Dangerous Waters - To Kill a Kilo - Part II

This is a continuation of my previous post. A battle between my Los Angeles III class submarine against two Iranian Kilo class diesel submarines.

Quick recap: I located one of the Kilo submarines and fired two Mk 48s at him. A loud explosion was heard. But a few minutes later, I was pinged from the same direction of my target. That was enough to make me lose my marbles and two additional ADCAPs just in the direction of the ping.

Although I love the ADCAPs, they give away my bearing for every enemy sonar that is paying attention. So, I get out of my firing position with a trail of countermeasures.

And I change course, at flank speed away from the ping. Just in case there is an enemy torpedo coming my way.

Anxiously waiting for my countermeasures to be reloaded, an explosion in the bearing of the ping is heard. That must be a Kilo.

At this point of the scenario, I didn't know if I destroyed one or two of the Iranian Kilos. Contact Sierra04 was 14 minutes old (I lost track of it) and I could not get it back into the sonar.  Caution was still on order. Note torpedo 0017, still in the water, seemingly not tracking anything.

So I set course for contact S01, hoping for the miracle that the oiler was still afloat.

But contact S01was actually a fishing boat.

So I stayed on station for a few more hours, but there was no Kilo to be found. It turned out that I destroyed both Iranian Kilos. I failed to protect the merchant ship, though.

So, why the mysterious ping from the same direction of the first torpedo explosion?

After watching at the in-game replay file, I noticed that the two Iranian submarines were very close to each other.

The two Iranian Kilos (red icons) preying on the oil tanker.

That's why when I destroyed one enemy submarine, the other one pinged me from almost the same bearing. Indeed, if one pays close attention to the screenshot of the tonals I was getting earlier in the scenario, two over-imposed profiles can be guessed.

In real life, two twin submarines of the same class would generate different frequencies. This is due to ad hoc repairs, patched up hulls, shafts, etc. I don't know if Dangerous Waters models those factors. If it does, I would be completely freaked up at the level of detail this simulation has. Other possibility, no less amazing, would be that the game actually models sound transmission with a high level of detail and the superimposed tonals are due to distance-dependent sound distortion by the water. Or maybe is just design for effect ... Who knows? All I can tell is that I will remember this gaming session for a long time.

Cheers,