Mission: Kara sea search Feed back.

[Kapitan]

Just finnished playing this mission in real time, according to the Mission de brief it took 7 hours 36 minuets and 47 seconds (it felt like a week!).

It was a good mission i enjoyed playing it and will more than likely play it again, the long stroke of bordem paid off after 6 hours when i detected a poss sub on narrowband with my Skat 3 towed array, after doing all the monovers to possitivly classify this submarine it came to the 688i.

I did not enguage immediatly infact i picked this guy up doing only 5 knots bearing 122 from me course 355 range 11 miles.
Now thats well with in my 65cm torpedo's.

So what did i do?

I sat there and waited till he got closer he came within 6 miles of me then i fired and i know i caught him litteraly with his pants down.

I activated the torpedo at 5 miles from me and almost immediatly had lockhow ever he evaded my torpedo and two others, but my fourth one got luck hitting him in the arse and sinking him.

The guy fired back a MK-48-ADCAP so instead of running away from the torpedo i ran towards it at flank speed, and just like hunt for red october it went straight past me going active only two miles behind.

I have to admit i got scared at that point i dropped countermeasures and made hard 90 degree turn i even had to look into my print out for torpedo aquisition ranges and thankfully i was now outside the MK-48-ADCAP's range heading now due north back to TK208.

Once the torpedo stopped pinging i ended the game the TK208 Dmitri Donskoy had been effectivly Escorted.

So how did i do it? what tactics did i use? what speeds ?

If you ever seen clive custler look for ship wrecks you will see he does whats called a box search, ie he splits a certain area up in goes up and down and then across side to side, i used this methord.

When turning i used sprint and drift tactic where i would speed up to 25 knots then set all stop and glide till i got to four knots this was mainly to straighten out the towed array.

When doing "the line" i would only keep to 5 knots and i kept to 55 meters (no layers under ice so no need to go deep).

Anyway as i said after six hours or there abouts i found him, he was outside the SSBN op area south about 45 miles from the boomer approximatly.
I knew his torpedos could not get the boomer so i decided to do what i do best, sit and wait and i didnt wait that long 20 minuets at most and then i fired sinking him.

Short tactic list of tactics used:

Box searching
Sprint and drift
"Stay silent stay shallow"



How can this mission be improved?

The SSBN op area could be extended.
More biologicals.
Shallower waters.
More of a mission objective ie make sure the entire op area is clear of all threats.

More submarines both friendly and un friendly.
Random failures of eqipment could be good as well .

How would i rate this Mission?

Over view:
This mission is perfect for a person like me, i am "off the wall" kind of skipper i dont play by the books or rules i do what i have to do to get the job done regardless wether i go in harms way.
To play this mission you need a lot of patience as it takes hours, it took me almost 8 hours on this mission alone and that was in real time!

Skill:
Well you dont need that much as long as you know the rules of the road you will do fine, if you dont know how to command submarines under ice dont get this mission its not like commanding a submarine in the blue water it is a whole new kettle of fish.

Detail of the mission:
Fairly good could be improved upon with the above mentioned area's but it was a nice relaxing easy mission unlike some where its just sheer mayhem.

Score out of 100:

I have to give this mission 88 out of 100 Certain factors come in that make the mission not that good but it is still an excellent mission i do look forward to playing it again, and maybe even multiplayer!

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Kapitain

The SSBN op area could be extended.

I'm not sure that's a good idea. If you make the SSBN op area larger, then the scenario will take more and more time, statistically. Do you really want to play a scenario where you sit there a month and find nothing? That gets lame quickly. It's realistic, but it's lame.

I figured 50x50 NM was more than sufficiently challenging for most people. I think in my original statement about the scenario taking a week to play, I underestimated the detection range by a great deal. It seems like so far 8-12 hours is about what it takes.

More biologicals.

The biologicals are random. Sometimes you see more, sometimes you see less. I thought about putting more shrimp in. Do you know of anyplace that specifically details the marine life up there? Actual numbers are hard to come by.

Shallower waters.

I'm sort of limited by what's on the bathymetric chart there. Is there a better location with the Kara Sea that you would pick? Why?

More of a mission objective ie make sure the entire op area is clear of all threats.

