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Originally Posted by LuftWolf
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BTW, SQ why oh why don't you use LWAMI? I figure you'd be one to jump at it, unless you have professional reasons for not using amateur mods... like you have a BETTER database than ours perhaps?  |
Actually, I don't. I also avoid making scenarios that have to do with contemporary topics unless I can point to a newspaper article, for example, which inspired it. I don't want anything I do to be "too close" to something I might have seen. You guys might be surprised at how much out there is public domain, though, if you just know where to look.
Honestly, my feeling is that the database shouldn't matter all that much. The principle around which I designed the Kara Sea mission remains the same regardless. Different databases might change the detection ranges, and therefore the pace of things somewhat, but the essential tactical decisions one must make remain the same. That's what wargaming is all about, to me.
My biggest problems with the sim have less to do with the database and more to do with more fundamental issues. SSPs for example, still look bizarre.
One shouldn't focus too much on trying to make a "realistic" database in publically available wargames. Given the limitations of the sonar and radar models, all of the second guessing of specific numbers probably doesn't buy you much.
Speaking from experience, I think the stock DW gives results that look just fine to me. I don't look at them and think, "that's all wrong!" I'm more annoyed by things like the presense of strong thermoclines in the arctic, or the lack of a useful exploitation of doppler shift.
Databases don't really change the "realism" (if such a thing exists at all) of the game play all that much, particularly if the scenarios people construct are typically contrived anyway. In real life, sometimes I think the real design specifications are just picked out of the air by a subject matter expert because his answer is, "I don't know." Either that, or they are arrived at by tests in a laboratory somewhere which might or might not have anything to do with what happens when the systems are actually employed. Who knows what the "real" value is?
I was talking to a guy yesterday who was telling me that when they were teaching him tactics at the Naval War College, they used stock Harpoon, with none of the mods out there. They weren't out at the time. The point was to teach people to make the best decisions and to illustrate general principles, and teach you how to solve problems. It makes you THINK like a sea captain, or a TACCO. THAT makes sense to me.
All of this dickering over a few dB here and there just makes my head hurt.