14 Torps to kill a Merchant Ship

[Transcon]

Hello,

Are You Kidding Me!!! It took 14 torpedos to kill a merchant ship.

Did UBISoft have BETA TESTERS?. If so, what the heck were they doing. Because they sure weren't looking for bugs!!!!

[davejb1167]

It kinda makes the patrol results more realistic, don't you think though? In all previous subsims I've been able to rack up huge tonnages by sinking all sorts with one or two fish, but I just made ONE attack on a convoy and hit with EVERY torp I carried, using the depth settings and spread angles to ensure I went for under the hull back breakers, contact hits to punch holes in for the water to flood through, and torps were hitting in several sections rather than bunging them all amidships.... sank a DD and two merchies with, what, 20 torpedoes or so?
Of course the added realism comes at a price - you have to troll 2000 miles out and 2000 back at 11kts to avoid running out of gas, and it does seem odd to have to pump 4 or 5 torps into a rowing boat before it'll take on a definite list....

[CableRouter]

The main problem isn't the torpedoes, it's the "flinch factor". You know that no matter what you do, you won't really die if you screw up; so you roll right into an enemy convoy, taking your time to find the best targets, and taking insane chances to get 1-2 fish kills on them. Most players fight entire careers with habits that if used by an entire fleet of boats in the actual war would cost their nation the war within months.

You get the same thing in first person shooters. Guys who calmly stand right out in the open in the middle of a storm of gunfire just to get off a perfect headshot. Something that maybe a couple of people in a thousand would be capable of and when they die in the game, they aren't removed from the gene pool like their real life counterpart would, they just respawn to do it again and again.

You want to see realistic tonnage in player patrols? Use online CD key checks and every time the player gets killed or captured the CD key is banned forever and you have to spend $100 to get another. You can bet your boat that people would be a lot less likely to just charge in and see if they can nail an entire convoy, including several escorts; just to rack up that high score instead of the more realistic tactic of taking one decent shot with several more torps than necessary and then immediately getting the hell out of dodge before the escorts show up.

[davejb1167]

Gosh,
you mean I'm NOT this heroic in real life?
(Rustling noise as underpants are removed from outside jeans)...

I think the big giveaway is comparing a single 'good' patrol result to the entire war record of somebody like **** O'Kane, and accepting that just maybe you wouldn't make him look like a numpty in reality.

Then again, it's the 'immersion' factor - sales of suimulators would nosedive if you didn't get to be a super ace pilot/ninja of the deep/F1 World champion every time you fired it up.

[davejb1167]

I really wish the short form of Richard could be removed from the 'I found a naughty word' scanner... <sigh>

[Tracer63]

I'm in the process of reading Bitter Ocean (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bitter-Ocean-Dramatic-Atlantic-1939-1945/dp/0755310896/ref=sr_1_1/202-5101788-2072634?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175436524&sr=8-1) by David Fairbank White.

Synopsis
David White's meticulously researched and brilliantly told account of the Battle of the Atlantic is the first to assess this crucial theatre of the Second World War from the viewpoint of all the protagonists: Germany, USSR, USA, Canada and, above all, the UK. Packed with first-hand testimony from seamen and submariners, White shows the real hardships faced. He also shows how the U-boat threat was countered and eventually defeated, ensuring the survival of Great Britain and thus the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Royal Navy's triumph undoubtedly changed the course of history.

It talks about one of the biggest wolf pack attacks on a convoy that was 13miles long, all the U-boats had kills with one or two 'eels' or finished with the deck gun.
This 4+ torpedoes is utter rubbish on merchants! Most of them sunk within minutes, even taking 100+ men to their deaths they sunk so quickly.
Read it and appreciate that SH4 is nothing more than a game, and be glad! But it's poor none the less.

[davejb1167]

Joking aside, the damage modelling is very variable and pretty poor imo. 14 torps - most old merch's would sink under the extra weight if they'd just been loaded as deck cargo, never mind fired into the hull!

Unlike some who swear by contact fusing I've been trying (using event camera on) to determine a good depth for each class to ensure a proximity fuse right under the ship - most DD's seem to be around 8-8.5ft, large merch's I've got down to 25ft so far. A good magnetic fused strike amidships under a DD has, several times, destroyed the ship in 1 hit with a massive explosion. Unfortunately I've also had three good torps under a DD on 'down the throat' shots only to have the darn thing still pounding me soon after.

What amazes me is the apparent damage control - you put 6 torps into a tanker, it stops moving and is clearly deck awash, then watch in disbelief as it gradually speeds up and disappears with the rest of the convoy. Real life included random events, "unsinkable ships" and so on, but the rarities of real life seem commonplace in sims - not just SH4.

[Khalidor1977]

Old Torpedos got a ton Bug you need to know...

Magnetic exploder failure....
Engine Failure.....
etc etc...

Some Torpedo hits the Targets without a "Bom"....just ba Plonk you get....no detonations....

And in the RL of WWII there wasnt alot Submarines with a big Hitlist....

hmm wasnt there sendout 900 Submarines and just 200 was come home?

[LeKeiser]

Hello,

A patrol during a storm, everything manual, lots of HUGE waves so almost impossible to tell how far the boat was. I launched 8 torpedoes at it, only one of them hit. 6 exploded way before, dunno why. One went directly to the left, eventhough :
1) the boat was on my 20?
2) it wasn't moving, so I didn't enter any speed
So now I can go home, I have only 3 or 4 torpedoes left, I don't want to waste my time firing for nothing :O

[davejb1167]

Gonna try to check out whether 'contact' and 'magnetic/contact' are labelled the wrong way round - in very shallow water I watched a torp set to 8ft pass under a DD (beautifully amidships v a manoeuvering target) without going boom. Given the draft of a DD that must equate to 2-3 ft under the keel (tops) - on the event camera it looked like a tiny gap was left between torp and DD hull. That would make sense IF the torp was really set to contact fuse - in which case my 'back breaker' work has really been 'using Mk14 torpedoes to measure the keel depth of Japanese shipping'.

Oh well - it's far less of a problem than the real US skippers had to figure out. The 'dud' rate in this game, for me, has been extremely low. I doubt the problems such as 'fast' torps running slow are intentionally in the game to add to our 'immersion' but I can live with this sort of thing better than a CTD.

Khalidor - your 'plonk' torpedo is a dud, if you have duds selected this is meant to happen. In real life the Mk 6 magnetic exploder didn't work, hitting the target too close to perfectly (ie perpendicular to the target) caused the contact fuse to fail, several boats reported 'circular running' torpedoes - D*ick O'Kane sank himself with his own torp this way, and other boats were probably lost the same way. Oh, and the torpedoes ran about twice as deep as the settings said they should - and the guys at BuOrd were so sure THEIR torps and fuses couldn't possibly go wrong that they virtually ensured the problems weren't even looked at for a year or more. Compared to all that the game is a pussycat.

As for kills - US boats sank over 1300 Japanese vessels, totalling 5.3m tons or more. There were 'ace' US sub captains, comparisons with the Atlantic Aces (or the Med) would be to compare apples and oranges - the US boats pretty well closed down the Japanese logistics effort, achieving a strategic victory in the process. In the Atlantic, for comparison, a strategic victory almost resulted, but not quite.