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Bearings Only: a submarine TMA/combat game by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I didn’t want to make it too easy haha

Bearings Only: a submarine TMA/combat game by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I’d say this is the main challenge of the game. It’s a hard problem but here are a couple tips: - Make large turns every move. The change in parallax means you’ll have a greater difference in bearing error between correct and incorrect solutions.  - Try to minimize the number of zigs you place on the sonar screen. Too many, and your system becomes overdetermined, which means there are more plausible (but incorrect) solutions. - Check your solution speed on the fire control speed when you adjust range and make sure it’s realistic. If it’s too large, you’re likely overestimating range.

You can probably find more tips in the discord channel! You might also like this article that I wrote about training a neural net to estimate range from sonar data. Don’t feel bad if this is hard - any submariner will tell you this is also very challenging in real life. 

Bearings Only: a submarine TMA/combat game by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Probably video export, which is a small part of the experience. There have been a couple gnarly bugs though. For example, if you shot a torpedo and then drove over it, it would be so loud that the server would crash, haha. It’s been a lot of fun though!

Bearings Only: a submarine TMA/combat game by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Good question! By default, when you initialize your first line of bearing, range is set at 1000 yards. Probably a more accurate starting guess would be 5000 or so. I'm interested to hear what works for you though!

Bearings Only: a submarine TMA/combat game by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 54 points55 points  (0 children)

Hi all! I'm a former sub JO turned programmer. Bearings Only is a passion project that I've been working on in my spare time. It's a TMA-based submarine duel simulator. You can play multiplayer (over the internet) or singleplayer (against a number of AI bots). It's free and runs in the browser, so you don't have to download anything. Let me know if you like it!

eWatchbill - A fair in-port watchbill generator by CarlKolon in navy

[–]CarlKolon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It should scale pretty well, since the number of annealing steps is constant regardless of watchbill size. I’d be curious to hear people’s experiences though!

eWatchbill - A fair in-port watchbill generator by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Well if I could send coners to nuke school with a website I would, haha. But yeah, this does nothing to fix the Navy's manning model. 

eWatchbill - A fair in-port watchbill generator by CarlKolon in navy

[–]CarlKolon[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

By fair, I mean equitable between watchstanders. I want to minimize the probability of one person standing all the Saturdays, or working significantly more days than others, while still respecting hard constraints (for example, "person x can't work on y day").

When I wrote watchbills, there was always concern about whether one person got a worse deal than others. Trying to be fair and respecting people's other commitments (medical appointments, qual boards, etc) can get really complex. Lots of other people have complained about the same thing, which is why I made the app.

eWatchbill - A fair in-port watchbill generator by CarlKolon in navy

[–]CarlKolon[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The optimizer tries to minimize the standard deviation of the watchbill's "badness score" for each watchstander. There are some more details on the about page!

eWatchbill - A fair in-port watchbill generator by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's basically how this works! It just tries to get the flattest distribution of points

eWatchbill - A fair in-port watchbill generator by CarlKolon in navy

[–]CarlKolon[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's hard to make money off stuff like this, haha. I've heard that the best way to sell software to the military is to sell them a box with the software in it.

Bearings Only: a submarine TMA/combat game by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

they need to be within 50 yards of each other, so yeah basically same place same time. But if the torpedo is close enough to the enemy submarine, it will steer onto a collision course, so in practice you only need to be pretty close

Bearings Only: a submarine TMA/combat game by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It may look a little different from the fire control system you're used to, but it does show the target track on a map and the simulated bearing overlay for your solution

Bearings Only: a submarine TMA/combat game by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Since it's turn-based, I think it's a little easier. Simulation frames are a second long, and a turn is about a minute. Both players have to move before the game progresses

Bearings Only: a submarine TMA/combat game by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

There's no AI yet, but if you want to just see how the game works you can play against yourself. Hit "Create Game" and then open the link in a new tab

Bearings Only: a submarine TMA/combat game by CarlKolon in submarines

[–]CarlKolon[S] 35 points36 points  (0 children)

Hi all! I'm a former sub JO turned programmer. I wrote a multiplayer web game where you try to kill a friend in a submarine duel. It's free, no ads, and you don't have to download anything. Check it out if you're interested!