Clear the Bridge! Dick O'kane method

[CDR Resser]

If I may add something to the discussion about the 120 degree reference. After spending many years reading O'Kane's books, I finally found out what was meant by the 120 degree track in another of the books about both Morton and O'Kane, I believe by Tuohy. O'Kane himself mentions it only in passing in each of his books.
The 120 degree track refers to torpedoes being fired to approach the target ship aft of the beam, or 120 degrees off the bow. This aspect allowed a spread of torpedoes to cover almost any evasive maneuver that the target might make.
It was always rather difficult to imagine this before I was able to demonstrate it using the game.
Hope this helps, and I am not repeating anything already covered.

Respectfully Submitted;
CDR Resser

[TorpX]

Originally Posted by aaronblood

Ummm...

I would like to go on record once again to mention that when I first described and tried to mimic O'Kane's tactics. I did in fact use the TDC as I believe O'Kane did and it has always been somewhat a thorn in my side that it was dumbed down over time but kept the "O'Kane" monicker.

What people call the O'Kane method now is such a crude method it doesn't really do O'Kane justice.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...&postcount=134

...where I mentioned "develop a solution for a 20° bearing (70° AoB)" I was using the TDC to do it.


In his book, O'Kane did the same thing as I described in the above post... holding the aiming wire constant and firing as target points passed the wire. It was just one attack that he documented in his book, doesn't necessarily mean he always did it.

I'm glad you posted this. It tends to be confusing when people see the "O'Kane method" and try to replicate exactly what was in the book. In the future it might be better to name techniques descripively rather than after historical figures, (i.e. The Perpendicular Attack method rather than The Jimmy Johnson Fleetboat Ace method). Many will see the most recent posts or the tutorials, but not read the hundreds of posts in the various threads.

[Thrair]

I need to try this type of shot at some point. Trouble is I've gotten very used to a method I use (mostly continuous bearing, but with some manual tweaking of the numbers), and am a little wary about shaking things up when I've a system that works very well for me.

On the other hand, learning new tricks will always be handy. Perhaps next time I go on a SH4 binge I'll try it out. Lately, I've been playing World of Tanks pretty heavily, and any time I play SH4 atm, it's to just hop in for a quick patrol. (heh, "quick patrol".... when do those ever happen? :P)

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by aaronblood

Frankly, I was trying to intitiate a Fast-90 attack in a US fleetboat,

There you go, right there! And that was the conversation that resulted in what we teach as the Dick O'Kane Targeting Method. It is named in honor od Dick O'Kane but has NOTHING to do with the mechanics of how O'Kane the person shot torpedoes. There is perfect evidence that he did constant bearing shooting. I think Nisgeis has gone as far as we can to determine what the mechanics were. Lacking the ability to "very carefully turn the target ship bearing input crank backwards so that the relative target bearing shown on the TDC does not move." as Nisgeis explains, we have to find historically plausible but not historically used methods of achieving most of the same result.

We achieved the booms. We did not preserve the use of the position keeper to validate our solution. Since our initial aim was to use the US TDC to replicate the U-Boat fast-90 attack as much as possible, we didn't feel we needed to go any further.

Yes, the Dick O'Kane technique could be extended to include other angles of attack than submarine 90º to target track with the introduction of complexity. However Nisgeis covered that perfectly with his Vector Analysis Technique.

That's where my personal goal of making successful captains out of newbie captains came in and I eliminated all steps that did not directly contribute to the boom. Aaronblood is right that using my rules of thumb can obscure understanding of the general concepts behind torpedo targeting.

But I figured that your next step is to wrap your brain around normal US targeting techniques, and you would understand it then anyway. My goal was to produce reliable manual targeting booms as quickly as possible for a newer player.

Limited goals plus ruthlessly simplified procedure plus application equals success. It's simple addition!