Sinking Ships/Anti-Surface-Warfare discussion (with DCS World 2.5 examples)

Chicomms in Anchorage you say… :thinking:

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Hangar200:

If you’d be interested I can set up your scenario in CMANO, which would open up the whole ASW area as well. Depending on how much you’d like to get into it, it could be everything from a blank slate of the US CSG and Russian SAG with their initial locations, up to having the missions setup and ready for the player to hit start.

I think it might make for an interesting comparison to DCS, and I for one think it would just be a great scenario in general!

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We should set up a think tank of maritime combat simulation :stuck_out_tongue:

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I don’t have a lot to contribute besides reading way to much Harold Coyle as a young man, but I’m totally game!

For those of you playing at home…the DF-21 is reportedly an Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile. More than that I am not permitted to say (yes, I know that’s getting old…but I don’t want to go to prison) and I use the word reportedly because I cannot confirm or deny or comment on any of the information presented in these this link:

Wiki DF-21 Mod 5

However, this link, a Popular Mechanics article of all things, includes quotes from Admiral Pat Walsh, the Commander of the Pacific Fleet. At the time I was his N2 / his intel officer…so for once I can comment - his views are 100% accurate. :sunglasses:

So DCS needs to model a Taiwan Strait theater and add a bunch of PRC stuff. I think the overall area coverage would be about right. It would be a blast…pardon the pun.

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Given the F/A-18 we’re going to have at the end of it’s development, I’d say a Taiwan Straights map would be the most fitting, challenging scenario available. I’m going to go fight the urge to re-read that RAND Co paper now.

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The Popular Mechanics article provides a scenario that is more fun to read.

Problem is, we’re missing some PLAAF aircraft to round out the mix. There’s the lo-fi J-11 but that doesn’t really mean much. I don’t think the MiG-21 can easily pass for a current J-7 variant, then there’s also the J-10…

All I know is there sure were a lot of high level officers talking about going to a Hooters to sing the blues. So serious, they classified it!

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Since we do not have Harpoons yet for the DCS F/A-18C, I figured I need to try the Buccaneer-way of attacking Soviet warships:

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Now do it while he’s moving :smiley:

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Give me an air-sea radar and I will try it :slight_smile:

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Approaching from the different side of the spectrum. I’ve been tooling around off and on with a script to spawn roughly one communist crap ton of enemy bombers, and have them attack a surface group (with accompanying recon for flair). Dusted it off to make sure it still works tonight, here’s a TACVIEW.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oWx21SLWyOkfxF65v30aWn5bGb1fEZ1/view?usp=sharing

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That was some awesome flying–keeping the fall line perfectly centered during the pull up–the SAM evasion (I assume you were also popping chaff)–perfectly bracketing the Krivak with the MK-84s in a nice tight group.

Yeah…that’s a bit more difficult. :thinking: I think the best tactic would be to come in from the stern at an angle about 20º off the ship’s heading (like bombing a bridge). Probably need to open up the interval between bombs a bit.

OK…well…I’ve worked on this pretty much all weekend and while it should be done…it isn’t.

I obviously don’t know enough about how DCS works and specifically how to get the advances AI features working. I’ve got a 3 axis attack plan except one axis pretty much refuses to launch all of its Harpoons. The HARM shooter seem to want to fly well into the SA-N-6 threat envelope before taking a shot…and then they only shoot about ½ of what’s on their wings. I assume they need a SAM signal which makes sense…but the SAMs are shooting and the FA-18 HARM shooters seem to be taking their time. Several have been shot down with a full load of HARMs still on their wings.

The Russian ship choices are woefully limited - no Kashin, Udaloy or Sovermennnyy.

