"2030+ Submarine warfare your thoughts on detecting Subs ?" Topic

Hi all, I know this is naval warfare up to 2006 board, but thought this is the best place for input. I will crosspost in the game design area too.

I`m wishing to try and design some rules on near future sub combat,alittle different to the space games out there. My issue is the detecting subs side of things. I want a game where you will use figures of your subs on the table, but first you need to spot them.

My starting idea is keeping it simple with each submarine starting off board and placing a "blip" counter to show a "could be a contact". these blips will move around the board based on 2 speeds in inches and moving in any direction.

Once two blips come into sonar range, rolls are made to see if a sub detects the other sub. If so then the sub figure is based on the table. once you are indeed detected your sub moves and turns based on its stats of course. Submarines now can open fire with weapons and that will show themselves also,so a blip can open fire and turn into a figure too. Always a risk as you become a target now as well.

Once you out of a submarines sonar range you can try and fade away and turn back into a blip again.

Theses are the thoughts i have been having and until i think more of this i love to hear your feelings of this cat and mouse idea…

Big thanks
Alan

Under the roll to detect…
High success---sub speed and direction
Mid----speed or direction revealed
Low---incorrect speed and direction

Also, kick around the idea of an "orders" phase where orders for each sub are put in place and then revealed with both sides "acting"

Autonomous subs. Micro autonomous subs. Robot subs that can sit at the bottom of the ocean for months or years at a time without maintenance and only checking in a long time.

I remember a naval officer telling me about how in the 70's the navy was trying to get whales to report submarines. I don't think it ever had much success, but one can imagine the results if it did.

"US PACIFIC COMMAND, US pacific command, this is whale No. 4369A/221C-F (Flippsy) reporting in."

"Hello Flipsy, this US Pacific Command reading you. Anything to Report?"

"Hello US Pacific command I sighted a Russian sub today coming out of Vladivostok, Komsomol class, heading South East, bearing for the Aleutians."

"Very good Flipsy, er ah… Whale No.4369A/221C-F, Anything else to report about it?

"It was delicious."

Don't forget a separate roll, after detection, to figure out what type of sub they're up against. Of course, you may ignore that, at peril to those on your side, e.g. your own nation, and those of your allies.

Supposedly, sonar mimicking whale and dolphin sounds, so as not to give the game away, when "pinging".

One of the things I was considering for my games are whales, dolphins, krill, fish schools, etc., so you get quite a few false "blips".

Where are we with the whole detection of water displacement / surface wake thing and submarines? Still sci-fi?

The Star Trek rules I'm working on have each squadron of ships begin the game as a 'blip' on sensors, which must be scanned successfully before the actual models replace the blip. Hardly a new idea, of course; I first encountered it in Battlefleet Gothic.

In the future sub warfare rules I also have in development, I assume submarine 'fighters' are the weapon of choice, capable of super-cavitation and moving at frighteningly high speeds, for short distances.

The tricky thing is to get the models onto the table. A miniatures game that sees counters moving about for two or three turns, while the miniatures sit in their cases, wondering why they bothered to come along, is not much fun. Therefore, there must be sound reasons for players wanting to 'convert' their blips into models as soon as possible, but at the same time, a solid rationale for keeping them hidden as blips!

I'm finding it a tricky balancing act. In 'Trek it's pretty easy – blips can't shoot – but in the sub game, what about silently launching torps, creeping them out of the tubes? Isn't THE major rationale for the use of submarines the fact they can attack unseen?

My subs have a Noise and a Sonar rating. The more 'things' a sub does in its turn, the higher its Noise. Noisy subs are easier to hit. Torpedoes do not actually 'move' across the playing area, they are placed on the target, and, depending on if they were launched 'Active' or 'Passive' there is a roll to determine how many turns it will take for them to find their quarry.

Active torps are really noisy, and can be shot down by blue/green spectrum lasers, but passives can attack without provoking a defence reaction.

As a mechanic, it works, although players seem to find it tricky to get their heads around the fact they're tracking time-to-target rather than distance. (The mission of this mechanic is to avoid having masses of torpedo counters / miniatures cluttering the table.) Still not completely happy with the result just yet.

So far, without adjusting the background 'fluff' to make underwater combat a sensor transparent environment (which leans back towards a space game) I don't have a solution I'm entirely happy with. I'll be interested to hear what your own musings on this have led you to, Alan.

- Martin

Hello all and indeed Martin. Good reply dear fellow,and we seem to have good idea of a direction its just finding the best path.

Myself when a blip detects another blip, the better the roll the better the angle when placing the other players sub, roll bad and he`s facing you…"raise the alarm",roll better and you can have him facing away from you "captain we are now behind the target"… When a sub is detected players will have to think do i appear and shoot and be a target myself or hold back waiting for a better chance later. That`s whats holding in my mind at the moment. Speak another day Martin

Well, the next big thing for submarine detection is actually Acoustic Daylight. Instead of using active sonar (ie, noise made by the searching ship), it uses the reflection of ambient sounds already in the ocean.

Good news is that it's stealthy like passive sonar. You can even make images using Acoustic Daylight.

Bad news is that you need hundreds of thousands of hydrophones to get quality images, because each hydrophone is a single pixel.

Run the subs/decoys out as normal, but when they are "detected", place more decoy markers around the sub/decoy. The opponent then has to eliminate decoy markers with more (or better) detection (or can take a chance targetting one in hopes that it is actually the target sub.)

Do just the opposite, Martin.

Every blip is an enemy target, until proved otherwise. That way, you can put lots of extra models on the table.

