[Bustoff]

I have been playing the Grey Wolves mod for some a while now and I am quite pleased with it. Everything just feels more realistic. The only thing that seems a little off is the way rough weather is handled.

For example, I spotted a convoy and put myself in a great position right ahead of it. It is April 1943 so I was very careful to submerge long before they could detect me. The weather conditions were perfect: Partly Cloudy, 15 kt winds and light fog. Those are absolutely ideal weather conditions for SHIII. You can charge in at flank speed with your periscope up and you will never be detected. I passed within 1000 meters of a destroyer and he just went happily chugging on by.

I was picking off ships with ease. Now I know that the stock game does not take into account the way rough seas effect torpedo depth keeping so I know that made my situation easier than reality. But shouldnt the escorts be better?

With the notoriously bad weather in the north atlantic a lot more convoys should have been penetrated according to SHIII!

[Raptor]

They might have been, had the u-boat(s) been able to find them in the first place. The ocean is a big place and the view from the conning tower is very lmited.

Also, since the allies were reading much of the Kriegsmarine radio traffic, or at least spotting boats through direction-finding, they were able to re-route convoys that might otherwise have been found. When u-boats stayed silent, sinkings went up; when they used their radios, sinkings went down.

Donitz's unreasonable demands for constant up-dates from his boats was counter-productive. He could have achieved much more by making the bulk of the Kriegsmaring radio traffic one-way; from shore to sea at pre-determined intervals. A boat would have to surface during one of these to receive that day's radio traffic. Even if the allies could read much of it, they still wouldn't know much about where the boats were since they never cracked the Kriegsmarine map grid system.

[ref]

[Keelbuster]

[dize]

just recently i realised this too.

choppy sea, at 15ms, is praticly a shield to almost everything the allies can throw at you, surface vessel wise.
no destroyer can get a decent fix on me. if im detected, i can simply dive away, without using silent run or anything. they will never get more than one run at me.

after reading uboat killer by donald macintyre, i think that its quite well done. the book states how hard it was for the escorts to sail, yet combat an uboat, in very bad weather with high seas.

the prob is, that 15ms should be a weather extreme, but as the weather system works, it seems to be the standart "bad weather mode". i had my recent patrol completed. nov-okt 44 arpoud the british isles, and i had the 15ms, plus various stages of rain and fog, for the whole patrol. not a single notable improvement.

the second prob is that the same general diffcultys, should be applied fo rthe uboat. navigating, keeping depth, sitiuational awareness, collecting a firing solution, or even firing a torpedo straight, should be a hard, to impossible thing. i think it was a. werner, who stated in iron coffins, that a uboat would not risk to attack in very bad weather, since it was useless anyway.

[Sailor Steve]

Rough seas are bad for everyone. As mentioned before, torpedoes have real problems with heavy waves, unless you set them to run deep enough, and in real life that is usually too deep for even magnetics to work. Deck guns are useless, even for a destroyer.

On the other hand, moving waters make sonar and hydrophones less accurate, and for a destroyer to drop depth charges in heavy seas is extremely risky to the crew. When I served we didn't have depth charges any more, but I did spend half of a midwatch emptying bags of shredded documents over the fantail. I would wait by the aft superstructure door until the ship pitched tail-up, then make a dash for the fantail; grip the aft railing while the tail was down, water washing over my knees. When the tail was up again I'd dump the contents of the bag, then hang on again through the next tail-down cycle. Next time up, I'd run for the superstructure again. I went through that five or six times that night, starting at around 01:00. Funny thing is, the weather wasn't THAT bad. No way would they have us do that in really high waves; these probably weren't more than 2 meters high.

You can imagine what it would be like for a depth-charge crew. Or a deck gun crew.

[Dowly]

Again, I dont know how true is the 'Iron Coffins', but in the book most of the attacks they make happen in moderate to rough seas.

And slight OT, as reading the book I noticed that most of the attacks took place surfaced. And they could outrun the destroyers. I´ve tried this in SHIII multiple times with no luck. :nope:

[Heibges]

[Sailor Steve]

To know for sure we would first have to know what each author meant by "moderate to rough seas". Any sea too rough to man the guns or operate effectively on the surface would de facto be "rough seas"; but what was the actual sea state? Iron Coffins has been described as playing fast and loose with the facts. This doesn't mean it's wrong in this case, but how do you tell?

The top speed of any U-boat was 17-19 knots, so there is no way they could ever outrun a 36-knot destroyer. They were, however, faster than a 16-knot Flower class corvette. I'll have to look again, but I'm pretty sure Donald MacIntyre, in U-Boat Killer, said that at least one sub was cornered because the captain didn't know this and submerged when he could have run on the surface and been faster. If the author of Iron Coffins thought he could actually outrun a destroyer, he was wrong.

[Heibges]

[Sailor Steve]

You're probably right. I'm not at home and can't look. I thought I remembered it being Prien or Kretschmer as well, but for the same reasons I didn't want to guess. I'm betting it was Prien, because I do know it was MacIntyre who captured Kretschmer, and I don't think he ever captained a corvette.

I'll know tonight.

[irish1958]

If you think rough weather is too easy, turn off stabilization in the options menu and play at 100% realism.
irish1958

[Dowly]

[Ducimus]

[Keelbuster]