I remember the sub school missions being being completely over the top for new kauleuns.

Starting right next to the convoy, in very shallow water etc...

Seems to me a proper training mission should start you quite far away from the convoy, give you the chance to track it, decide upon the convoy speed and course, decide on a track to intercept and attack it, then give you enough room to evade the escorts.

I am going to use the mission maker to make such a mission
I think I would be very useful for new Kauleuns.

EDIT: This may take me a few days !

That sounds like a very use full mission indeed. Though I expect that some one just starting out with the game would find it a tad overwhelming. I know it took me a solid month or so befor I was able to get into position and attack a single ship, let alone sneeking up on a whole convoy with escorts and make a sucsesful attack; or at least an attack that put torpidos near the target. I have been thinking about doing up a mission like that for my self, or finding one like it, to practise convoy attacks; the ones that come with GWX are good but the escorts are eather too advanced or to numerous for my level of skill just now.

The Naval Acadamy missions give new players just the ammount of dificulty that alows for some sucsess while still learning the basics of what you need to know to be sucsesful in the game.

Well I finally passed the Convoy Attack exam with flying colors - which involved waiting until the rear escort turned back some distance and getting three quick shots off at the leading escort and two of the merchants. Missed the escort but slipped fast down the inside of one of the convoy lanes and managed to hit the returning rear escort before she even tried to shoot at me. Dove to 80 m and ran silent back up in between the fleeing merchants and evaded one depth charge run by the remaining escort. Came back to periscope depth after she seemed to have lost track of me and was able to take her out with one lucky shot. Much to my surprise the rear escort sank too while I was busy playing footsie with her comrades.

Still had some really stupid misses with my remaining eels and had to finish off the last couple of ships with the deck gun, but at least I didn't spend two solid hours running silent at 100 m down trying to outwit the Royal Navy, and then have to catch up again from 8 km away. :D

Congratz, Frau K!

When attacking convoys in your career, shoot two or three targets and dive deep. Don'y hang around to watch results. :salute:

Nah, that's what the Event Camera is for! How did the real Kaleuns ever do without it?

I have to admit - it is very tempting to stay at P depth and wait to see them blow up. Not a luxury most real Kaleuns could take advantage of in a convoy attack and live to talk about, methinks.

I bet a few got away with it early in the war. The sensors weren't vary good at that time and thru the whole war they were kind of spoty when the target was at parascope depth.

One thing you might keep in mind when you get into a convoy attack in your campains: Save your eels for the merchants. They are almost always bigger than the escorts and that will give you more renown to buy new toys for your boat with. The exception being capital ships, batle ships, crusers and carriers.

I'm still confused on this issue. A number of times now I've confirmed the following:

1. I'm 30 meters down (with only 5 meters room below me)
2. A Destroyer and/or Trawler is searching for me
3. I'm in silent mode at < or = 100 RPM, around 1-2 knots speed
- or -
3. Stopped
4. Noise meter shows green
5. Suddenly, without me changing anything, the noise meter becomes RED and I start hearing the sonar pinging me and getting louder.

I have not changed anything, yet suddenly I'm making more noise? Or is it possible that the meter does somehow convey the search mode or detection by the enemy?

EDIT: Also, I recall that I can be at full speed on the surface and the icon is green. So it must have something to do with who is listening as well.

the icon is not only a "noise-o-meter" but an indicator of the state of detection as well, I suppose.
once I was down at 150m and as a DD was closing in the indicator showed gradually all its colours: green, light green, yellow, orange, light red, red.

I've now turned it off.
there's actually no need for it.

I've gone back and forth having it display and not. Since I'm still learning the ropes, it is good for investigating how the SH3 world operates. Knowing what it's telling me is helpful. But I'm with you and expect it'll come off soon since I'm learning that really all you can do is stay deep and stay quiet and let the slow dance play out. Hopefully they keep guessing wrong (even better if they never knew you were there except for the sinking ships all over the place).

The stealth meter was a little confusing for me at first too. But then someone explained it real well for me, or someone elce I don't recall; a fat lot of good it did me to seeing as I tured it off shortly after I figured out what it dose and how to interpert it :O:. The meter isn't an indication of weather or not you have been detected but rather an indication of how detectable you are at that moment.

Take for example what you said earlyer: You were siting full stop just off the botom riged for silent runing and the meter was green as would be expected beacouse it is hard to find a silent boat down there visualy or audably. Now it turned red when the enemy started to ping you; this is to be expected beacouse now you are reflecting the sound of the ping for the enemy to hear making you more detectable. Just beacouse the meter is red dosen't mean that they have found you only that if they point their hydrophones in your direction they are very likely to find you; even having the enemy pinging you is no gaurantee that they have found you, if I had a nickle for every time I was pinged and not found... Well I don't know how many nickles I would have but it would be a lot of them.