Put chits underneath all, and only some are real. Labels on the bottom of the subs will work too, e.g. fake and real, for targets.

That'll make your games a lot more satisfying, and terrifying, since you don't know how many, or which of those six enemy subs on the tabletop are real.

We did that in a Falklands game, years ago. Surprising how much that scares/intimidates surface vessel commanders.

Oh, and just because you see the sub at X position on the tabletop doesn't mean that's really where it is, either, if you do find a real one. Used a 12 position clock face for angle from the model, and the sub could be up to X inches from it too, so providing a very wide range that ships, and/or antisub aircraft, and helos with dipping sonars or sonobuoys need to cover to find the sneaky little s.

Perhaps use a 6" or 12" radius from the sub model for placement deviation.

My son eventually found a "real" sub, but still couldn't localize it, despite multiple tries with his dipping sonar.

You can choose to remove fake sub blips, or not, as desired. If using the localization rule mentioned above, keep even the fake ones on the table, AND roll for detections/localization on each and every attempt, to keep your opponent guessing.

"Every blip is an enemy target, until proved otherwise. That way, you can put lots of extra models on the table.

Put chits underneath all, and only some are real. Labels on the bottom of the subs will work too, e.g. fake and real, for targets.

That'll make your games a lot more satisfying, and terrifying, since you don't know how many, or which of those six enemy subs on the tabletop are real."

Mmm, it's a good idea, entirely from a gaming perspective. I did consider this very approach early in development. (in fact, it might have been reading of your Falklands game that inspired me to, Mako.) Commercial realities turned me from it.

The hypothetical purchase:

"This box contains seven scale models of the same class of Subfighter. You will need to paint and decal them all the same, but only one is of the actual Subfighter, and the others are its decoys."

I'm not sure that works as a retail pitch! ;)

Also, in my game I am aiming for players to field squadron-strength forces of between six to twelve subfighters and other craft. Times that by the number of decoys… you can see the issue.

I have wondered about using a deviation template for the placement; the model only represents where the enemy think the sub is. Depending on how quiet that submarine is, it could be X" from the initial placement, at the discretion of its owner. But how to accommodate that as a mechanic? There's a can of worms that it opens regarding weapon ranges, target aspect, etc.

I'd prefer to avoid letting the game devolve into a set of space combat rules with a watery setting, but I do wonder if it might be easier… and a heck of a lot quicker to market, too!

Oh, thanks for the info about Acoustic Daylight, Lion. Well, that could potentially render all this sonar pondering to naught! :D

Yeah, if you can get Acoustic Daylight to work, it does a lot of simplification to your detection problem (or complicates the decoy problem, whichever).

However, there are still things you can do to reduce your detection range, even with today's tech.

The simplest is called an anechoic coating. It's basically thick blocks of sound-dampening materials. Reduces how much noise your hull reflects. This works against all sonars. Reduces passive detection range by reducing internal machinery noise getting through the hull. Reduces active sonar detection range by reducing how much of the sonar signal your hull reflects. Also reduces your acoustic daylight detection range, for the same reason as active sonar.

Large explosions will still put huge numbers of air bubbles into the water, which drowns out active and passive sonar, and produces "fog" to acoustic daylight sensors.

Also, acoustic daylight needs a bajillion sensor elements to make an image, and those are BIG. potentially a meter across, for each element (hydrophone plus the parabolic horn). Means that your shipboard sensors might be acoustic daylight, but your weapon sensors are active and/or passive. So classic decoys will still work against them.

In the future sub warfare rules I also have in development, I assume submarine 'fighters' are the weapon of choice, capable of super-cavitation and moving at frighteningly high speeds, for short distances.

Yep I've thought about this model as well. The old Etranger site for 2300 has/had a good summary of super-cavitation operations. High speed dashes into the operational zones followed by dropping out of the bubble and using a much quieter drive to sneak around. Lots of sitting on the seabed and waiting for a target to come into range for a high speed attack run. And so forth.

-Will

High speed dashes into the operational zones

I'm not sure how well that would work, since supercavitation usually requires a rocket engine to get enough thrust to accomplish.

Tough to keep enough fuel for that to have more than a couple minutes of operation. I mean, the Russian VA-111 Shkvall supercavitating torpedoes only have enough fuel for about 2 minutes. Might be able to extend that to 3 or 4 minutes with better fuels, but I'm not sure of that. And larger ships have exponentially greater drag (and therefore thrust requirements).

If you use supercavitation to arrive on station, I don't think you'd be able to use it to escape or attack, due to a lack of fuel (unless you have the ability to make more rocket fuel in the subfighter… ?).

At supercavitating speeds, you're basically blind and deaf. Even if you were using something like LIDAR to see through the steam bubble, you still run afoul of the uncertain refraction difference between seawater and the steam bubble. Which means that things might not be where your sensors tell you they are! Ask the USS San Francisco how much fun that is. image

I'd honestly expect a subcarrier to haul the fightersubs into position, as a subcarrier could make a sustained 20knot crossing of the ocean while remaining quiet. For example, it's 3022 nautical miles from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, and a sustained 20knot speed would let you travel that in 151 hours (6 days, 7 hours). If you're willing to make more noise, you could make that faster. 121 hours at 25 knots, 86 hours at 30 knots. Rumors have it that the Seawolf-class can actually make 45 knots, which would put the travel time down to 67 hours.

Granted, that's a long time to wait in an emergency. But I'd suggest that your subcarriers would be on deployments much like modern aircraft carriers are, so that when something goes awry in the world, a carrier will already be moving in that direction, as well as being a lot closer than 3000 nautical miles away.