Sub Skipper's Bag of Tricks

That would be very nice. I could try but I doubt I have any of the knowledge to put togethe such a thing, I mean I know basics?

Originally Posted by Falkirion

Can someone knock together a DD evasion tutorial? I know its kind of hit and miss evading but a general idea on how to handle a sub and some evasion tactics might help some first timers.

[Batch]

Hey Sailors !

Anyone know what became of Legion's Noob Guide for casual gamers ? I am new to Silent Hunter 4 and have found the manual totally inadequate.

Regards,

Batch

[Diopos]

Originally Posted by Batch

Hey Sailors !

Anyone know what became of Legion's Noob Guide for casual gamers ? I am new to Silent Hunter 4 and have found the manual totally inadequate.

Regards,

Batch

Link

.

[Batch]

Diopos,

Thanks a Million !!!

Batch

[Rockin Robbins]

I received a PM from taukarrie that was so good the I think it needs its own thread. As that thread sinks in the sunset, I think it deserves a place in the Sub Skipper's Bag of Tricks thread:

your first O'Kane method tutrial that is. first off, very well done. a lot of my most recent ciritcal questions were answered by watching it just once. one question though...

when estimating your lead angle you, as a rule of thumb, go for 15 degrees. but you also said that it doesnt really matter what that number is. my question is why would you choose 15 degrees and why does that not matter?

it seems to me that the lead angle estimate is crucial for this method and to regard it so lightly confuses me.

thanks for your time.

OK, I'm going to do this without reference to my video, so I may be correcting my own error here. Here is where language becomes very important and I believe that it's important that we be careful to use the same terminology as the military.

Why? Because knowing that lives are at stake, they take great pains in using carefully defined terms that can't be mistaken for each other. They are extremely disciplined in their use of terminology. They don't tolerate sloppiness too well. In this case the sloppiness may be mine, so let me set things straight.

Taukarrie, I think the problem comes with the definition of "lead angle." The lead angle is the difference between the shoot bearing or aiming bearing, along which you sight your periscope at the target, and the bearing the torpedo travels to impact the target you're looking at. Of course, if the TDC just sent the torpedo up the aiming bearing, by the time the torpedo got there the target would be gone! But you've told the TDC that the target is on a course at right angles to your own, traveling at 8 knots. From that the TDC does its analog calculation mumbo-jumbo and says, well, I have to send the torpedo 10º (or whatever lead angle) ahead of the aiming bearing.

You see, Dick O'Kane came about because of my stupid mistake. I was using Gutted's great chart, which he had just adapted for fleet boats. It looks like this:


OK, so you pick the target speed out of the first column, travel across the row to the column reflecting the torpedo speed and there's your lead angle. We'll take a target traveling left to right at 8 knots. For a fast torpedo your lead angle is 9º. You subtract 9 from 360, where you want the boom to occur, and sight your periscope up the 351 bearing. So your lead angle is 9º and your aiming bearing is 351º. When the target crosses the wire, you push the button, the torpedo zips up the zero bearing and kaboom!

So I did it wrong when I first tried it. I looked across the 8 knot line and picked the wrong column. That gave me the 14½º lead angle for the slow torpedo. I aimed up the 345½º bearing and pushed the button. The torpedo shot up the zero bearing just as it was supposed to but there was no boom. The target got there after the torpedo did. I was a bit miffed.

Then I had an idea. If I could screw that up, so could everyone else. And that chart only had columns for fast and slow Mark 14s. How about Mark 18s and Cuties? Heck, that's two more columns to make twice as many mistakes! The chart is great but we are not. How can we fix that?

It just so happens we have a built-in chart on board that automatically knows what torpedo and what torpedo speed we have selected. It NEVER makes a mistake. It's called the TDC. When we're using the chart, we tell the TDC where we want the torpedo to go and WE pick the lead angle. Let's do it backwards!

Instead, let the stupid people pick the aiming bearing only! The TDC can calculate the lead angle for us and send the torpedo up any bearing it needs to to make a boom. In the Dick O'Kane bearing we pick an arbitrary aiming bearing with a goal of getting somewhere close to a boom at the zero bearing. That's where the rules of thumb come from: under 15 knots, pick 350 or 10 as the aiming bearing, knowing that the lead angle is going to be somewhere around 10º. If you have a faster target than that pick 20º and aim up the 340 or 20 bearings, depending on which direction the target is coming from.

