Whats the point of ESM, Radar, Periscope or Active Sonar?

[thunda]

The masts are (obviously) useless against enemy subs, and that leaves surface vessels.

Well you definitely dont want to go to periscope depth against any ASW ship, so that leaves just merchant vessels. But that would mean you have already sunk all the enemy ships capable of dealing harm to you and the merchant ships dont have active sonar so ESM is useless. So why not just take it safe and torpedo them from 800ft deep or something?

Also considering that the game is coded to automatically spawn aircraft in combat, regardless of where you are on the strategic map, or what the situation is, you really just dont want to ever use your sensors other than passive sonar. Active sonar is so short-ranged that when it becomes 'useful' youre already noticed by that wolfpack and probably dead.

The first mission in the '84 campaign ordered me to sink some troop carrying ships + sec obj. sink the escort vessels. After prioritizing and sinking all the escorts first (4 ASW ships), I thought well none of these transport ships have weaponry, aircraft or active sonar so why not go to periscope depth and use radar/periscope to find these strugglers.

My face when after messing about just 1 minute with the periscope I hear a helicopter above me and suddenly depth charges litter the water with the complimentary torps following soon thereafter. This was like near the south-westernmost point of Norway's shore. At the start of the campaign when they should have 0 aircraft there, lol.

So, can anyone explain this (these) ?

[Team Triss]

Origineel geplaatst door Brygun:

Origineel geplaatst door The Inept European:

That is impressive and I'm surprised and yet, not surprised. This is a very well thought out game under the hood.

That's another reason to put torps out on dog legs. Ships and subs do that plus they have the ammo count to afford shooting a weapon down an agressive torps path.

A dog leg is a good leg.

Yeah, but you run the risk of burning a torp for nothing if you lose the wire.

Or can you set waypoints?

[The Inept European]

Yes. No.

[arkhangelsk.severstal]

Origineel geplaatst door The Inept European:

Origineel geplaatst door Rectal Nectar:

You can check whether there's a helo in air by

... hitting F4 (and cycling to see if there's more than one).

But that's probably cheating...

Personally, I don't feel too guilty using the F4 button. For one thing, those planes and helos are lethal. For another thing, most of the time it doesn't tell you where there are, just that they are there somewhere. And the game doesn't seem to give me even the theoretical possibility of catching them with the ESM mast and it is clearly too late when I can catch the thing on the periscope or hear its noise from my own sub's POV.

[Brygun]

There are various things that can go wrong with a dog leg. So I suggest the initial launch be aimed for the targets expected course then adjust. Several things to consider beyond that which can check on the wire guided torps guide I wrote here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=960438075

[The Inept European]

Origineel geplaatst door arkhangelsk.severstal:

Origineel geplaatst door The Inept European:

... hitting F4 (and cycling to see if there's more than one).

But that's probably cheating...

Personally, I don't feel too guilty using the F4 button. For one thing, those planes and helos are lethal. For another thing, most of the time it doesn't tell you where there are, just that they are there somewhere. And the game doesn't seem to give me even the theoretical possibility of catching them with the ESM mast and it is clearly too late when I can catch the thing on the periscope or hear its noise from my own sub's POV.

No I don't feel too guilty either.

If you watch an aircraft long enough, you might see it fly close by a ship that you recognise and have tracked, so you briefly know the aircraft's location. (Or if you pan around you might see a formation or distinctive ship you can recognise from a distance). That gives you the rough position. If you rotate around the aircraft until it's facing directly away from you, and check the compass heading (top centre of screen) you can figure out its heading. So by a kind of dead reckoning you can sort of track where it's going, if not exactly where it is. And if it flies right over you you still get the aircraft noise, which does vary based on the type of engines, props, etc.

You can actually get a kind of location with the ESM mast. I don't recommend it, but if you leave the ESM mast up the aircraft will eventually go active (radar) and you can see a purple directional trace (like an active sonar ping trace) that points to the aircraft. But again, it is not recommended to have the ESM mast up that long, and when the aircraft starts radar pinging your mast it probably is time to get ready to receive a little yellow visitor to your local cold waters.

