AAR: Blockade [Spoiler Alert]

Last night, we welcomed another player to the Harpoon3 ANW community. John (a.k.a. OFFascist) is also the roommate of Sharker2003, but I knew that there wasn’t going to be any favourtism shown because of it.

We elected to try Freek Scheper’s Blockade scenario from his 2nd Lebanese War Battleset. It’s made with the most popular database with the ANW crowd, the PlayersDB. It’s a 3-sided scenario with John acting as UNIFiL, Sharker as the Israelis, and myself as Hezbollah. Their orders were to maintain a blockade around Lebanon. My job was to break it.

From the very start, John, who is a real life Coastie, said that the scenario was just what you would see in the real world – a radar screen Full of unknown contacts (and to think that Freek only put in 1% of the ships normally found in the area!).

I was trying to sneak an old Foxtrot-class sub past the Israelis and their UNIFiL “puppets”. The Fox was cruising in at 9kts when the sonar watch reported a vessel doing 31kts. It was soon identified as the Hyane missile boat and she was in a hurry to get somewhere. Fortunately, she appeared to run right over my diesel boat.

Insh’allah.

The torpedo room readied a salvo of 53-65 Wake-Homing torpedos for the infidels. Closer, and closer, she came. Finally, it was time for one quick peek with the periscope before unleashing hell. Everything was perfect. Two torpedoes were fired from less than 2nm. I couldn’t check the database to see if Hyane had any functional sonar or ASW weapons (since the ANW 3.8.0 patch can still crash if you hit the DB button), but I didn’t think she did. So I was hoping that he wouldn’t detect my attack nor be able to respond. It turned out to be a fool’s hope.

I got my response soon enough in the form of a torpedo in the water! And then, another! Damn. I immediately went to flank speed in hopes of putting as much distance between myself and the weapons. Unfortunately, diesel submarines are not known for their speed. A white noise decoy was ejected and it distracted the first torpedo. However, the second one exploded in the engine room and sent the Fox to the bottom. Both my torpedoes appeared to miss. My miserly allocation of only two weapons was certainly coming back to haunt me.

Now, all I could hope for was to run my surviving smugglers through the blockade and avoid detection. I tried to mask their identities by only moving at 15kts amongst the swarms of fishing vessels. As one vessel neared the Lebanese coast, a torpedo was detected! (I don’t know how, since the ship had no sonar). Well, Insh’allah. God will provide.

The Batroun immediately engaged her jet engines. The cigarette boat had been bought from American compatriots in Florida and disguised as a common fishing boat. This was her first time to really open up the throttles. She was able to do 33kts and the torpedoes were only running 35kts – she might survive the ordeal. Minutes later, the torpedo contact was lost. Hopefully, it had run out of fuel. However, the masquerade was over. Now, only a safe and speedy arrival in Lebanon would give me victory so I made a bee-line for port.

At this point, we had to call it a night. Hopefully, we will get the opportunity to finish off this fun scenario this weekend. Thanks for the use of the server and good time was had by all sides involved.