I thought about that, but I wasn't sure how to do it in a way that felt good to me. In real life, you can never say that an area is clear of all threat submarines, you can only make probabilistic statements but the way DW is set up now, you can't really do something like, "clear the area to 90% confidence that there are no threats in it," because you can't do math in the doctrine language.

I think it'd be neat if you could do some kind of "probability of clearence threshold" trigger. I think if I could do that, though, I think it'd be much more challenging (and realistic) for the Soviet side. In that case, what I'd do is make the inclusion of the threat submarine random, so you don't know if there's actually a threat there or not. :-) You just have to get to 90% confidence the area is clear as fast you can. I'd have to make a pair of scenarios, actually. The same situation played from opposite sides. Huuuuum... this has me thinking.

More submarines both friendly and un friendly.

I was cautious about this, because I explicitly DIDN'T want to have to deal with issues like coordination of ASW assets. Every time I try to design a complicated scenario in DW with lots of things going on at once, I end up in over my head and never finish it.

Besides, I think DW is at it's best when it's a very small number of assets. Larger scale stuff is best played in Harpoon. This boils things down to the essentials, I think. It gives one a good feel for what an ASW scenario is all about.

Random failures of eqipment could be good as well .

I'll keep that in mind. In general, I like to assume that things are sufficiently well maintained that this isn't too much of a problem, but I don't know what you people do with your ships over there.

To play this mission you need a lot of patience as it takes hours, it took me almost 8 hours on this mission alone and that was in real time!

Yeah... I'm scared a lot of people won't like it for that reason.

I have to give this mission 88 out of 100 Certain factors come in that make the mission not that good but it is still an excellent mission i do look forward to playing it again, and maybe even multiplayer!

I actually originally intended it to be multiplayer, but realistically most kids aren't going to sit there for hours at a time twiddling with the narrow band sonar, trying to find a 50Hz tonal. It takes a special kind of wacko to get into that.

[Kapitan]

Thankyou for your dissitation, i shall reply now with this.

I'm not sure that's a good idea. If you make the SSBN op area larger, then the scenario will take more and more time, statistically. Do you really want to play a scenario where you sit there a month and find nothing? That gets lame quickly. It's realistic, but it's lame.

I figured 50x50 NM was more than sufficiently challenging for most people. I think in my original statement about the scenario taking a week to play, I underestimated the detection range by a great deal. It seems like so far 8-12 hours is about what it takes.

For a person like me id prefer it extended but this is good for a normal run of the mill sort of guy.

I'm sort of limited by what's on the bathymetric chart there. Is there a better location with the Kara Sea that you would pick? Why?

About 150 miles due east of the the middle of Novaya Zemlya is a good place to hide a boomer its shallow, thick ice, and hard to find.

More submarines both friendly and un friendly

The to make it just that little harder why dont you put in nutrel submarines of other countrys say France it would prove difficault for both sides then to find and fire at a target.

Yeah... I'm scared a lot of people won't like it for that reason.

It depends on what type of person its made for i like long missions so i enjoyed this some others like short missions, you need to cater for both sides and this mission was done fine.

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Kapitain

The to make it just that little harder why dont you put in nutrel submarines of other countrys say France it would prove difficault for both sides then to find and fire at a target.

The context of the scenario was the big NATO/Warsaw Pact grudge match of the 80s. There are few if any submarine-wielding, neutral nations.

You're welcome to modify it any way you'd like, but I was shooting for a certain amount of realism. I'm also making the assumption that NATO planners in the scenario were sufficiently together that deconfliction between friendly SSNs was not a problem. I don't think that's unreasonable, either.

[Kapitan]

AAAAhhhhh now i know the setting, then the mission is perfectly fine, although i personaly wouldnt have opted to send a boomer near Novaya Zemlya.

Close but not as close as that as the island itself creates great navigational problems.

However for realism in this mission its got to be at lesat 7 /10

[XabbaRus]

Using doctrine and stuff you could do a 90% clear type thing.

It would be quite clumsy but doable.

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by XabbaRus

Using doctrine and stuff you could do a 90% clear type thing.

It would be quite clumsy but doable.

How so?

[XabbaRus]

It depends on how many enemy subs you want to put in the scenario.