[pavig]

A torp set with a circular seek pattern set to enable past the contact is a good way of planning a dogleg. If you keep the wire you can move the waypoint set it to seek straight and enable it, and if you lose the wire it'll still pose a threat to the contact.

[The Inept European]

Origineel geplaatst door Brygun:

There are various things that can go wrong with a dog leg. So I suggest the initial launch be aimed for the targets expected course then adjust.

I tend to agree it's safest to launch on a straight bearing with a good solution on the target and a suitable activation point. Then, once you have survived initial wire break probability (on launch, and when parallax change is highest), and you have less parallax change on the torp as it moves, you can dog leg it with less risk of losing it. Dog leg it out, then dog leg it in again. Apart from the first dog leg out, again set a sensible activation point in case you get a wire break. One trick is, if you are dog legging left, set circle search right, and vice versa. Then again if you lose the wire there's still a fair chance the torp will find and engage.

[The Inept European]

Origineel geplaatst door pavig:

A torp set with a circular seek pattern set to enable past the contact is a good way of planning a dogleg. If you keep the wire you can move the waypoint set it to seek straight and enable it, and if you lose the wire it'll still pose a threat to the contact.

Yes +1

[thunda]

What is dog legging?

[pavig]

Dog legging = sending a wire guided torpedo off in a different direction to the target, then turning it (optimally by updating the waypoint) part way through its course to intercept the target. The main advantage is that even if the enemy can get a tma solution and backtrace the torpedo to where it aparently came from, you aren't actually at that location. :)

Target Motion Analysis is interesting that way. It improves your tma analysis if you change your course (due to triangulation), and it degrades tma analysis if a contact changes its course. By steering a torpedo in flight you both make it harder for the target to figure out exactly where it is, predict where it is going and (most importantly) where it came from.

There are other tactical advantages - being able to attack a target from multiple directions at once, selectively picking targets within close formation, etc. From the manual p.32: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/541210/manuals/Cold_Waters_Operations_Manual.pdf?t=1499389852

"Assuming the wire stays intact, a weapon can be doglegged towards a target, creating a false datum for the enemy once it activates. With the capability of controlling several weapons at once, salvos can be arranged into complex, multi-directional time-on-target attacks that confuse enemy sensors and limit the effectiveness of their evasive measures."

[thunda]

thanks

[The Inept European]

Great explanation as ever Pavig. I hadn't thought about the fact that the doglegging (or other movement) degrades the opponent's TMA on the torpedo itself.

[Uboat]

Thanks Pavig, I'm definitely trying that trick.

As for the original post, I rarely, if ever, use the masts. Especally in '84, you're just asking to get torp dropped on you.

[The Inept European]

Origineel geplaatst door The Inept European:

Great explanation as ever Pavig. I hadn't thought about the fact that the doglegging (or other movement) degrades the opponent's TMA on the torpedo itself.

I wonder if that's implemented in the game engine though?

From our side, we either know exactly where an enemy torp is, or have no idea where it is (if we're lucky we heard a transient and had a bearing). So I wonder if the AI gets the same black vs white information on our torps, or something fuzzier like the TMA we get on an actual vessel target.

[captain403]

I had a mission to sink an Oscar SSGN. Local environment was 112db. Had a VERY hard time finding anything.

Started with no contacts at all. Eventually a Victor III was detected (ultimately fixed at about 3kyds of stb bow). Killed it with a torp (I don't think it ever knew I was there). Another Victor III detected stb beam 6kyds when it went flank (I think it heard the torp that killed it's mate and got the wind up).

After killing that I simply couldn't hear the Oscar at all. All search patterns drew a blank. So I went up to 50ft and put up the ESM mast (heck, nothing else was working, so a long shot is better than nothing at all). Got a lvl 4 (iirc) contact southeast. Back to 600 ft and did more search in that direction. Still nothing. Back up to 50 ft with the ESM....contact, but no bearing, so I put up the radar. BINGO! Oscar on the surface doing 4 kts at 5.4kyds away. Buy the time he heard the two torps that were gonna ream him a new one, it was far too late.

But without the ESM and Radar masts I probably wouldn't have got him. Passive sonar was extremely degraded by the environment.