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NATO vs. Soviet Union

Date/Time: 1st March, 1985/ 08:00:00 Zulu
Location: North Atlantic - Barents Sea
Duration: 1 Day
Playable Sides: NATO


USS Bedford is on patrol near the Svalbard Islands and has been repeatedly over flown by Soviet Aircraft including low level passes at main deck level.

Bedford has also had fleeting contacts on sonar which is believed to be an unknown SSK in territorial waters.

Even though Hostilities have not broken out her Captain is hell bent on bringing it to the surface!

Paul Bridge

Author and Scenario Designer


OVERVIEW

The increase in tensions between NATO and the Soviet Union has intensified over the last 2 weeks , this has been more so in the Barents Sea region with various intermittent contacts of submarines along the Norwegian coast.

USS Bedford and a detachment of Orion's based in Banak have been conducting round the clock patrols in the vicinity of Svalbard Islands.

ORDERS & CONDUCT OF OPERATIONS

1. USS Bedford and associated air assets are to conduct aggressive ASW Patrols in their allocated areas.

2. Any Submarine contact is to be forced to the surface if detected in the Svalbard Islands TTW.

3. Units are to only fire in self defense.

4. Soviet MRR Aircraft have been deployed to Greem Bell, Intelligence suggests the SSK is on route to RV with a Submarine Support Ship.

ORDER OF BATTLE

Surface Forces

USS Bedford - DLG
HNoMS Narvik - FFG

Banak Air Base

333 Sqn Det P-3 Orion

THREAT

Surface Forces

Unknown Submarine Support Ship

Sub-Surface

Unknown Submarine

Air

Be-12 Mail MRR


COMMAND & CONTROL

Flagship - USS Bedford

EMCON

Limited Transmission on all sensors

Running it now, I like ASW situations. One small point as the scenario description gives the length as one-day but the game clock says one-month to go.

EDIT
The duration is set correctly to 1-day but the scenario start time is 1985-04-01 rather than 1985-03-01. Easy fix and if I had a dollar for every time I've committed a similar error in scenario set up, I would have more dollars than I have now.

No issues so far, still hunting.

-C

Hi Chris

All fixed and uploaded [:)]

Sweet! I'll download right now!

UPDATE: I just realized i need the Public beta DB. I think it should be stated as such in the OP.


UPDATE 2: Okay so I've just started things. I do have one comment. I think the NATO ASW Patrol zone should be extended a little bit further southward, just beyond Hopen Island (the long thin one south of Svalbard proper) as it seems a little wonky for the ASW Zone to so ridgedly run along one of the southern bits of Svalbard.

ORIGINAL: HalfLifeExpert

Sweet! I'll download right now!

UPDATE: I just realized i need the Public beta DB. I think it should be stated as such in the OP.


UPDATE 2: Okay so I've just started things. I do have one comment. I think the NATO ASW Patrol zone should be extended a little bit further southward, just beyond Hopen Island (the long thin one south of Svalbard proper) as it seems a little wonky for the ASW Zone to so ridgedly run along one of the southern bits of Svalbard.

Noted [:)]

Am well into the scenario now with no issues noted. However I entirely disagree about adding to the Player's patrol zone. Right now the Player has over 110,000 square nautical miles of open ocean for an area of responsibility (AOR) and this after subtracting the land area of the Svalbard Archipelago*. To do this you have two surface ships and effectively one LRMP. It's already a big haystack and adding more hay has to be counter-productive.

There are countless reasons why the patrol zone ends arbitrarily and only a comparatively small area of Norwegian territorial waters is outside of the Player's mandate. Consider that there may be a USN SSBN patrol zone south of Svalbard, the commander on the scene would not necessarily be advised of this but conducting ASW ops near friendly missile boats cannot possibly be a good thing except under particular situations not apparent in the briefings.

So I will loudly vote and often against expanding the Player AOR as it is quite large and complex enough as is.

Just my $0.02 CAD.

-C

* I actually crunched the numbers using the bearing and range tool, trig functions and a calculator. Thanks to Wikipedia for the land area of Svalbard, 61,022 km^2 converted to nm^2 and subtracted from the area of the patrol zone.

Hi Chris
I will be leaving the areas as they are

Very disappointed. I really wanted to try this scenario but am not using the Beta updates and it will not load with the [PC] Update v1.01.11474 Jun 24, 2020 version.
Is there any way you can upload it with the current official database?
Thanks

So I played through this a couple times.

I was attacked by Soviet aircraft with no warning, and discovered that the Pharris is basically helpless against air attack.

I never found the sub or the sub support ship, so I presume that the attack was not based on aggressively shadowing ether. Was this intentional?

I'm suspect of scenarios that have sudden hostilities break out like this, as it seems unplanned to me.

I'll try it again.


Also, are the Allied satellites completely necessary? The ELINT contacts of Soviet radars end up cluttering the map space.



UPDATE: I took another look at this scenario, and wanted to make sure I was reading the coordinates right with the two special messages. Sure enough, the sub and support ship are where they say they are (I used god's eye view in editor mode), and I realized that the sub never seems to actually enter the ASW patrol zone.

Why? Why is the sub so far away when the briefing suggests that the commander of Pharris is much closer to the sub an prepared to force her to surface?

It seems to me that the two vessels are too far apart from the player's vessels.

I must concur with HalfLifeExpert regarding the target sub location and satellites. There is no reason for the Player to leave Norwegian territorial waters since the briefing clearly state that only subs in the TTW are to be tracked and forced to the surface. Sailing Pharris 200+ nm to the north of Soviet Franz Josef Land would take much of the 24-hours allotted and clearly exceed orders.

I found the sub-depot ship using an Orion but it was also too far away to engage within the scenario time limit without a high speed run from Narvik that is the antithesis of ASW operations. I had actually thought that the periscope sighted message was a Red Herring and so plotted it and determined that, as per orders, it could not be the offending Soviet sub.

The satellites and all of those mainland radars are unnecessary distractions which merely add clutter to the map.

No losses and just ammunition expended with three MiGs and a MAIL splashed.

I take the briefings seriously and when they state operate with the TTW, that is precisely what I will do until new orders arrive. Suggest change the briefing and or the locations of the sub and tender. Variable start locations might enhance re-playability.

Nice shout out to The Bedford Incident with Novosibersk as the Soviet sub-tender.

-C

Thanks for the supporting words. I too take briefings very seriously and don't violate them lightly.

Even in this case with the attack aircraft that strike the Pharris and the Narvik, they come in very low, but the briefing states that the Pharris has been buzzed by Soviet aircraft, so I can't take that alone to open fire until it's too late.

I was honestly expecting the sub to appear somewhere east-southeast of Svalbard in the ASW zone, which was why I repeatedly checked and confirmed the two sighting reports, as I was starting to think that the coordinates were written down wrong.

Hi guys all points noted and will update as required

Hi Guys

Scenario updated and new file uploaded with Submarine and support ship moved, replaced USS Pharris with USS Bedford!, expect a surprise if you detect the Boomer !

Does this update also require the Beta database?

Couple of small glitches with the newest version:

- USS Bedford has no missiles or ASROC loaded and her magazines are empty; and

- Banak Air Base also has empty magazines. Is this intentional?

-C

Ok this is weird all platforms have zero in mags and weapons mounts stby for update

Uploaded and updated

Thanks Paul, I've downloaded it and loaded it up. I'm a big fan of The Bedford Incident, so it's awesome to see the vessel in CMO!

It's a great movie with great Actors, used to watch it alot when I was in the RN doing ASW Ops in the GIUK Gap

But there are no nukes in the ASROC launcher!

-C