Now this aiming bearing means nothing at all to the solution! Let me explain. Our target is coming left to right at 8 knots. I'm going to choose my 10º offset and aim up the 350º bearing. The TDC is set for 8 knots, AoB 90º-the 10º correction for an aiming bearing of 350º. But that 10º isn't the lead angle! It is the correction for the aiming bearing. We're letting the TDC set the lead angle. And if you check Gutted's chart you can see that the TDC does its magic and calculates the lead angle as 9º. So it adds 9º to the aiming bearing of 350º and sends the torpedo up the 359º bearing. BOOM!

So aiming bearing: where you point your scope. THAT's what we arbitrarily pick by rule of thumb in the Dick O'Kane method! And yes, we can actually pick any aiming bearing we wish. The TDC will hit the target regardless.

torpedo track bearing: the path of your torpedo. That is calculated by the TDC much more precisely that we can with a chart!
lead angle: the angle between those two bearings

Clear as mud?

[I'm goin' down]

Hypo 1:

It's Thanksgiving. A 450 foot wood duck, quacking wildly, is traveling from left to right at 8 kts, range 2,000 yds., bearing 270 degrees and closing. (It is lost and not flying very fast.) You put your shotgun away because it does not have enough fire power to bring down waterfowl of such immense size, and forget that it is Thanksgiving. You decide to take it out with a torpedo! You set the scope to 350 degrees, set Aob to to 80 degrees starboard (i.e. the duck is showing you its starboard feathers), and set range to 2,000 yards. Even though the PK is not activated, the TDC, which never sleeps, calculates a lead angle of 9 degrees. If you fire when the duck crosses the wire (i.e. at 350 degrees), the duck and torpedoes should rondeveous at 359 degrees. (See gutted's chart posted by Robbins.)

Hypo 2:

Same duck as hypo 1, but you spilled your coffee, and did not fire when it crossed the wire at 350 degrees. You still want to take a shot at it, because a portion of the duck is better than not eating on Thanksgiving, and your kids are hungry. Swivel your periscope to a bearing of 10 degrees. Reset Aob to 100 degrees starboard, as the duck is flying away from you and still showing its starboard feathers. Click range. The TDC will recalcuate the lead angle, which will be approximately 9 degrees. (The TDC will calcuate the precise lead angle, which could be slightly more or less than 9 degrees.) Fire when the duck crosses the wire (i.e. 10 degrees) and the torpedo should hit the duck on its starboard side at a bearing of approximately 19 degrees [wood duck crosses wire and torpedo fired at a bearing of 10 degrees + 9 degree lead angle = torpedo and wood duck rondeveous at a bearing of approximately 19 degrees], as the TDC, even though the PK is not activated, calculated a lead angle of approximately 9 degrees. Dinner is served!

The key is that the TDC will calculate the lead angle since it operates even if the PK (Position Keeper) is not activated.

Download gutted's remarkable Solution Solver program, and once you are familiar with it, you can input the variables of these hypotheticals and confirm Robbins' instruction. Don't forget to reset range when switching from a fast to a slow torpedo or vice-versa, because that will impact the TDC's calculation of the lead angle. And in the early war, set your torpedeos to run fairly shallow, as the Navy manufactured them to run too deep and did not tell anybody.
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[ronjonthobi]

i hope the make this into a fps like silent h8unter 5 just without all the bugs and crap

[Son44]

Been a long time since i played the game or checked the forum. Thanks for the awesome collections of tutorials (It's gonna help be remove the rust from my tactics xD)

[Gerald]

@Son44. Welcome to SubSim!

[cdrsubron7]

It seems like most of the links for the manual TDC videos and tutorials are dead. Anyone know where I can download or access them?

Thanks for your help in advance.

[Able Brown]

It seems like most of the links for the manual TDC videos and tutorials are dead. Anyone know where I can download or access them?

Here are some of my favorites. None on are on easy and none are with mods:

Silent Hunter 4 Manual Targeting Noob version



SH4 Double Attack



400 M Torpedo Attack



Radar Approach:


I couldn't find a "best of" playlist I liked.

[Rockin Robbins]

A lot of those links are mine. I'll have to check them out and see which ones work. Good think I've kept local copies of all of them. The Internet is a beastly unreliable place to store stuff. Sure wish Subsim had a way to store the videos, but they're strictly limited. Filefront has been totally reworked in a way that isn't very friendly to what we do any more.

I'll look around and see what works.

[cdrsubron7]

Thanks, Guys.

[19Herr_Rapp86]

I've noticed that most of the tactics I have learned from SH3GWX can be carried over to SH4TMO. The map has similar overlay tools for manual plotting and targeting techniques.(Thank you Paul "Wazoo" Wasserman!) And of course you can't forget your trusty whiz wheel

[19Herr_Rapp86]

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