I let 4 TBs advance until they were head on with Lyena, at a distance of 8000m to starboard; this is the constellation shown in the screenshot below (the saved game uploaded starts here). The western and northern Russian divisions are the slow 18/19kn TBs which run away in fear. I first thought they would screen Lyena, that's why the second TB division run wide north and came too late for the decision. Well, that's what news are: arranged and censored, but never the whole truth :whist:.
Then I let the TBs close in by turning to port for about 20°, opened fire at 5000m and kept firing most of the time. I suppose this weakened the defensive considerably, because I received hardly any fire during the final approach. Sometimes I was even able to start fires on board of Lyena before the torpedo attack, one time a lucky hit at 5000m slowed down Lyena by 1kn from the beginning.
At about 1500m ahead of Lyena and 45° to starboard I turned the TBs for the final attack. Lyena started to turn away, but the TBs could keep their relative position due to their superior speed. So it ended with Lyeana heading NE and the TB leader abeam and parallel at 600-700m, in a almost perfect launch position. This situation can be seen in the video.
For the torpedo scene I restarted a saved game several times. Because there are no replays, every attempt will end different. It almost drove me crazy:
- Take 1: mouse pointer visible :argh:
- Take 2: all torpedos were duds :curse:
- Take 3: pressed Pause key too late :argh::argh:
- Take 4: Firefox reported the end of a download :curse::curse:
- Take 5: HURRAY, and no duds at all now :coolban:
But it was repeatable: the TBs sunk the raider without ever being damaged. They remained fit for the later hunt of the northern Russian TB division.
One advantage of the many restarts: I know now that about 50% of the torpedos are duds, and (oh dear :freak:, I wish I had the recording started then) one time the first torpedo hit really blew up Lyena. A huge explosion, and then she started to capsize immediately. I watched stunned, eyes wide open, how she turned over still on full speed, and completely forgot to record. On the bottom was a large dark marking, as if it was ripped off.
The capture was done with a free version of
Fraps. This versions allows only for limited resolutions, so the quality could be better. It also adds a watermark on the top, but I cut it away together with the ingame menu, status line and other elements of the GUI. For that I used AviSynth (processing of the intro has also been done with AviSynth). Final assembly was done with an old version 3 of PowerDirector which once came with a graphic card.
I'm think now the best approach for a movie would be to take i.e. the Tsushima scenario (lot of ships to select as actors), start it with both players as humans, and arrange the ships selected for the action. Without a replay a video will rarely be an exact description of what happened, it would be more practical to think about a story, write down a script and arrange everything in best Hollywood style.
). But the pursuit continued, and finally the hunter group detected a unknown vessel 150sm SE of Ominato.
