Quote:
Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins
End around should NEVER be done submerged. Neither should patrolling during the daytime. The first principle of combat is that your batteries must always be fully charged, ready for a long combat.
So your end around must be done surfaced, at a range of at least six miles from the enemy. If your batteries are not fully charged during the end around you will lose at least a knot of speed, and that can spell the difference between getting a favorable position in front of the enemy and waving as they sail by. And you should get back to the target track out of sight of the enemy: at least six miles in front of them. If you have your tactics right, you're in that position so that they won't run over top of you until after sunset.
Then you have all night to decimate the convoy. Don't get greedy. Don't let the escorts pin you down. YOU are forcing them to play your game. NEVER play theirs. Hit and run all night.
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Hello Rockin Robbins,
of course i always did the end around technique surfaced, unless i wanted to catch a single merchant ship that was running away.
When the convoy approached me i tried to position my submarine accordingly, so i was a smaller target for the enemy sonar just as written in the TMO 2.5 manual. Thanks to that, i was able to start my attack being undetected by escort ships.
When the escort started dropping depth charges on me i dived to a secure depth and waited there on engine off and run silent mode. Most of the time i received no damage at all. I deployed decoys when available to distract the escort. I waited few hours submerged till sunset to be sure that i will be safe when i surface. Usually i sunk 1 or 2 merchant ships from every convoy that i intercepted starting from late 1943. Once i sunk 3 ships from 8. One time i came across an unguarded (?) 8 ship convoy from which i sank 6 (!) ships, because i run out of torpedoes in forward torpedo room and those 2 remaining ships were heading to enemy port through shallow water. I tried to avoid intercepting convoys in shallow waters.
In total i sunk ca. 200 000 tons in my RSRDC career that lasted from 16 June 1942 to 15 August 1945. However, in the RSRDC You will have less ships to encounter than in the stock game. For example: a SH4 Let's Play Youtuber that played stock SH4, sunk about 1 000 000 tons (!) from 7th December 1941 to the end of the Pacific war.