Sensuikan — Guadalcanal | Episode 3 | August 1942 | WW2 Solo Japanese Submarine Game
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Transcript
Hi everybody, I'm Zillah Blitz, and welcome back to more adventures with Sensuikan from Compass Games. It's August 1942, we're ready to head out on our third patrol. Let's get started. So, here we are, summer of 1942, and we are all set to go out to sea on our third patrol. Our campaign to date has been successful. We've had two patrols and two successes. We've sunk five ships for a total of 20,600 tons of Allied shipping. So, we're off to a good start, and because our first patrol counted as a double success when we were at Pearl Harbor, we our engineer has been able to upgrade to keen judgment, which gives us an advantage when exceeding test depth the first time in a patrol. We'll talk about that where how that works when we get there. Let's uh here's our crew, by the way.
Everything is the same, and I will say that our scout plane pilots, Gadget and and fun gunner, their receive have done in admirably well because every time we launch the scout plane, there's a one in six chance we're not going to get it back, but their excellent navigation and aerial navigation has allowed us to recover them every single time. So, hopefully that keeps up as we advance into this third patrol now. So, here is a look at the Pacific theater. We're working out of the Yokosuka base. We have events in the Indian Ocean, which would be a regular patrol if we were assigned there. And then Guadalcanal campaign is in full swing at this point in the war. Very likely we could get sent to either of these two places. If we are sent to Guadalcanal, it would be a picket line mission, which is means we can't engage with regular surface merchant shipping. We can only go after warships. So, that would be an interesting patrol, but we'll see where we get. Before we do that, let's take a look at our submarine because we have some changes from our previous build-outs. So, here's a look at the Iron Shark. The biggest change between our last patrol and this one is that we no longer have to take the old torpedoes. So, we have 17 type 95 oxygen torpedoes, which are better. We've gotten rid of all of those bad steam torpedoes that give away our location with the bubbles when we fire them. So, that is a good thing. Now, before we jump in and see where we're assigned on patrol, I did want to mention three things from the previous mission. There were three little errors two errors we made and one tactical decision that was probably poor. When I got flooding in the previous mission, I
I rolled the flooding check after the detection check, but you roll it at the end of each round. So, I should have rolled to see if we have additional flooding before I checked to see if we escaped detection. It's a little procedure. It could matter in some situations, but it didn't in this case. The second thing is when we have one when we got one hull damage for taking exceeding test depth, the what you're supposed to do is if you roll two dice and if you roll less than your current hull damage, you sink. Well, there's no way you can roll less than a one. However, you still have to roll in that case and if you roll snake eyes, you take an additional point of damage and then you roll again, which could conceivably with some extraordinarily bad luck have led to more hull damage for us. That will matter, I think, going forward. It wouldn't have mattered in our previous mission cuz we were able to get out of the situation pretty quickly.
But, the third thing to mention is when we engaged the unescorted tanker after we had already damaged it, we had five what five torpedoes left. I used torpedoes. I probably should have used the deck gun ammo first because the torpedoes are more valuable and we only had five left and you can do that in whichever order you like. And so, it wasn't a necessarily a gameplay error, but it was probably a tactical error to burn through our valuable torpedoes before if we before we checked to see if we could have sunk the the tanker the wounded tanker with the deck gun ammo. And with that being said, let's go in now and see where we are assigned to patrol here. It's July August 1942. And so, here's our chart. Lots of possibilities for the Indian Ocean and Guadalcanal. And indeed, we get Guadalcanal. This will be very interesting because well, let's let's get out to sea here. We're going to have to go through some transit zones first as we're up here and then we're going to go to on station. We'll have a full patrol on station cuz Guadalcanal is not as far away as Australia and Pearl Harbor was. So, let's get started here.
We'll jump right in and see if we can make it through this transit zone first without any incident. The only thing that would be bad for us would be a two. We don't want that. We want something three or greater. Get an 11. So, we make it through the transit zone with no problems whatsoever. And now we are on station at Guadalcanal. And if indeed we pull over the the little patrol, the task here for this. It says four. We don't have a submarine, so we ignore that, but we have picket. And picket makes it basically means that we are part of a submarine picket line looking to engage enemy warships. In terms of game play, all that means is we cannot engage with merchant shipping. We can only engage with warships. And a successful mission for us is not necessarily sinking a warship, but it is to at least engage with one. So, with that in in mind, let's take a look here at the New Guinea Guadalcanal zone
and there's a good number of warship possibilities here. However, there's a lot of blank spaces. So, we do have a lot of time on station here. We can launch our scout plane here, too, to help us hunt even more. So, let's check for the first one. Be nice to get off to a good start and get a warship right away. A six. Nothing. That doesn't help us at all. Let's now go launch our scout plane. So, Russ Seabs and Gadget are up in the air. We need to roll Avoid a two or 12 to have to roll on the mishap table. We get an eight. So, they are up in the air looking for warships for us to engage with. So, that means we're going to get our second search on this on station box looking for a warship again. We get a seven, nothing but empty sea. So, our first, whatever this would be, maybe a week or so on station ends uneventfully and we go now to our second stage of on station hoping that the fates will get the I mean, a warship's going to be tough. So,
this could be very interesting, but what we get here, get a seven, which is nothing again. Oh, sorry, one thing I forgot to do. We need to check to see if our scout plane are successfully recovered or whether they are lost. A one or a two and they are lost, but because we have aerial navigation, we are lost only on a a one cuz we're going to add one to the die roll. Three. So, we did get our scout plane back. So, that's good. So, I did things a little bit out of order there. But now, let's launch it again for a second search on this station here. Need to avoid Oh, that's not good. Okay, so we had problem here on launch. So, when you roll a two or 12 when you're launching your uh scout plane, you have to roll on the mishap and malfunction table. Let's take a look at that.
