All right! I was going to do the video in the safe, balmy waters near Catalina Island off the Coast of California, but in the course of getting some experience in a real campaign I've got a great setup on a lone merchie actually in the war zone with evil planes buzzing around and in the final phase of an end-around. It's just a perfect setup in the Marshall Island chain so I'm going to go for it.
I plan on doing a video using GFO/RSRDC and stock plotting with friend or foe colors, with ship silhouettes, with velocity vectors, and you'll see how to set up the attack that way. We'll see the futility of using the accursed stadimeter at 4000 yards and a big surprise, how to use sonar and make that setup pretty deadly at 4000 yards.
Unfortunately you can't depend on your torpedoes not crapping out at that range and our merchie is zig-zagging because I was stupid enough to get spotted earlier in the run where I was making 20 knots to get ahead and stayed on the surface just 10 seconds too long. I got spotted by a plane. No booms but he's a blabbermouth on the radio. Merchie's been zig zagging ever since. No long shots.
But we'll practice with the stadimeter and compare that to sonar fixes, watch our speed setting to see if we've got that accurate and generally not forget to look for planes. I predict we get buzzed by at least three whilst we are very busy concentrating on our target. Don't get tunnel vision! It can get you a severe headache. A short, severe headache....
After we dispatch this guy we'll start all over using my TMOPlot mod, which gives you the plotting scheme of TMO while not changing gameplay one bit. Now friend or foe colors are gone. Ship silhouettes, identification, velocity vectors are gone. All you get, even on radar is a position dot. It's completely up to you to figure out what direction that dot is moving and how fast. It's much more realistic. And we'll go through the entire attack that way, including planes trying to crash the party.
So we'll have two companion videos of the same attack with lots of trial and terror with the stadimeter, pointing out what you can and can't do, a few little tricks that make it more accurate---and remember---we won't be using CapnScurvy's mod to fix all the boo-boos in the game mechanism. I think that although the game boo-boos are different, they have the same effect as the real life boo-boos including misidentification, that the heroes encountered in WWII. Are they the same errors? No. But they ARE errors and that helps the realism a bit. It means you can do everything right and miss.
Should be fun. Just like all my videos, they're real time, no compression, no cuts no matter how long it takes. You will see the pacing and that's more important than a lot of other things even if I do risk boring some people. But if you enjoy the game you should enjoy the videos. Tomorrow we shoot.
Edit: video didn't come out well, I'm still working on it and you'll have to bear with me while I get these sound feeds set up.
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