I've had the jag for naval sims lately and I recently fired up Dangerous Waters (had it since when it was released in 2005 - deep, deep sub warfare sim that is amazing, but requires lots of study and patience to get good at. It has a 560+ page manual!) and tried out the Kilo demo scenario which is a good tutorial for subs in the game.
The scenario has you in a super-stealthy diesel-powered Russian Kilo sub - the so-called Black Hole because of its quietness. Your task is to sink a cargo ship, that's being escorted by a US Frigate through the Tsushima Strait (the frigate is a dangerous anti-sub foe), but not to sink or damage any other vessels.
The scenario opens with the Nav screen, showing the target area and the line we don't want the cargo ship to cross. The only ship symbol to be seen at the start is our sub symbol. Somewhere out there are our target and some other ships. But we are submerged and can't see anything yet. I immediately slow down to 4 knots to be really stealthy.
The first place to search is the Sonar station, where a couple of contacts are showing up on passive broadband sonar. They are the spikes around seven o'clock on the dial. I mark the contact to send it to the Target Motion Analysis (TMA) station.
Then to switch to Narrowband sonar which has filters to help us identify the sonar contacts. This contact is a freighter of some kind.
Next stop, the ESM (Electronic Support Measures) station. I deploy the ESM Mast and immediately it identifies some radar contacts. This station also has filters and one of the strong emitters is clearly an Oliver Hazard Perry Frigate - our escort.
So here is the situation after sonar and ESM search. There are 3 ships out there somewhere (range is not accurate yet for any of them, but bearing is). M01 and M02 and E03 (E because it hadn't been detected by other means, but only ESM so far).
To establish a torpedo solution, we need to know 3 things about a target - bearing, range and speed. We have bearings from sonar and ESM contacts (and these are regularly updated to keep the TMA accurate) and we can get speed from something called DEMON (demodulated noise). This counts the beats of propellors and by knowing the turns per knot a ship makes, speed can be determined. Our cargo ship has a 4-bladed prop and it does 10 turns per knot. The screen shows the four blades as four lines in the 'waterfall' display and when we set 10 in the TPK, it says the ship is doing 18 knots - motoring along.
Now sonar and ESM are so-called ambiguous sensors. We do have an unambiguous sensor - the periscope - which can also give us range. I sneak a look and can clearly see the cargo ship we are expecting on bearing 223 and by panning left, I see the masts of the OHP Frigate that is escorting it. We now have the target and can classify two of the contacts with a high degree of confidence. M01 and M03 are our Frigate and Cargo ship respectively.
Time to shoot. I head to the Weapons Control Station, assign tubes 1 and 2 (loaded with fast wakehoming torpedoes) to my target M03 and then set presets for the fish. We are in shallow water, so I set the fish to run shallow, with shallow ceiling and floor and to go "active" - that is to turn their own active sonar on, after 10,000 metres - the targets are 13,000m away. Up until then, they will be more difficult to track if they are not pinging away. I also have wire-guided torpedoes that I can steer after firing, but I decided not to use these.
Now I flood the tubes, equalise pressure and open the muzzle, before clicking fire. Both torpedoes are soon on their way.
I change course and start to sneak away. There's a very good chance that the Frigate heard my torpedo launches and if that happens they may fire their own torpedo back down the line of bearing so I want to get ready to evade and fire countermeasures.
This time though they carry on blissfully unaware. In a previous play-through, both ships turned south and ran, with the Frigate behind and trailing a decoy.
Here the torpedoes are barelling south towards the target.
About a minute later, as I watch through the scope, boom, the first fish hits and I get the mission complete message - I'd hit the right ship!
Hope you liked them and thanks for looking!
smith
to stick around and try to evade the fig. Personally, I've had a hard time trying to stay away from the fig without destroying it, and when I don't destroy it, it sometimes chases me and then runs aground.