Any advice on being stealthy?

[jayni]

You guys give wonderful advice about how to creep up on enemy ships and sink them. But I was wondering about sailing into and in enemy waters what is the best way to remain undiscovered.
For example if you are in the middle of the Pacific Ocean your sub probably won't be discovered on the surface but what if your sub is within a few hundred miles of the enemy coastline? How does one stay stealthy with limited battery hours.
When should one be on the alert for patrol aircraft and what is the aircraft range?
Any advice from experienced captains is always appreciated.

[cdrsubron7]

You guys give wonderful advice about how to creep up on enemy ships and sink them. But I was wondering about sailing into and in enemy waters what is the best way to remain undiscovered.
For example if you are in the middle of the Pacific Ocean your sub probably won't be discovered on the surface but what if your sub is within a few hundred miles of the enemy coastline? How does one stay stealthy with limited battery hours.
When should one be on the alert for patrol aircraft and what is the aircraft range?
Any advice from experienced captains is always appreciated.


SOP for early in the war called for skippers of US submarines when patrolling they would remain submerged during daylight hours and surface only at night to recharge batteries. As the war progressed and the skippers of the US submarines became younger and more aggressive they stayed on the surface to help spot more targets on the surface then when your submerged.

You'll have the SD radar early on to give you warning of approaching aircraft, usually you'll have enough time to submerge before a plan spots you. I'm guessing that your fairly new to SH4. As you play more you'll develop your own tactics and what will work for you.

[propbeanie]

ditto for cdrsubron7's posting. I do most of my driving between points while on the navigation chart view. Be aware of the zoom level of the chart. As I get closer to enemy waters, I then do me similar to this:

Avoiding Aircraft (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=169073) - I couldn't find Rockin Robbins original message, but this works.

Some folks just draw the circle and drag it around with them as they travel. You might not have time to draw the full cone, but at least have the circle ready to go. The whole idea is to NOT be seen. Crash dive if you have to. You can encounter an air plane any where at any time. Consider them all as "enemy", and don't be seen. Well, not all maybe... coming back into Pearl, that might take you a while... but anywhere except in the Pearl and Midway immediate areas early in the war.

When you find some enemy shipping to shoot at, you want to track them. Get their speed and course, no matter which method you use to shoot. Following other's techniques and using them for experimentation, I've settled on what Rockin Robbins calls the Dick Okane Manual Targeting system. See the Sub Skipper's Bag of Tricks (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=221540) thread. I usually approach deep, below a thermal, and then come up once the escort(s) pass by me. Getting away afterwards is the trick...

Big thing, I think, is time compression. I used to use the maximum I could set the game to. Through the different iterations of Silent Hunter, the amount allowed has steadily increased. In SH4, you can use 8192. I do not recommend that. I've been experimenting with the levels I use, and others might mention it also, but the lower, the better...

[Armistead]

The game isn't so much reality, works on percentages, timers and zones and how hard, long and from how far they will come from depends on your mod settings. Basically if you're spotted in enemy territory, don't expect killer group of escorts to be vectored to your area, unless they are nearby in your contact zone. However, depending on mods planes can show up and hunt you in mass, such as Trav's mod. you get spotted, if airbases are near they will hunt you basically all day, often many dropping bombs and depth charges. Other than that, once you remain hidden and not found for a certain period of time, usually around the 30 min to an hour range, those timers reset and it's basically as if you were never there.

Once you gets some skills, most people stay on the the surface all day unless playing stock and depend on their radars, long as you crash dive, you always get under, heck, usually a normal dive gets you down in plenty of time.

[Rockin Robbins]

What made great skippers like Eugene Fluckey and Dick O'Kane so effective? What made the great U-boat skippers great? It was the fact that they fought their boats as a surface raider which submerged only when its fool life was going to be snuffed out if it didn't.


Batteries are a finite resource. It's vitally important that when that unpredictable thing happens that forces you to submerge that your batteries are fully charged
Batteries not fully charged just suck your diesel tanks dry. Running around with fully charged batteries more than doubles your range.
On the surface, you can search more than 4 times the surface area that you can submerged, and that is without radar! The number of contacts you develop is proportional to the number of square miles of surface searched per day. Stay on the surface equals sink more targets. It's as simple as that.


Rule #2 is never be seen. One thing that is different between real life and our game is that without radar, by the time you see the plane, he has seen you. Then he calls in his buddies for a party and YOU are the cake and ice cream. In real life, typical orders for a sharp crew were for the OOD not to dive the boat on sighting of an airplane. They called the captain and he made the decision. There was no automatic "Holy (expletive of choice), there's a plane! Dive!"

With radar on an American boat, you are totally and completely safe from aircraft. When I made this video I had just stupidly allowed myself to be seen by a plane. Of course he called in all his friends to the party. Of course my reaction was "Time to make an airplane avoidance video!" The sky is filled with fully alerted airplanes and we are not sighted again.
https://youtu.be/Hidf8p64_CE