Slow, Medium, and Fast speeds....?

[Greystone]

Does anyone know what the range is, in knots, for each of the slow, medium and fast speeds referred to when the hydrophone operator reports a contact?
I believe "slow" is 7 knots or below; the others I'm not sure about..

[meduza]

Slow: 7kt or less
Medium: 8 - 11 (8 - 18 for warships)
Fast: 12 - 34 (19 - 34 for warships)

[Greystone]

Thanks, Meduza!

[nirwana]

U wont get any merchant contact speed which is fast. Its reserved for warships only.

[Cezbor]

U wont get any merchant contact speed which is fast. Its reserved for warships only.

Yes, you will. F.e. fast tankers (from curacao) and fast troop ships and passanger liners (at med.):yep:

[Kielhauler1961]

U wont get any merchant contact speed which is fast. Its reserved for warships only.

Are you sure about that? I could swear that I've had 'fast' contacts on tankers doing 13 knots+ in 1942 in the Caribbean area...

[nirwana]

:o I must have missed those rocketdriven merchants completely. I never survived xmas 42. Is there a chance to find them before that somewhere ?:hmm: 15knts were still reported as medium speed to me.

[onelifecrisis]

Cezbor and Kielhauler are right. And yes, you can sometimes find fast travelling lone merchants in the early war years. I found a couple of them near Britain in '40 and '41 - a nippy wacky pakky type tanker (as I call them) and a whale factory ship, IIRC. My sonarman reported them as "fast".

Note that in rough seas ships will decelerate as they climb a wave and accelerate on their way down the other side of it. If your sonarman catches it during the deceleration then a ship doing 8kts can be reported as "slow" and a ship doing 13kts as "medium". But I don't know how you got 15kts reported as "medium"!

[Pisces]

for GWX 2.1:

After plotting/tracking medium contacts with my watchofficer's reports of range and bearings over atleast halve an hour I've noticed the slowest ones move just above 7.5 knots on average. Sometimes I have also taken the distance and time since the initial map-report into account. I don't know about the upper limit of the medium contacts for sure (haven't found enough of them yet), but suspect it is 11.5 knots. I've allways made visual-contact ahead of them when I intercepted them assuming they moved at 12 knots. If that range was faster than that I would have made visual contact on their side or behind them. Never happend.

The slow contacts I have found moved slightly faster than 7 knots at most (can't remember exact value), so the crossover of the speed-range must be between 7 and 8 knots. No clue as to what the practical lower limit is of slow contacts. I mean, is it really sane to move your ship across the ocean at 3 knots? The slowest probably move atleast 4 knots.

You can find the limits of these ranges in SH3_folder\Data\Cfg\Contacts.cfg. It's 0.1-8, 8-12 and 12-35 for GWX 2.1. You may think of looking in this file as cheating, but BDu ought to have given order at some point on what slow, medium, fast really meant. Based on my experiences above, I think the real average speed is rounded off first before it is converted to those speedranges. (7.4-> =7 -> slow ; 7.5 -> =8 -> medium) But that's just my guess.

[nirwana]

An explantion for 15knts reported as medium might be the fact that in bad weather it fairly often happens to me that the contacts are switching forth and back from a merchant to a warship running surfaced and get dropped below 10m temporarly.