Shrike37
06-27-09, 01:14 AM
Alright, it is Oct., 1939. I am ~50km off the coast of England. I get a long range hydrophone merchant contact and I am closing in at standard speed on a rough intercept course. The wind is 13m/s and there are pretty nice sized waves and the sky is overcast.
I keep diving to get a hydrophone update on the merchant. All of the sudden, my hydrophone guy picks up a warship contact moving very fast and closing. I put the UZO on the bearing he gave and sure enough I see a tiny speck in the distance (occasionally as the waves permit). About 2 or 3 min. later I figure out it is a small boat. He is coming dead on for me. So I submerge and turn 90 degrees. After a little while the torpedo boat shows up almost exactly to the spot where I submerged at and slows down for a search.
It was overcast and my watch had a full status bar so I doubt a plane spotted me and reported my position without me seeing it (it would have had to fly pretty low to see me under the cloud cover). There is no way that torpedo boat could have seen me in those conditions that far away without hydrophones or something. I hadn't even gotten a visual on the merchant, so no other ship could have reported me. Did the English have radar up that early?
I was obviously stunned at how precise his attack run had been and was wondering how the heck he spotted me. I was so amazed I decide to do a little test. After putting ~1.1km between he and I, I surfaced the boat. The whole time I am surfacing, I watch him with the periscope. Again, I can only see him ~20-30% of the time because he and I are so close to the waterline and there are big waves. Anyway, he immediately spots me and I can't even get the watch crew on the bridge before I start taking incoming machine gun rounds. I dive and get out of there...
I'm running GWX3.0 and wondering if this was a freak thing, or are torpedo boats that good?
I keep diving to get a hydrophone update on the merchant. All of the sudden, my hydrophone guy picks up a warship contact moving very fast and closing. I put the UZO on the bearing he gave and sure enough I see a tiny speck in the distance (occasionally as the waves permit). About 2 or 3 min. later I figure out it is a small boat. He is coming dead on for me. So I submerge and turn 90 degrees. After a little while the torpedo boat shows up almost exactly to the spot where I submerged at and slows down for a search.
It was overcast and my watch had a full status bar so I doubt a plane spotted me and reported my position without me seeing it (it would have had to fly pretty low to see me under the cloud cover). There is no way that torpedo boat could have seen me in those conditions that far away without hydrophones or something. I hadn't even gotten a visual on the merchant, so no other ship could have reported me. Did the English have radar up that early?
I was obviously stunned at how precise his attack run had been and was wondering how the heck he spotted me. I was so amazed I decide to do a little test. After putting ~1.1km between he and I, I surfaced the boat. The whole time I am surfacing, I watch him with the periscope. Again, I can only see him ~20-30% of the time because he and I are so close to the waterline and there are big waves. Anyway, he immediately spots me and I can't even get the watch crew on the bridge before I start taking incoming machine gun rounds. I dive and get out of there...
I'm running GWX3.0 and wondering if this was a freak thing, or are torpedo boats that good?