The only real way to know the enemy has found you when you are submerged is when a depth charge bounces off your hull or detonates realy close to you. Though I supose you could also use hydraphone readings to figure their search patern and see if it bisects you, but the depth charge meathod is way more fun.

Same goes for the surface in terms of the meter. It can be green even though it is a cleer sunny day but there is no one around beacouse the distance from you to the nearest ship is so great that there is zero chance that they will see you.

Having watched it more carefully the last couple of sessions, I think there are SO many factors that go into how it determines your "stealth" factor... for instance even if you are rigged for silent running and at a dead stop, being only 30 m down is gonna kill the stealth factor if a nearby destroyer closes in and starts pinging. If they're actively looking for you, and that's as deep as you can go and they already know you're around there somewhere, all the silent running in the world is not going to keep you at full stealth.

At the beginning of the convoy attack exam, I can just sit there at periscope depth long enough to watch the entire convoy pass by, even maneuver into a better firing position, and the meter's still green - in theory I should be much more detectable than that, but apparently no one in the convoy is aware at that point that there's a u-boat in the vicinity, so they aren't even trying to find me yet. They haven't seen me, don't suspect I'm there, and I'm still at full stealth even at P depth and running 6-7 knots (and not rigged for schleichfahrt) alongside the convoy well within optimum firing distance from ships on the far side of it.

The meter seems to function based on a combination of where you are and what you're doing, where the enemy is and what they're doing, and what they know or suspect about your whereabouts - even if you don't know that they know or suspect anything.

You could probably be at 30 m running silent at a dead stop and if you sat there long enough for a distant destroyer to approach who didn't suspect your presence at all, they might pass right over and you'd remain at "full stealth" because you've done nothing to give away your presence AND they have no reason to be actively looking for you and so they aren't. But if it turned out that they did have a reason to be looking, even if you didn't know about it until it was too late, you'd quickly go from green to red the closer they got.

hmm, interesting.
nevertheless I leave it turned off. :03:

but there is another question about "stealth":
what do you think is the range of sight a DD or merchant has in this conditions:
night, light showers, heavy fog, wind 15m/s

I'd like to know cause I'll try a surface-attack on a convoy and therefore either I know before or learn it the hard way ....

aint that because they are marked as neutrals, and only when you fire your firrst shot do they start searching for a possible enemy?

Ah, didn't think of that.

Hell, it s just a wild guess, i have never done the Missions since GWX 2.0 was out... and on stock, only once.
Been a while...

:DL

This was Naval Academy, the Convoy Attack "exam." IIRC all the ships were flying Brit flags. But f I'm not mistaken the date shown in gameplay was June 1939 (which makes sense if you're still in training for combat in a war that will begin a few months later) so seems like any ship would count as "neutral" at that point. I noticed it because I was looking at the time/date trying to figure out how much longer I'd have to wait until it got dark, if I decided to hold out for a night attack instead of getting my groove on in broad daylight.

It's kind of a weird thing that the Naval Academy stuff has you contending with what appears to be the RN, but datestamps it so that the war hasn't started yet.

I've got GXW3 installed and my playing time with stock was almost nil before that, so I really don't even know what difference there might be from one to the other or if the mod has much of an effect on the Academy sessions. Altho it did apparently make the Flak Gun exam impossible to pass, because that's about as far as I got in stock and that way I got an "Excellent." With GWX - fugeddaboudit. I can't even PASS the damn thing.

Naval Academy dates don't count. All ships are flagged as some potential fictional enemy, and are meant to be sunk. Of course we don't want the Tommies to know we're doing this, so we do it well away from their prying eyes.

Shh! It's a secret, 'kay?

AAAAAAhhhh

That explains it all - the war has not started yet, and if you d be running Stock, you would see GREEN icons on the map.
meaning the RN is neutral.

once you damage any of them in any way
or
they see a Torpedo trail,

they get nervous... but before that very second, you could surface next to them, they wouldn t care.

That is the secret... :)

OMG did I just start a war?

:doh:

Under those coditions visibility would be quite limitied though in my last convoy attack my watch crew managed to "see" enemy ships a few K off but when I went up to the bridge all I got was a solid black screen. If I recal on the nav map, if you have contacts turned on, you can click on the enemy ship, or any other ship realy, and you can get some info on their detection capabilities if you zoom in enuf. One ring might be their visual range distance.

I generaly work off the docterain of "If I can see them chances are they can see me." That means if I see them I run or kill them.

So the war realy wasn't about the German invasion of Poland? Someone should realy tell people about this, wright a book or some thing. THE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW!