The Royal Navy's Revenge

I re-ran the last couple of turns of the 'Operation Goldfish' scenario as a paper exercise this afternoon, taking on board the inability of the Riga class frigate, KRI Jos Soedarso, to use her torpedoes against HMS Alliance. It went like this...

Turn 12

The end of Turn 12 was exactly the same, apart from HMS Alliance only firing four torpedoes, as I thought it was a bit cheeky for her to use both her bow and stern tubes for a head on attack. I crossed off the last two die rolls from the previous game, which was fine as they both missed. I decided to leave the hit result and damage the same as before, with the frigate suffering heavy damage, light damage and a fire, compounded by another light damage due to the fire spreading. So far, so good (unless you were on the receiving end of course).

Turn 13

In the next turn, the Indonesian commander won the initiative so moved first, steaming directly ahead to close the range to less than 12cm, so that he could use the MBU-600 anti-submarine rockets. However, the commander of HMS Alliance wasn't having any of that, so decided to stop dead in the water, effectively making the range a good 15cm, no problem for the torpedoes but useless for a rocket launcher salvo. The submarine also switched to active sonar, to give her Mk8 torpedoes a better chance of hitting the target, which was now clearly detected and accurately pinpointed.

In the Attack Phase the frigate was a sitting duck, so HMS Alliance launched all four torpedoes and achieved a D10 roll of 3, 4, 5 and 8, which meant three hits with +2 added for the active sonar fix. I rolled the damage dice for these hits and got 1, 8, 3 and 8. This was modified with +4 for the torpedo damage rating, + 4 for existing damage to the frigate, but only -1 for the warship's construction, giving a final result of 8, 15, 10 and 15. As the damage table only goes up to 14, you can work out the end result for yourself but there was a very, very large BANG and nothing much left floating around afterwards.

This meant that the submarine not only escaped but that there would have been no survivors to reveal that an SBS team had been landed ashore. A double win for the Silent Service.

What does this all mean?

So...in the light of this scenario having a revised outcome, I also looked back at the previous scenarios to see what would have changed. It was clear that HMS Oberon would also not have been sunk or even scratched in the 'Ill Met By Moonlight' scenario, but the losses to the Indonesians would still have occurred. To see how that changed the overall campaign, I did a running tally of the losses to both sides and it now looks like this:

Royal Navy

HMS Blackpool FF - Sunk (gunfire / torpedo)

HMS Falmouth FF - Heavy Damage (air attack)

Indonesian Navy

KRI Kakiali FF - Sunk (torpedo)

KRI Ngurah Rai FF - Sunk (torpedo)

KRI Jos Soedarso FF - Sunk (torpedo)

KRI Lambung Mankurat FF - Heavy Damage (torpedo)

MiG-17 Fresco Fighter Bomber x 2 - Shot Down (AA)

Il-28 Beagle Light Bomber x 1 - Shot Down (AA)

....in other words, the Royal Navy is most definitely not losing the campaign and is in fact giving the Indonesian Navy a right thrashing.