"In Harm's Way" was an ugly experience, "Blue and Gold" (by Mike Mykytyn) was a short ugly experience, so I'll narrate this one.
My three submarines, one Seawolf and two Los Angeles, start at the borders of the Sulu Sea. Their objective: a sub tender and an Ohio of the "Gold" team. Heavy ASW is expected, but I play with autodatalink on and Mike even gives me a clue "Center of the Sulu Sea!"
"This is too easy", I grumble, expecting more challenge from a DB2000 scenario (actually the game was still loading, but you know how it is). I then proceed to creep at 5Kts at periscope depth with all my boats, so to get a better picture of the neighborhood via passive sensors. And, lo and behold, in a few minutes I detect a number of fishing vessels and the tracking radar of an american ASW helo.
This peaceful state of things is shattered a few minutes into the exercise, when a sub skipper of the Gold Team under the influence fires a torpedo for no reason at all. I'm not joking: the Seawolf and one Los Angeles picked up the transient at, I belive, 500 miles or so. After action analysis also showed that it was entirely possible that the Gold sub was off Tasmania or something. Anyway, the Seawolf panics, and she sprints north at 40Kts, in a stunning example of "groupthinking" ("individually we know that the Gold action was inane, but as a crew we think that if the other skipper did it there must be a reason, even if we do not understand what it is") - and so the quietest submarine in the US fleet gives away her position just like that.
The other Los Angeles chooses a more prudent course of actions, and when the torpedo stops running she approaches the launch point at 5Kts, trying to detect the launching boat. Meanwhile, the LA up north had detected only fishing vessels, so her skipper decides to do a blind sprint at 25Kts toward the center of the Sulu Sea. This sprint turns out to be truly blind, in spirit and fact, and the LA is hit and sunk by nobody-will-ever-know-what (it could have been a whale) one hour into the engagement.
In Italy we say "a shared problem is half joy". This wise countryside proverb becomes reality not five minutes later, when the Seawolf slows down at 5Kts and returns at periscope depth to reacquire her bearings. The first (and last) recorded image on her on-board camera is a very cinematic close-up of an ASW helo, and the Seawolf buys the watery grave maybe three seconds later. The crew of the first LA to go down feels a little better.
So, I'm left with a single LA, still closing on the area where the extemporary torpedo came from. She closes, and closes, and closes, and all the way she detects a big nothing in the sub-sea department. Since this is my last submarine, and I need it for hunting the sub tender and possibly the Ohio, I "decide" that the enemy skipper cleared the datum, going away from the launch point. So, I push the boat at 15Kts, and plot a new route towards the center of the "warmest body of water in the Pacific". At this point the enemy skipper, who was still there and waiting exactly for this, fired a second torpedo at me from the pointblankest distance I ever seen in H3. I raised my hand to plot a new course and speed, and that was it, my sub becoming a star-shaped explosion on the display, my hand still in the air.
I'm not sure if Gold Team is partying - the common agreement could be that we tried to cheat them by using "dumb" targets, and they could be still out there looking for us. I mean, NOBODY loses a Seawolf like that.
Lessons learned: "next time do not simply say 'I can pick a FCR radar and classify the contact via the database'! H3 is really cool!, but try to understand the implications of ASW helos flying around"
Bright side: I didn't spoil anything in the scenario, since I never remotely understood what hit me or what was going around my boats, so I can play it again! More to follow. Maybe.
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Originally Posted by Reckall
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