Question - how far away can you be seen?

[MrBledsoe]

How far away day and night can you be seen by enemy ships?

[Armistead]

It depends on what mods you're running. If you're playing stock, I don't recall, but it was poor. Seems I do recall gun range was about 3000 yards. With TMO visuals during the day can be as far as 5nms. The game gives different values for each class of ships, merchant usually have less visuals, escorts and capital ships more. Visuals are also effected by crew ratings.

Some of the important values related to visuals are that you should consider.

Weather
Profile of your sub
Light
Sub speed

Simply, each class has a set visual range, but they're numerous other factors that effect that range for better or worse.

[Webster]

hard to say because the game cheats

i have been at 300ft running slow and a DD comes from 10,000m away to park right on top of me and drop charges like i had lights and horns going off or something. more often they do this from 5,000m away when im undetected so if the game wants to attack you it does and it follows no logic.

the best you can do is take an average of repeatible situations to determine the "average" detection range and they see at night just like its the middle of the day so as far as the game AI goes it means nothing that its night time. now things like heavy rain and fog do seam to hinder sensors and visual sight so at least that seams to work right

[MrBledsoe]

Thanks

[TorpX]

How far away day and night can you be seen by enemy ships?
Keep in mind, that you will not be able to see anything beyond 10 nm. If, for example, you are trying celestial navigation, and are looking for a landmark, even Mt. Everest will not be visible at more than 10 nm. (perhaps a bit less).

[MrBledsoe]

Is this due to the "horizon line", earth's curvature?

[TorpX]

It is due to rendering limits of the game. 10 nm is the limit in RFB, stock is even less, unless I'm mistaken.

On a clear day, you should be able to see smoke or something tall and large, at over 20 nm.

[gnbii]

In Silent Hunter I, at night, with decks awash, the destroyers follow you around but cannot shoot at you or drop depth charges. Is this a bug?

[aanker]

In Silent Hunter I, at night, with decks awash, the destroyers follow you around but cannot shoot at you or drop depth charges. Is this a bug?
What range? At night you can be quite close before they fire or even spot you - also depending on moonlight & moon phase - New Moon for example you can be on the surface around 1,000+/- yards before you are spotted.

They won't DC you if you're on the surface, or decks awash, but they will shoot.

This should probably be downstairs in the Classic Subsims forum for two reasons.
SH1 is down there
Many up here in the SH4 forum may not have had SH1 - SHCE, although 'Sailor Steve' and a few others do (or did).

Welcome to Subsim, gnbii

Happy Hunting!

[Armistead]

In Silent Hunter I, at night, with decks awash, the destroyers follow you around but cannot shoot at you or drop depth charges. Is this a bug?

Not a problem with SH4, they'll blast you and run right over you. One thing I have noticed is sometimes after damage and I have a severe up angle, at scope depth, sometimes the bow nose will stick out of the water and they don't get a visual on it.

[TorpX]

I guess if you're in that situation, you have problems whether they see it or not. :arrgh!:

[paulhager]

How far away day and night can you be seen by enemy ships?

If you're playing with the TMO 2.5 mod, siting distance at night is a reasonable facsimile of reality. If you go over to the Ubi forum, you'll find a number of posts by me relating my experiences with night surface attacks. I think they became feasible sometime around TMO 2.2.

Check those posts and they should tell you everything you need to know.

[Bilge_Rat]

In TMO 2.5, your visibility seems to be a function of various factors: your speed, your aspect vs target, the enemy crew experience, the alert state(?).

When going slow or stopped, I have managed to get to within 1500 yards at night without being spotted.

OTOH, I had a more recent encounter tracking three warships moving fast at night where they opened fire when I was still 8000 yards away. Of course, I was moving at flank speed perpendicular to their track in an effort to get into a reasonable firing position.

[merc4ulfate]

If you surface and they shoot at you ... they can see you :har: