JapLance

Hi sid,

I just played one of your missions, the Benghasi convoy one .

After receiving the message re-routing my interception point and acting accordingly, I got an hydrophone contact to the North of my position early in the morning. After some surface maneuvering my lookouts spot two destroyers coming right to my position. Dive! dive! dive!.

Fortunately, they seem to be useless as ASW units, but that forced me down too far away from the convoy. Maneuvering under the thermal layer I finally get closer to the convoy eluding a lot of escorts... Periscope depth.

I see some of the convoy merchants, but far away, almost at the limit of the range of my torpedoes. As the escorts are all around, no chance of surfacing and look for a new position ahead of the convoy, so I decide to shoot a long-distance 4 torpedo spread (I'm using the U-class instead of the T-Class).

These British torpedoes with no gyro-angle are a PITA, so I'm using Auto-targeting and fire when the TDT shows a 0º gyroangle shot (well, more or less from 2º to 358º). Incredibly, after a while my crew and I hear 4 impacts out of 4 torpedoes!. I had never had such a rate with this British system!. I check the Log a bit later and see that I have been credited with a 8000t tanker (not the ship I had targeted, but very good anyway).

Down again and leave the area without any interference from the escorts. When no sound contacts are around, I surface to recharge batteries and compressed air. Later in the day another contact with another convoy. Lots of almost blind escorts (DD's and armed trawlers) but the same thing again: forced to go down, I have to shoot from a long distance, two torpedoes this time. Both miss their mark. At one particular moment, when I went to periscope depth to check the merchants position, I found myself less than 300 yards from a stopped Italian destroyer!. Still they didn't see or hear me.

With only two torpedoes left (U-class has only 4+4), I set sail for the original interception point. Fog gives me a surprise and an enemy DD apears only about 4000 yards away from me shooting its guns. Crash dive! The U-class really dives fast, and the enemy ships must be very low-level crews because the shots never hit me. Again they never knew where I was once underwater, so I left again the area. I decided to return to Malta and on the way back, another contact takes me to waste the last two torpedoes on a slow two ship convoy with two destroyers as escort. Finally reach La Valetta, but the game won't let me dock, so I finish the mission.

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I enjoyed it all a lot, but I have a couple of things to point out: the first is that the convoys were a tad too big. I don't know how many ships were there in them, but I noticed more than 15 contacts through hydrophones in the first one. That seems way too big for a Med Italian convoy.

Another one would be that in the interception area after engaging the convoy, I had too many contacts with enemy forces, including another big convoy. Too many ships at the same time in the same area, I think. Maybe you could tone down the % chances so not all the ship groups always spawn.

And then I guess that most escorts were of poor quality or their sensors don't work. I never heard any pings, which may be something real as the Italians probably didn't have anything similar to ASDIC (at least in 1940), but their hydrophones should work in some way. They never seemed to have any idea about where I was. Could someone with the right knowledge check the NDD_Soldati ASW equipment?.