Quote:
Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat
The standard RN DC in September 1939 could reach 500 feet. Yes, technically a U-Boat could have gone underneath, but in the early days, U-Boat commanders rarely took their boat as deep as they could go since no one knew how deep they could really go. By the time it became standard practice to go "deep", the RN had DCs that could reach them.
The issue in any subsim is whether you want to put the player in a similar situation to skippers at the time or whether you should be able to use hindsight to avoid enemy weapons, always a tricky balancing act.
Again revisiting U-Boat damage is already on the roadmap so we will see what comes out of it.
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That's the benefit of "soaping" charges, no-one at all knows exactly how far they'll delay before exploding, other than it's deeper than the nominal maximum. It means u-boat commanders can no longer "know" for certain that they're beyond the effective range of DC's. In any case, I suspect that the current undetectable range of u-boats to asdic is actually defined by the excessive period between losing the asdic signal, and the dc's reaching that depth. Anything that varies the predictive abilities of "the escort can't see as we're 2501m away from it" or "they can't hit us because we're 5m deeper than they can hear us on hydrophones" HAS to make for a better game. The problem of "predictable sensor/weapon ranges" is also a disagreeable side-effect of the AI rather then Human operated escorts. A human operator can pretend not to have seen the u-boat or turn in an unexpected fashion, greatly reducing the u-boats "computation" that he's safe from detection at a given range, or even that he's been detected at all....