How to Determine Ideal Spread?

[jgbishop]

When manually targeting ships, how do I go about determining the ideal spread angle for a salvo of torpedoes? Clearly the distance to the target is important, since 1 degree at 1000 yards is vastly different than 1 degree at 5000 yards. Is there a trick to figuring out what to use at any given distance?

[Platapus]

one way is not to designate a spread by angle but by observation with the periscope

Lock onto the target which puts you pretty much in the middle of the ship. Launch a torpedo.

Unlock and move the periscope to the bow (or just ahead of the bow) and launch another torp.

Move the periscope to the stern (or just behind the stern) and launch the third torp.

You know have a spread all along that ship with no angles to worry about.

Way better than trying to figure out what the angle should be for a 120 meter ship 1100 meters away.

[Rockin Robbins]

with manual targeting on. The periscope is not hooked with a full-time connection to the TDC. American subs only had dial-up 56K modems.:rotfl:Sorry, couldn't resist that. But it is true that the American TDC did not automatically update based on where the periscope is pointed. Believe it or not, that is good.

I'm so used to it that even on the U-Boat I have disconnected the periscope from the TDC until I can learn how the blasted thing works.

Unfortunately, the real TDC worked differently than our game TDC and it had an input crank for ship length. It then calculated the correct spread for you. We have no such animal here.

A compromise would be to steal a page from my Dick O'Kane technique (disclaimer: I did not develop the Dick O'Kane technique alone, but with the help of aaronblood and gutted, without whose help I would never have investigated......etc, etc) .

How are you gonna do that Unkel Rockin? Well, after you have your solution perfect and you've verified on the attack screen that the impact point is following your target perfectly, Let's just mess it up!

What we want to do is make the impact point actually in front of the target, moving in the same course. We're going to have to scew up the bearing and maybe tweak the speed to do that. First, we'll screw up the bearing. Unlock your scope and sight one ship length ahead of your target. Press the send range/bearing button on the TDC. Now you're aimed ahead of the target. If you press fire you'll miss now. Isn't that great?

Check out the attack screen. Your impact point should perfectly shadow the target, but be ahead of it. Now except for extreme angles, where you can compensate by slowing down the speed adjustment, You're all set up.

Here's the plan. Open three torpedo tubes. We have a moving aiming point 1 ship length in front of our target. If we point the scope just ahead of that, then press the position keeper button (turning it off) when the scope is aimed there and then not move the scope while the ship cruises by the crosshairs, we can aim for specific parts of the ship by firing when they are in the crosshairs!

So, aim the unlocked periscope 1½ ship lengths ahead of the target and left click so mouse movement won't turn it. Wait until the ship is 1 length from the crosshairs and press the PK button to turn it off. DON'T CHANGE THE AIMING POINT OF THE PERISCOPE!!! Let the ship come to it.

Now ¼ of the way back from the bow press fire. Fire at the center, fire ¼ length from the stern. Cook at 350º for 2 minutes, stirring as necessary. Listen to three very satisfying booms.

CAUTION: because of parallax errors involved, this is not as accurate as conventional targeting or Dick O'Kane, but it's a darn sight better than the "I guess I'll try a 5º spread angle" method.

[Platapus]

Ick Did I confuse SH3 with SH4 again?

Humble apologies

slinking away

[Rockin Robbins]

SH4 now has U-Boats and Fleet Boats, which work entirely differently. So you can talk SH4 and mean either one to confuse all of us who will talk about whatever we think you mean. Should be very entertaining.:rotfl:

[Platapus]

Nah I pretty much F-ed up there

[M. Sarsfield]

Another approach is to look at the target's bow and stern and note the difference in bearing change on the scope. This tells you the max arc that the torpedoes should stay within when firing a spread. Usually I use +/- 1 degree at 1000 yards and +/- 1/2 degree up to 2000 yards. If the ship keeps changing speed and course, a wider spread is required to try to compensate for what he might do next - and some misses will result.

The only way that I know of to update the scope bearing with the US TDC is to just click the range/bearing button without taking the range, again.