For example if you wanted a 75% clearance
You'd need 4 enemy subs. Then using doctrine language set up that if any 3 out of the 4 are destroyed then the mission would be complete.

I think it is possible..

[Kapitan]

Sounds a good idea :hmm:

[Ramius]

Mission worked fine for me.

Just went sneaking about rather than killing things



Regarding the idea of putting "neutral" units up there =

[Kapitan]

I knew american skippers started to kiss Russian ar$e but that is taking the pi$$

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by XabbaRus

It depends on how many enemy subs you want to put in the scenario.

For example if you wanted a 75% clearance
You'd need 4 enemy subs. Then using doctrine language set up that if any 3 out of the 4 are destroyed then the mission would be complete.

I think it is possible..

It might be possible, but I think you're misunderstanding the problem. Suppose it wasn't known how many subs were in the box, or if any were in the box at all. You need to search the box and such that if there are any submarines in there, you stand a 0.9 probability of finding all of them.

That changes the problem because now, just because you've killed a submarine, doesn't mean that you're necessarily any closer to reaching your objective. It might change HOW you search, but that's not even clear, necessarily. It also makes negative information more ambiguous. "I searched this area for a hour, and I found nothing, is there really nothing there?"

It's that lack of information that would be neat to build into a scenario. The way I'd like to do it, you don't necessarily have to kill a single submarine to win. You just have to sanitize an area to make sure those submarines that you do know about aren't there, and the ones you don't know about are most likely not there. You can prosecute the submarines as a way to complete the objective or not.

It's kind of a subtle point, but I'm not sure how to do that in DW. The objective I just layed out, though, would let you experiment with TACTICS, which is what makes these kinds of computerized wargames fun. That's where they can be kind of deep, actually.

[XabbaRus]

You'd need to make several groups with several subs in each group then make those groups appear randomly.

So you make 2 groups, one with 3 subs in and the other with 4 subs.

In each of these groups when they appear anywhere between 1 or 4 subs can appear. (Or 1 and 3 depending on the group)

Then you need another group containing these groups, so either 1 group or 2 groups appear.

How you work the goals though is something else...

[Bill Nichols]

Originally Posted by SeaQueen

It might be possible, but I think you're misunderstanding the problem. Suppose it wasn't known how many subs were in the box, or if any were in the box at all. You need to search the box and such that if there are any submarines in there, you stand a 0.9 probability of finding all of them.

That changes the problem because now, just because you've killed a submarine, doesn't mean that you're necessarily any closer to reaching your objective. It might change HOW you search, but that's not even clear, necessarily. It also makes negative information more ambiguous. "I searched this area for a hour, and I found nothing, is there really nothing there?"

It's that lack of information that would be neat to build into a scenario. The way I'd like to do it, you don't necessarily have to kill a single submarine to win. You just have to sanitize an area to make sure those submarines that you do know about aren't there, and the ones you don't know about are most likely not there. You can prosecute the submarines as a way to complete the objective or not.

It's kind of a subtle point, but I'm not sure how to do that in DW. The objective I just layed out, though, would let you experiment with TACTICS, which is what makes these kinds of computerized wargames fun. That's where they can be kind of deep, actually.

How about this for an idea:

Say you want the mission goal to be, "Sanitize an area 50 x 50 nm with 90% confidence"

Let's assume the mean detection range at tactical search speed to be 5 nmi. Create 25 destination (event) triggers, each with 5nm radius (10 nmi diameter) such that the 50 x 50 nmi search area is covered. You can specify a max speed to force the player to use correct search tactics.

Next, create an Aggregate (Goal) Trigger that requires at least 22 of the above destination triggers to fire (90% of 25). Call this trigger, "Comple ASW Search" or something similar.

That's it.

[Bellman]

Scenario now completed in SW with kills of the Typhoon Dimitriydonskoy 208 and Akula 1 -Improved,
Leopard 328. Time elapsed 12 hrs 44 mins.

Strange metallic sound emitter source tracked down and reported in HIFAS DW.

Point to note - although mission completed 100% -Score shown as 50% 100/200 Resolution Incomplete,due to
American SSN incomplete goal.

I enjoyed playing this mission a lot, as my cautionary first mission, induced a proper leve of tension the
second time around. I shall play it again. :|\