I was inspired by the recent discussions on the Sea Power topic about Dangerous Waters being the best P-3 sim out there, 3 bucks on sale, and I also recalled feeling thrilled at our brave frog’s AAR ten years ago.
The ProtonDB compatibility rating was the final push I needed so I have, almost 20 years after its release, finally bought and installed Dangerous Waters.
I have sent the manual to my phone, binged it over the weekend and clumsily ordered my P-3 around in that same 1-star mission.
I am not promising to write an article, but if this sim clicks, it should result in a Steam Deck control profile tailor-made for P-3C ops in Dangerous Waters.
Now I have a question, and I have a feeling many more will follow.
As a P-3 TACCO, how do I know at which depth a sub I am hunting is lurking? Or how to choose a profile for the Torpedo?
All my buoys are hot, deep and shallow alike, and I haven’t been able to get a MAD hit.
Be more patient, fly away and accurately overfly the track to try to get a MAD hit? Is that it?
Thanks for reading this far, I hope you will join me in this thread
It’s been over a decade since I played DW, but I seem to recall you have to assume the sub is wherever the SB that last heard it is and set the torp for that.
If it was deep last, you shoot deep. Shallow, shoot shallow. Good chance it will change depth at that point to switch layers for protection, but if you shoot where it isn’t what are the odds it will move there?
I never relied on MAD because while it gave you a precise location for a split second, unlike the USS Reliant you don’t have aft-firing torpedoes, and by the time you come around and can fire at that spot it could switch depths anyway. Subs may not be able to move far in a minute, but they can change depth pretty fast.
If you want to be sure, pull a Russia and fire one at each layer and hope it dodges away from one into the path of another.
That makes sense. I’ll have to man the acoustics station more and rely less on the lines on the map.
I share your observation about MAD. I hope it’s more useful in a hovering MH-60 than at 200 knots. Though I will need the precision, with the rate at which I’m currently slinging torpedos.
How much should I be worried about torpedos locking onto each other instead of the sub?
In real life, I have no idea if this is a concern. Torpedoes are small and fast while subs are massive and not nearly as fast, so you’d think they wouldn’t track something going that fast with such a small return.
That said, how “smart” torpedoes really are is something I have no clue about.
In DW, though, I can’t recall it ever really happening. As long as you don’t drop two at the same, space them out by at least a few seconds, I would think it would be ok. But I never learned as much about naval weaponry as SAMs and AAMs.
So far I’ve just been using the “mouse” (right touchpad) a LOT but I already bound a button to “Ctrl” to enable zooming in and out on the map display and I’ll surely dive more into the controls at some point.
I only spent one day (long commute) playing it.
Found a sub 3x, sunk 0.
This is a LOT of fun though, and a perfect game when travelling. Easy to pause, time flies, and it still runs good enough at TDP set to 3W, lasting more than 6 hours.
IIRC MAD only works at fairly shallow depths of around 200 feet for so, so if you get a MAD hit you know they’re shallow. If no MAD hits, then at least deeper than that. If your buoys are active in all depth ranges take the mid point of their depth spread and use that I think it was around 400 feet.
Use your buoys to triangulate the subs position, use some more to figure out his heading and speed. Then drop a fish square in his baffles from close range. MAD is great if you’ve got a quiet target that environmentally is forced to be shallow, it gets you an instant “there he is” target reference. If you know the rough heading they’re sailing, make a MAD run bow on to them, with the fish set to run directly on their heading (IE it’ll make a 180 degree turn to follow the sub) with your finger on the drop button. Be as low and slow as you can to get the torpedo right on their tail.
The MAD boom on the Seahawk requires 60 knots I believe to keep it from dragging in the water. So slighty better then zooming along at 200, but it’s not like the dipping sonar. Speaking of that’s your money maker. Get a good target localization, dip the sonar, go active, and drop a fish on that target. It’s not 100% lethal, but it’s dang close.
I don’t think they do that in DW, or at least I don’t recall ever seeing it.
I finally hit my first submarine! Once I got over my fear of manning the TACCO station with zero reading and dialed in a reasonable runout bearing, I got a hit.
Lesson learned: autocrew is pretty useless except for sonar station when you are not in a hurry and have less than 4 sonobuoys in the water.
OK it was also in the North Sea so it was fairly simple as there is no depth to hide in. Much easier than those deep trenches around Japan
Yes, autocrew can fly/sail and they can do a semi decent job of detecting (sometimes they found things I didn’t), but I always took over for the actual weapons.
Is the only way to dial a depth into a torpedo to create a track at that depth and assign it to the track?
Every torpedo parameter except bearing is greyed out and not editable for me (both in P-3 and MH-60).
Am I correct in assuming that there are no keybinds for dumping sonobuoys? You have to either click through the expanding menu in the toolbar or click on the screens in weapons control (TACCO/ATO) right? I’d love to have a keybind for these.
Been a while, but off the top of my head you are correct. The only things you can program into the MK46 and MK50 are search type and run out bearing if you’re dropping blind.
You mean a keybind to deploy them? Off the top of my head no there’s not.
