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Catfish · 05-13-08, 06:20 AM

Hello Onelifecrisis,
thanks again for all this - we are really having a ball with OLCE, and certainly GWX2.1

. Hope you are not embarrassed, just wish you will get on with the real life thing, and wish you the very best.

Apart from that i have a question

:
Please don't take that as an attack or something, it is just some (hopefully) fruitful critic - since "we" all (or better: you) are trying to get SH3 as "real" as possible (if you can talk of that from an armchair's fighting position) i thought of the day and night visibility. I recently had a look into some of my books again ("Sharks and little fish", "Das Boot", Brennecke's "Hunters, hunted", and some others.

You wrote (and i experienced that) that you turned down night visibility range of surface ships to reflect real life, and i like it very much - this is a real advance in quality for SH3, which gives the U-boats back their #1 advantage of surface attacks at night.
Having read some passages in those books again (which i really should translate into English sooner or later) my perception is that night visibility is still too good for the surface ships compared to the reports. Apart from radar the "Mk 1 eyeball" did not change during the war.
Even after radar the surface ship crews were blind on a distance of less that 1000 meters, so even if radar picked up the boat at night at a range of, say, 8000 meters by radar, and the DE would go for this position, it would not detect the boat below that 1000 m range.
There are numerous reports by U-boat crews that stated destroyers and merchants were almost colliding with them, or running close on parallel courses without the surface ship's crews even noticing the U-boat. As well U-boats were known to run with the convoy surfaced, and would not be detected: neither by physical visibility, nor by radar because of the convoy's ship hulls blocking radar waves, and the general bad detection of a low silhouette conning tower running between bigger contacts.
A boat within a convoy was almost secure at night unless spotted by a merchant by mistake (b.t.w. not one U-boat was ever hit by a merchant's gun throughout the war - certainly not at night). In my opinion this is still much too difficult in GWX2.1 and OLCE. As a real commander said about the original SH3: "I would have had no chance if things were as they are in SH3. They get me everytime".
Question is whether one could tone down this visibility a bit further without ruining the other settings of general visibility ?

Thanks a lot and greetings,
Catfish

05-13-08, 06:20 AM	#605
Catfish Dipped Squirrel Operative Join Date: Sep 2001 Location: ..where the ocean meets the sky Posts: 16,897 Downloads: 38 Uploads: 0	Hello Onelifecrisis, thanks again for all this - we are really having a ball with OLCE, and certainly GWX2.1 . Hope you are not embarrassed, just wish you will get on with the real life thing, and wish you the very best. Apart from that i have a question : Please don't take that as an attack or something, it is just some (hopefully) fruitful critic - since "we" all (or better: you) are trying to get SH3 as "real" as possible (if you can talk of that from an armchair's fighting position) i thought of the day and night visibility. I recently had a look into some of my books again ("Sharks and little fish", "Das Boot", Brennecke's "Hunters, hunted", and some others. You wrote (and i experienced that) that you turned down night visibility range of surface ships to reflect real life, and i like it very much - this is a real advance in quality for SH3, which gives the U-boats back their #1 advantage of surface attacks at night. Having read some passages in those books again (which i really should translate into English sooner or later) my perception is that night visibility is still too good for the surface ships compared to the reports. Apart from radar the "Mk 1 eyeball" did not change during the war. Even after radar the surface ship crews were blind on a distance of less that 1000 meters, so even if radar picked up the boat at night at a range of, say, 8000 meters by radar, and the DE would go for this position, it would not detect the boat below that 1000 m range. There are numerous reports by U-boat crews that stated destroyers and merchants were almost colliding with them, or running close on parallel courses without the surface ship's crews even noticing the U-boat. As well U-boats were known to run with the convoy surfaced, and would not be detected: neither by physical visibility, nor by radar because of the convoy's ship hulls blocking radar waves, and the general bad detection of a low silhouette conning tower running between bigger contacts. A boat within a convoy was almost secure at night unless spotted by a merchant by mistake (b.t.w. not one U-boat was ever hit by a merchant's gun throughout the war - certainly not at night). In my opinion this is still much too difficult in GWX2.1 and OLCE. As a real commander said about the original SH3: "I would have had no chance if things were as they are in SH3. They get me everytime". Question is whether one could tone down this visibility a bit further without ruining the other settings of general visibility ? Thanks a lot and greetings, Catfish