Submarines and Targets

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EDIT: Oops. This was supposed to be part of the other LET'S PLAY topic. :P Oh well.

We found the 'phibs. I'll post the replay movies once I find a suitable place to put them up; one is of the action overall and one is of the torpedo evasion sequnence.
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Several minutes were spent in tracking, but the only ship we could track consistantly was the noisy Amguema transport. It was pretty obvious the thermal layer at 300 feet was preventing proper passive sonar tracking, so I took us up to 275.
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It paid off. I could track two ships reliably now and had intermittent contact with three others. Not yet good enough to shoot, however. Sonar wasn't generating ship types fast enough, so (hitting F5) I decided to do it myself. On higher difficulties, you have to always do it yourself. This particular contact, via the slowly filling colored dots, is a Udaloy ASW destroyer.
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I also identified a Krivak 2, but wasn't able to hold contact on the other two long enough to get an ID. The situation didn't appear likely to improve, but I had good fixes on the relative posistions of the Udaloy and the Amguema, and they had been proceeding on steady courses at 10 knots, so I could fire at them with a good chance of success. You'll notice we don't currently have contact on the Krivak or one of the other ships in the force as I do so. However, the course of the formation made it clear that I was approaching from behind, and the escorts were to the front.

The Amguema (god I hate spelling that name) was a transport and thus a primary target per our orders. The Udaloy was almost certainly the best ASW ship in the screening force. Thus, it was time to resolve the deadlock by lofting some TASMs.
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One's already in the air here, headed for the transport. I'm about to fire the other. Notice the targeting cursor. That's not where your weapon is targeted, but where it goes active to search for targets with its onboard homing gear. TASMs, obviously, cannot be guided once launched, so selecting the activation point is crucial to ensuring it hits the right target (or indeed, any target). Torpedos can have their activation point changed via their wires and be steered manually once active...assuming you're not forced to accelerate rapidly or manuver radically. Once they enter terminal homing, they go automatic.

What the picture also doesn't quite show is that every ship in the force just went nuts detecting the first missile. You can see the Udaloy is already turning to charge, blissfully unaware he's about to have his own missile headed at him.

The Amguema didn't survive the Tomahawk hit, but just to mock me, the Udaloy did. A rocket-boosted torpedo arrived, but out of posistion and it never detected me or required evasion, so I fired a second TASM to finish the Udaloy.

Then we get a pair of other rocket-boosted torpedos lofted my way in return for the second shot at the Udaloy. The first immediately acquired on entering the water. (Torpedos don't account for depth in this game, 3D was a little beyond its capablities when one of its graphics cards options was 2-color.) A noisemaker was released, along with a decoy, to confuse the torpedo. This was successful, and the good ship SECTORGAME ROCKS actually managed to turn inside the torpedo's circular search pattern after it passed through the noisemaker. (Which is nothing more or less than a canister of pure sodium tablets, resulting in making lots of bubbles, and hence both noise and an active sonar-reflective target.) Accelerating to 30 knots en route to 900 feet, the second torpedo enters the water and also immediately acquires...the decoy I had launched earlier. We were never in danger.

After that sequence, it was time to try and sort out who was still left and what to do. The Udaloy had gone down (you get a little animation for every hit that lets you know whether you sunk the target or not, I'll have to capture it later), as had the transport, but I'd had intermittent contacts with three more ships.

I came back up from the abyssal depths to 275 feet, slowing to ten knots before doing so. Then we listened for about a minute and a half, obtaining a solid posistion on a second amphib, a Ropucha LST headed due west, and tracking it briefly (the short grey track with the skip in it). I also very briefly had a 75% solution on the Krivak, but lost contact again.
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The other 'phib had to die, so a TASM was launched based on our brief tracking of him and the knowledge the only thing he wanted to do was run directly away. Another TASM was fired with a short activation distance in the Krivak's direction, in the hope it would do its own thing detecting and attacking. In return, yet another rocket-boosted torpedo arrived to harass us, immediately acquiring on entering the water. A rapid turn to starboard as we accelerated and a noisemaker confused it, and it turned the wrong way when it failed to strike anything after passing through the noisemaker, placing us outside its seeker cone. In the meantime, the Ropucha had been successfully sunk, athe last TASM "guess shot" had found the Krivak and sunk it as well.

We emerged from the Abyssal Zone once more to locate the last ship in the formation. Having a good bearing, but not yet a range, and fairly sure he probably had both, a final TASM was fired as a snapshot with an activation distance at 5000 yards. We immediately started to dive again and accelerate in anticipation of a return launch. The Tomahawk found its target. The target, a Kashin-class destroyer, did not manage to return this one, took the hit, and sank.
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Six Tomahawks expended, five ships sunk including both the transport and the tank landing ship.
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COMSUBLANT was happy with us. Note that all these little images are actually animated, and that means I'll have to get video of them at some point. Ack!

ER is your efficency rating. It goes up for sinking ships, not getting hit yourself, and I think not being detected by enemies or enemy weapons during your attack. It goes down for expending weapons, getting hit, and probably getting detected. Ours is pretty good for only two engagements, one of which I screwed up. The little thing along the bottom gives a relative idea of how the war is going. Random events can alter it; so, obviously, can your actions. Wiping out everything Russian that was currently floating has done much to turn the tide, as you can see.
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