Cold Waters Tactics: How to Avoid Retaliation When Attacking Fleet or Convoy

Welcome to Cold Waters Tactics w/ DotMOD. I am Captain Chang. 

This briefing is primarily for the NATO and allied navies, i.e. the Blue Team. For those on the Red Team, some of these will not apply to you.  

A submarine's natural environment is deep in the ocean, barely moving, ready to ambush the enemy. It is inevitable that sometimes, our prey shoots back. Now how can we protect ourselves from that? 

Now any one want to answer the question? Yes, you in the back. 

"Shoot them first."  Good sentiment, if your ROE allow it. In some scenarios, it is a perfectly acceptable solution, like SEAL insertion. But not always. 

You may have seen this diagram before:

The Survivability Onion, layers of detection and stuff...

Obviously, you have a mission to accomplish, so "don't be there" is probably not an option. 

But you can avoid being identified acquired, or engaged, by utilizing your offensive assets, so when enemies retaliate, they are doing so blindly. 

Let's assume that you are taking on a convoy, and you have to take out the freighters in the middle. What can you do to maximize the effectiveness of your attack? 

Here is where I introduce you to a buzzword: pre-vasion. It's a portmanteau of pre- and evasion. Basically, we are evading before the enemy even fire, so they have no idea where to shoot at. 

There are three phases to pre-vasion: 

1) early detection of your prey (and you being undetected), 

2) determine engagement range and angle

3) execute the attack 

Phase 1: Early detection of target, and not be counter-detected

This may sound terribly obvious, but a lot of players forgot about the tips given previously about campaign map movement, and as a result, they immediately alerted the escorts. Go into the encounter as slow as possible.  

Once in, deploy your towed array, and ID everything. Then you can form a plan of attack.  

Phase 2: Determine the engagement range and angle

To understand how to attack a convoy, you need to understand how the escorts react as per SOP:

1) the freighters to turn away from the torpedo at best speed 

2) half of the escorts will charge toward the torpedo and ping beyond it, while the other half stay with the freighters

3) the hunters shoot a torpedo or two toward your torpedo

This leads to two observations:  (NOTE: wire-guided torpedoes with good range is assumed)

a) the closer the torpedo activates to the enemy ships, the less time they have to react. 

This is not that useful unless you are able launch the torpedoes under a thermal layer so they aren't detected until you activate them close to the enemy ship. 

b) don't be "behind" your own torpedo when the enemy shoots toward the torpedo (assuming they can't detect you directly). 

This is the key concept behind pre-vasion. You need to get away from your "launch bearing" as soon as possible. 

If you are using a wireless torpedo, your job is simple: turn "broadside" to the target, shoot, and keep going (at a highest speed without being detected). 

If you are using a wired torpedo, you have more options... You can fire a torpedo "behind" you (4 or 5 o'clock, or 7 or 8 o'clock), have it travel a bit (a few km or kyards) then turn toward the intercept point. This "bent" torpedo trajectory is called the "dogleg". 

Phase 3: Execute the attack

Don't be caught in the blood lust. Yoru objective are the convoy itself. Everything else is just bonus tonnage for a possible medal. The targets have more tonnage anyway. You only need to kill escorts if they are impeding your attack. 

Conclusion 

This goes in conjunction with Torpedo Survival 101, which you should also read.