Bay 12 Games Forum

It will compliment my big peepee nicely.

It wouldn't be absolute.  It's possible, likely even that the subs won't be picked up by the ordinary radars, but they'll get the occasional spot that way.

On what? Periscope? A small ass straw? Even if they had radar detecting small objects like this it'd be just sunk in all the false positives.

Same with air-to-surface radar, a sub won't be picked up nearly as easily, particularly in bad weather, but they'll get some spots.  The sub will have to surface, at least partially, to line up attacks, allowing for the eyeball to spot a few submarines, and some torpedos to be dodged.

Well yes, submarine is surfaced, now it dives and now it's up to luck for you to find where it's going specifically.

Basic depth charges are also very easy to make, you can modify an airplane general purpose bomb into one easily, and then just kick it over the side.  It'll be almost completely ineffective, but technically that's a depth charge.

Sure, you still need to know where the submarine is, and even then there are ways of getting around that.

In general, I'd expect them to pick up a few kills with air-to-surface missiles, when the luck factors line up, but the fact they have radar on the missiles themselves makes it much easier for the sub to differentiate between there being enemy radars in the area, and when someone's actually shooting at them, and get underwater safely.  Particularly because of the long range of missiles in general in this theater.. if the target isn't there by the time the missile arrives, it won't get hit.

Actually the one thing I could see them hitting is with ARM, but then the same problem as with ARM in general arises - just turn off the radar and move away lol.

Air ASW will be heavily hampered by the all-missile loadouts, as a conventional bomb or even torpedo can act as a depth charge much easier than an air to sea missile, (even if this weren't the case, an ad-hoc one would be only slightly more useful than one on a ship), and the great speed and low loiter time for jet aircraft will make it basically impossible for planes to hunt after submerged subs.. even 15 or 20 minutes underwater would mean the plane would have to start over from square one.  The restricted aspects caused by the high speed and missile combat would also help things, as I'd expect the plane to not get a proper aspect and have to take another pass for a second shot, by which time the sub would have plenty of time to submerge.

They have floatplanes and helicopter, both things relatively useful at hunting submarines with proper equipment.

So yeah, I'd expect them to get a few kills, from the occasional missile hit and a few from gunfire, but they would indeed be more or less incapable of sinking a submerged sub, and wouldn't really be able to take out too many even in transit on the surface.  If they stripped the guns from their smaller ships, which they might do or have done, I'd expect things to be really brutal.. a submarine that sneaks into point-blank range in a formation could sink a gun-less missile destroyer with torpedos, without taking a scratch.  I'd also have them hunt for merchants, with ASMs the big threat I doubt the merchants are armed with deck guns, rendering them only so much meat for the subs, and possibly reducing their resource flow for a turn.  No better way to keep a push going than to raise the expense rate of some enemy designs.

I don't rule out few kills but they'd be more like extremly unlucky situations for us rather than the norm, and the submarine is... cheap, isin't it?
The interesting part is that the submarine design can be made much better in multiple ways - make homing torpedoes, make cruise missile submarines, etc - each of them bringing something new to the table and not being really hard countered by even supposed hard counters (they make sonar - we now have long range torpedo that just homes on their shit so we don't have to even get anywhere close, same with missiles), and so on.

Yes.

Big battery bank are a different beast than smaller ones, and to be honest, you don't really need them in missiles and other shit, since it pretty much doesn't stop, alternators or other means of power generation powered by the thing itself are fine.

(1) UFN-SS-45 "Archer III": Es
(1) UFN-SS-45 "Boot":
(1) UFN-SS-45 "Rán": lightforger
(1) 'Leto' Naval Countermeasure Launcher: taricus
(3) UFN-SS-45 "Boot" (v2): Cnidaros, Happerry, Kot

I'd still enjoy at least a basic autocannon on top. Historically those were used to harass lighter boats too.

UFN-SS-45 "Boot"

Thanks to our engineers dedicated effort, the battery piles no longer leak. The parascope is replaced with a proper persicope. An Garlic turret (or just a single autocannon if there's no space, also obviously without IR guidance thing) is added on top behind the conning tower, covered by a sheet of tarp fitted with the conning tower so it doesn't stick out and catch water.
Additionally, a "ping" generator is added, along with the passive sonar from the Whalesong.  Engineers argue that it cant be that hard - after all, the Britsh built active sonar thirty years ago, and they haven't even figured out guided missile tech yet.

Fix the submarine and name it something different.

Sure, you can, but radar might not give them much. They'd want sonobuoys (or rather dipping sonar, since I doubt they could pull off remote transfer of sonar readouts), which IIRC they have no sonar at all, and THEN they need specific weaponry to deal with submarines, which they also don't have. Submarines can be seen by low flying aircraft if they're at shallow depths, but that's more an issue of WW1 than WW2.
Helicopters are relatively effective at ASW, but they'd have to have helicopters on alert 24/7 on ships, sonobuoys and some form of anti-submarine weaponry, and tbh, a depth charge wouldn't do a helicopter much good, they'd probably need a homing torpedo, which isin't out of question considering what shit happens in this game, but still I think they'd need to spend more to deal with a succesful submarine design.