So, the mishap and malfunction table here, um it is create some problems. We could have inoperable radio, engine misses, lots of bad things happen. So, we don't want any of these events to happen here. Woo, we get a four, which just misses an assembly problem, but
the mishap or malfunction is uh not eventful and we are up in the air. So, we can do our next search. And with that in mind, let's again search the Guadalcanal waters. See if we get something. A three. Two ships and an escort. This would have been a juicy target indeed, but because we're in the picket line, I believe we cannot engage with this. Let me just double-check if the escort makes me means that we can engage with it. No, submarine is not permitted to engage with merchant shipping, so I assume that means that the merchant shipping plus the escort means we can't do it. Two ships plus an escort, so not helpful there. Let's see now if we can recover our scout plane. We need a two or greater. Woo.
That was a dicey mission for our scout plane. They almost had an a mishap on takeoff, and we almost lost them on the recovery, but they are back. But that is our second roll on station. Okay, let's go to our third roll here. Hoping the face will change here a little bit. Three, again, two ships and an escort, but we can't engage them cuz we're in the picket line. Let's send our scout plane up in the air again. We're up on a four. They are up successfully, and we can do another search. Get a five. Five is an R. If we had radar, something good happens. Reroll if radar We reroll if radar is present and working, but it is not. So, that means we have nothing happen there. Now, let's see if we can get our scout plane back.
Get a four. They are back. Okay. And with that, this rather empty patrol will slide on to our next station. Holding Hoping that our luck here turns. It's It's not looking good for us for finding things so far. Here we go. Let's see what else we can see as we search the ocean. That's a five. A five is an R with nothing again. So,
we're not seeing a lot of action here in Guadalcanal. Let's launch our scout plane again. Try to put it up in the air. We get an eight, so that is up in the air, and now we can search again. Our patrol here is running low. We kind of Oh, I thought we were going to get an 11. Look at that. We are right between the two, between the nine and the 10, but that doesn't do us any good. We must have just missed some warships slipping by in the night. Well, let's hopefully see if we can retrieve our E14Y1. WE NEED TO OH, THAT'S NOT GOOD. SO, our E14Y1, Russ Seabs and Gadget are lost at sea
and we do not recover them. Their fate is unknown. Are they POWs or
[snorts]
are they just lost to the Pacific Ocean? A moment of silence for Russ Seabs and Gadget. We will need a new pilot. Well, I actually will come back to that at the end. Um so, that's not only is that not good because we lose our pilot and gunner, we also go to our last station without our scout plane, which means that we only have one final search here. This would be a rather anti-climactic finale here to this mini-series if we don't find something now. One shot. Here we go. Seven. Empty ocean. What a dismal patrol this has been. That's And we're going to transit back now home. All this looking and searching Uh let's hopefully make it through the transit. We need anything except a two.
We get an eight. And we are back home. A whole lot of empty ocean and the sad loss of our scout plane pilot and gunner as well. Well, that brings the Iron Shark back to port in Yokosuka after a first failure of patrol. If we sum up our career now, we've had uh three patrols, two successes, two strong successes, but this one was a whole lot of nothing and we lost our scout plane. And with it you have that. That brings us actually I'm I mentioned the beginning I'm going to do three patrols. It's a rather It's a very anticlimactic finale to this, but I hope you've enjoyed the series. I'm not holding out the impossibility of coming back and making a occasional continuance in this series, but I do have There's a lot of games I want to play and make videos for. So, at this point I'm going to call this one at least temporarily wrapped up, but we may see the Iron Shark come back in the future. If we did, the patrols are 2 months, so that's August and September. It would be October of 1942 we would need to refit.
So, our next patrol would be November of 1942 and Guadalcanal would still be in play actually at that point as would be the Indian Ocean. But, thank you so much for watching the series. Sorry that Sorry it ended on such a a bland note, but I mean that's what happens in these games, right? Sometimes you just nothing happens. And sometimes everything happens. So, it's you just never quite know. Thanks for watching. I look forward to your comments down below.