Molon Labe

Even if you had the outside database information, wouldn't you still need a high fidelity sound propagation model that utilizes that information during the simulation?

The database is out there. You could just pull the water temperature and salinity from the Levitus climatology. There's also public domain bathymetry out there and that drives the pressure terms dictating soundspeed. There's lots so nice simulations available online.

Even if you could download data and plug that into the acoustic conditions of a DW scenario, you're still stuck with 3 low-fidelity SSPs and not many variables to use to tweak them.

I was thinking more of a future subsim other than DW.

*And one which would be a great feautre of a dynamic campaign engine!

You know, back when Microprose's Red Storm Rising was out, I think they hit the nail on the head by limiting it's scope to the US/Soviet confrontation in one theatre. If you do that it makes it possible to do a lot more like that.

Falcon I think was very smart, because it did essentially the same thing. If you want to do something other than North Korea, you have to download a whole seperate campaign.

Harpoon is cool in that it allows you to do any conflict globally, but the thing about it is that it also has an easily extensible database, and is a lot more abstracted. The more detailed you make a simulation, the more limited in scope you need to make it in order to do a good job. I don't think it's wise to try to make a simulation all things to all people. It never works well.

If I was going to make a subsim, I would make it very limited and ONLY worry about a hypothetical US/China confrontation in the western Pacific in a single timeframe 15-20years in the future. It would also have a detailed database of US, Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese warships. I might also add UK and Australian warships and land units. It wouldn't even attempt to have a global database.

Submarines would be the only playable platform. They would include 688i, SSN21, SSGN and 774 classes. I don't want to have to build a flight simulator or surface ship simulator on top of a submarine simulator. I'd want to make the controls of those platforms and the way they behaved underwater as correct as possible. There's also a part of me that wonders whether it might be fun to give players the option of going into the engine room and playing with the nuclear power plant where they could adjust control rods and manage the various radioactive decay products. It seems like the engineering section always gets short changed in these games. If you can take the helm, you ought to be able to man the throttles too.

The thing about naval sims, though, is that they're necessarily more slow paced than an air simulation like Falcon. Sub sims are particularly that way. An individual submarine's mission might last weeks. In light of that, I'm not clear exactly how dynamic it would make sense to make it because from the submarines perspective, minute to minute changes in the war don't matter much. It's more like the day-to-day changes. A scripted campaign would seem much more natural.

[Frame57]

I like campaigns where you "hunt". When we went on out "Northern" patrols we knew that was what it was all about. If we found a contact of Interest I am sure the CO had standing orders, but if it was something not is our profiles then we would radio it in and see what COMSUSDEVRON 12 wanted us to do with it. Sometimes Patrols I guess could be what you call scripted. Like testing out a new Sonar device or something like that, or testing ADCAPS impact on Ice caps etc... But to have a "fun factor" in these types of games I think havin unkown variables pop up is necessary. Else it gets boring reallly fast.

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Frame57

Like testing out a new Sonar device or something like that, or testing ADCAPS impact on Ice caps etc... But to have a "fun factor" in these types of games I think havin unkown variables pop up is necessary. Else it gets boring reallly fast.

The thing about that sort of mission, is that even with random events thrown in, it gets old because ultimately you exhaust all the possible random events and the whole arguement that, "you don't know what's going to happen," goes away after you've played it a few times.

Really, in a wargame scenario, there's only so much "surprise" you can put into it. The trick is to figure out what randomness really drives the scenario and figure out how to put that in.

[Frame57]

Sure, at some point it will become the same ole, same ole. But the format of the SH series has some of that. When you make a contact is it going to be some old tankers with some escorts. Or will you find a nice big fat carrier or battleship to sink. Gotta love that. In modern times we do not have the history like WW1 and 2 to make these scenarios, but we could sure as heck make a fictitous one that would be awesome. WW3, we go against the Russian and Chinese navies using our 688i's and Virginia class boats and of course the few SSN 21's we have. I would buy it.

[SeaQueen]

Right now it's hard to imagine a plausible third world war. The name of the game is limited regional conflicts with specific political goals. This isn't to say you can't imagine some pretty big wars, but when you imagine the scenario you have to take that into account.

I mean... in WW3 losing a carrier wouldn't mean nearly as much as it would in a limited conflict where the American public might feel that the benefits of winning the war are outweighed by the costs in blood and treasure.

Originally Posted by Frame57

Sure, at some point it will become the same ole, same ole. But the format of the SH series has some of that. When you make a contact is it going to be some old tankers with some escorts. Or will you find a nice big fat carrier or battleship to sink. Gotta love that. In modern times we do not have the history like WW1 and 2 to make these scenarios, but we could sure as heck make a fictitous one that would be awesome. WW3, we go against the Russian and Chinese navies using our 688i's and Virginia class boats and of course the few SSN 21's we have. I would buy it.