kaleun in distress

[Bosje]

Dear fellow kaleuns,

I am in dire straits, ambushed battleship nelson in narvik 13th april, got spotted but still went ahead with the attack. got rammed and depthcharged, massive damage, leaking, flooding, sank like a stone.

a scene pretty much exactly like the one from Das Boot ensued:

sank to the bottom and got stuck there at 181 meters (type VIIB, hull is holding together)
planes set on dive and engines stop, sit tight on the bottom while repairing. after about 15 minutes i repaired it all and got all the flooding out. Destroyers above very angry but they are not hurting me yet. blow ballast to get some ground clearance, then as the boat starts to rise, put some speed in her and order to surface

I thought that would see my boat rise a bit and from there i could get her leveled out at maybe 130 meters or so to start the cat and mouse game.

but...

she sank right down again!

so now I am stuck on the floor with little compressed air left. i have no damage, leaking or flooding whatsoever except that my hull integrity probably took a big plunge, but I cant see the exact % as it's GWX.

any ideas on how i can get my boat back up?

for now i'll just stick on the bottom to see if the DDs get tired but if they leave, I still need to come up.

[bigboywooly]

Do you still have water onboard ?
Even though flooding stopped you can still see water in some compartments which will weigh down the boat till pumped out

Any damage to any major systems ?

[Bosje]

all systems fully functional and not a drop of water in the boat

[Bosje]

i'm absolutely sure there is no damage or water shown on the F7 screen, but she still acts like she has a private pool party in the forecastle. does 3 knots at best and sinks a meter every couple seconds when i try to get her running

less than half of my compressed air left so i need to know the options before i blow it all. literally

edit: wait i'll show you

bottomside


topside (i think i count 8 mad tin cans but i dont think their depthcharges can reach my depth so i have about a day to come up with a solution, lol)

[bigboywooly]

:hmm:
Odd

Well you can try putting motors in reverse if the bow is down and heavy and set depth to PD without blowing ballast
MAY pull her up that way
Stern first
Have done it before
You may need to blow tanks in the end though if no go

Trouble is if you still have those DDs up top do you want to surface right now

After seeing that pic I would sit tight in silent running
Let them bugger off first before attempting to surface
World of hurt waiting up there

[GoldenRivet]

sit tight, when you are sure there are no enemy boats about, order a 'surface the boat' with the "S" Key, when clear of the sea floor order ahead flank and blow ballast... all of it.

If the boat appears the be surfacing stern first, order back emergency. this might help.

your only options are to blow all ballast, get the planes set for an up angle and get as much momentum as you can.

good luck

Edit: learn the following lesson from this... No target is too big to let go of. never sacrifice the boat and crew chasing a "white whale"... it takes the SH3 kaleuns a lot of deaths to learn this lesson.... in real life however you only get one shot.

[Phaedrus]

Yikes!

I am reading this thread with a particular interest, because I am on my first patrol in a VIIC crossing through AM 22 heading to Narvik on April 4.

(My previous boat, an IXC, finally met it's end on patrol 13, May 1944 to a HK group south of Iceland.... I'm on to GWX career two.)

Perhaps I will think twice about taking on the task force.

Thats quite a situation you've got there.


The only thing I can think of is sit tight until the Co2 is about to give out.
(but will still enough left to make an underwater run if you have to)
Hopefully they will have moved on by then. If not... I guess its blow ballast, run slow and silent until you start to drop again, and then kick the engines up to keep you off the bottom and hope for the best.

[Bosje]

the destroyers pissed off just now, they got bored after giving me some pretty screenshots

I did it, blew all ballast and gradually increased speed while planes are on rise

it worked, i just surfaced. here is the odd thing though: when i order flank ahead the engines stop. full speed is no problem but she wont do flank...

thats probably why i dropped back down, failed to notice the engine not going to flank what with all the stuff going on around me.

a nice (nasty) surprise from the damage model? engines so screwed up by damage they dont function properly anymore?

edit: pheadrus, take on the taskforce, its fun
i sank all 5 destroyers in the warburton group on the 9th/10th
this screenshot is the escort of the battleship on the 13th, i'm going back in there

[GoldenRivet]

Has ahead flank worked before this attack?

are you using SH3 commander?

If i were you i would make the best possible speed for home waters

[Bosje]

yeah the boat was fine before, except she had a tough time getting a good speed in the wild seas. hmmm...

i have malfunctions enabled on SH3 but i never got any message saying the engines are in any way screwed up. that a normal thing to happen?

i do know that after the attack, speed is down to 1/3 of the usual on all the different speeds, and flank doesnt work at all.

possibly a malfunction which i am not told about but which means my engines are bad this entire patrol? possible some collateral damage from the attack? all compartments are fully functional but she drives like a rowing boat

[Stealth Hunter]

Could very likely have been a malfunction. Crew might not have reported it due to inexperience.

Anyway, glad you got back to the surface! I've had some close calls like that before. Had my VIIC sink to 230 meters, and I thought I was dead. Massive depth charging had destroyed my radio and blown a huge hole in the forward crew quarters area. Water was flooding into the torpedo room, forward crew quarters, and the radio room (along with a bit of flooding in the control room). We sank quite quickly, and when the depth meter went to an extreme, I was certain I was doomed. At the last minute, however, I heard a thud and we stopped falling, although we took a bit of damage upon hitting the sea floor around Tunisia.

[GoldenRivet]

in my experience the crew WONT report malfunctions or sabotage... as this is not even modeled in the stock game thus the AI does not know it is a condition requiring a report.

If you order ahead flank and nothing happens, thats your only way of knowing... if you didnt use ahead flank in the whole patrol until that point... well there you go.

[Bosje]

Well I did engage and destroy the warburton-lee group, I cant specifically remember but i really think i used flank speed at some point or other. anyway, its a challenging thing to be met by malfunctions like this. my boat seemed slow before the destroyer runs but afterwards she was even slower, if that makes sense

oh and i just want to share this:

the taskforce returned, i was trying to get into position but i was too far away. i watched all those destroyers sail by on the horizon

but wait... where was the Nelson?

turns out she must have engine trouble as well, perhaps from that 1 torpedo i got under her keel before all the trouble started

sonar contact way behind the escorts, got in position in time to fire my last 2 torpedoes from 1500 meters

boom, dead, done

now limping back to base, gonna take a while but the navigator says we can make it, we still have half of our fuel left.

thanks for all the help, glad to still be alive

[Platapus]

Wow, these types of "adventures" really make the game exciting.

Sitting on the bottom, just barely holding on, willing the destroyers to leave you alone just this once, fixing all the damage but realizing that you have one chance only to make it to the surface.

Man I love this game!

Glad you got out of it. We build them good in Germany eh Hienny

[Bosje]

amen to that!

hats off to the GWX team
btw i love that wolf in the zeppelin, lol (unless thats a historically accurate sniffer dog in there, lol)