The real “unreal” issue for me is SAMs intercepting HARM on a regular basis…that just doesn’t happen…the “H” in HARM stands for High speed…as in Mach 2+…and they have a tiny radar cross section when compared to a Harpoon…which the same SAMs tend to miss on what is an unlikely percentage…considering that their FC radar is still working. Pls I saw a HARM that did get through–hit directly at the TOP DOME…and a few minutes later, the Moskva was pumping out SA-N-6’s…those virtual damage control and repair parties must be awesome.

Bottom Line: I’ll work it a bit more and learn some more, however, I’m not are this kind of thing can realistically be simulated in DCS…which, to be far is a flight simulator with emphasis on the land battle.

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The AI are VERY finnicky if left to their own devices. From what I can divine, they’re attempting to shoot what they think is enough to damage the ship and no more, and once those are shot down they repeat until out of missiles. It’s very dumb.

I get around this by deleting the anti-ship -a task (which is a background task to find and sink enemy ships). I then give them a Perform Task → Attack Unit task at the waypoint, and set it up like this.

Set the Group and Unit (you can do this by clicking on the unit in the map, or using the drop downs. Set what weapon you want. Set how many you want fired at the unit (you can give multiple copies of this task for different units on the same WP)

The secret sauce here is the MAX ATTACK QTY. Setting that to one convinces the AI they get ONE opportunity to fire whatever they’re going to fire, and there’s none of this “fire some and come back later” crap. Setting it up like this my missile shooters conform to my expectations.

The AI also don’t like shooting ARMs at ships. To fix the limited shooting, I will give them an orbit waypoint outside the MEZ, and an enroute task that either looks for specific units or the group. Once the air defense ships start engaging they’ll generally roll into action (can’t fix them charging into the MEZ or ■■■■ poor targeting priorities).

This gets back at what I was saying earlier. I was shocked that they actually simulate discrete azimuths for the FCR, but there still is no connection between the ship’s model of the FCR antenna (and damage model), and the actual virtual representation of that radar.

I also am totally unconvinced this is an unfixable problem. They’ve been quietly but consistently tweaking how emitters are modelled with relation to ARMs on ground radars for the past two years. They’ve been drastically tweaking what options are available to naval units for the past two months. If they want to, this is an entirely solveable problem, they just need to put the effort into it.

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I suspect it comes down to where and what they’re prioritizing right now. Ships are probably fairly low on the list, and the Hornet really isn’t a heavy hitter for anti-ship operations, even with Harpoon. Anyone know if the Skipper is planned for the Hornet?

ETA: While looking around, I found that the Rockeye was actually used against a frigate before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_frigate_Sahand

Interesting to take into account for damage modeling. 3 Harpoon hits, a pair of Rockeye’s, and 2 Skippers (ie 1,000lb bombs). She was still afloat until the fire reached her magazines. If she had the capability to flood her magazines, possibly she might not have sunk at all. Certainly a mission and mobility kill, but even a small (1500 tons loaded) ship is surprisingly hard to sink.

For the scenario designer, it would probably make sense to link a successful shipping attack with a percentage of damage rather than an absolute sinking. I do know some damage modeling is done on certain ships because some weapons will cease firing after a certain amount of damage. It would make a fairly good explanation for why the Tarantul can be sank with a single GBU-16 to the midsection, as it is one third the tonnage of the Sahad.

I feel like I posted that as the first response of this topic :smile:

Rockeye is an effective weapon for rapidly complicating your enemies damage control situation. It doesn’t poke too big a hole, but it does wreck things on the super structure, set fires, and murderize crew members.

Magic Eightball says no, but we are getting Walleye which is way cooler anyhow.

image

This is the story of everything that has been built ever. I would argue the Hornet is as heavy a hitter as any naval attacker there has been in the last fifty years. More importantly you have two modules that are built around aircraft designed to varying degrees to sink ships (Hornet, Viggen), and a third on the way that was designed to protect ships (F-14), if we’re gonna get it, it’d be some time in the next year or two.

Memory read error. Abort/Retry/Fail? :brain:

(Yeah, I forgot!)

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