That's hardcore man! The only way to play! The experience you want to have is decided by YOU and only you.

Ok so I (finally) started a campaign in NYGM3. Much different than GWX3 I must say, but so far I'm really liking it.

There's only one issue I have to bring up. I was tracking this merchant vessel for a good while, probably an hour or so. I spotted him when I was in a favorable position anyways, so I didn't need to track him longer than that. I took range/bearing estimates with the UZO at about 9000m off his starboard bow, and then turned to a heading parallel to track him. At the correct intervals I took my estimates with the UZO until I was satisfied and locked him in at 9 knots.

I also estimated his course to be about 015. Now with this I could spring ahead and get into an attack position. Confident about his speed and heading, and detecting no evasive maneuver, I got into position about 1500m off his course line. Not ideal, but good enough. I did all my final torp preps and setup battle stations. I took another reading through the periscope, and determined him to be on roughly the same course line 015. With that I used my formulas (which I've tested time and again, they're correct), to figure his AOB. He was properly ID'ed as a small merchant. With everything set, AOB and speed pre-factored, now all I had to do was one more range, lock it in, and shoot....and miss. There were no evasive maneuvers that I could tell. I tracked this guy for a long time and no variables changed, even up until the time I took my shot. Frustrated, I surfaced and put him under with my deck gun. Not my cleanest kill, but I still got the end result.

Now to the drawing board... What went wrong? What changed? What variables did I miss/mis-calculate? Up until I took my shot, I confirmed all my parameters and found them to be accurate. Could he have made just a slight course or speed change? Is the stadimeter broken? Anybody have any ideas?

Salute, Dan !!!

There are a whole bunch of things that go wrong even when we do everything right !! :wah:

First thing that comes to mind is your torps may have run under the target. (I usually watch steam torpedoes on their run with the external camera so if I miss I can learn from it.)
If you have Hsie's mod and are using realistic torpedo performance then there is a very good chance that they were duds. He mimics that by making the torps run too deep.

Is it possible you accidently got your AOB backwards? (starboard/port)? Did you remember to put the TDC back in auto after you inputted the settings?

In real life, I think that most misses were due to errors in the target speed. That is what probably causes us to miss as well.

AD

I'm guessing it wasn't a dud since I didn't get a message saying it was a dud, but who knows. It's possible that a deep run happened, but I was using the T1 early war steam torps, I thought the early electric torps had depth keeping and pistol issues?

I know I didn't get the AOB wrong because I have tried and true formulas to figure that out to an exact number, as long as you correctly estimate enemy true course. I also visually confirmed AOB with the scope.

It was either a speed or course change last minute, or a deep runner, or a dud that didn't get reported. Either way, I sunk him, and now I'm going back to GWX3 because shortly after him I went on to sick a Medium Cargo worth 6,000GRT with one torp on impact, and it did the stock "split in two" thing :/\\!!

All is good though, as recently I've been doing more mod putzing than actual playing, so a complete reinstall of GWX3 is nothing more than a tedious way to spend an evening for me at the moment.

I've played SH3 until the cows have come home. Right now I think I'm just using it as an art easel to test mods and what not. If I screw something up, oh well, that's why I'm diddling around with SH3 and not SH5.

Well, gotta beta test stock SH3 to see if it's corrupted, then onto reinstall of GWX! :rock:

You don't always get the dud message.
I've watched torps bounce off Ships and gotten no dud message.
It happens and is just 'one of those things' ya live with.

Dunno, the times I was bombed while recharging batteries with the snorkel before I got the radar detector on it or dodging bombs while leaving the port in 1944 have left me with a different impression.

Try leaving Bergen for a patrol in February of 1945... All your flak guns are roaring before you even leave the confines of the bay! And of course when you're in a fjord there's really no diving for obvious reasons.

By that time in the war, the allies were shipping in ONE DAY what it took the U-Boats a whole week to sink. Once that happened it really was pointless and futile to keep sending them out to their certain deaths.

I'm sure by that point is was obvious that Hitler didn't care, and was simply hell bent on killing Germans needlessly. Any scrupulous commander knows to not engage in a fight he cannot win. No wonder why some of those ocean-going IXD's defected to places like Argentina and Mexico. If it were me, I would choose a sunny spot in the Caribbean.. Jamaica would be good. :arrgh!::sunny:

YA MON.. Now what about our submarine? (Kaleun and crew on beach sipping rum n cokes). :cool:

Actually it was Donitz who insisted for continued operations. The rationale being that the allies had to keep planes on ASW duty instead of releasing them for use against Germany, the inefficient convoy system had to remain in place and a large amount of resources in general had to be expended to mantain the global ASW effort. I do not recall any confirmed wartime defections, though going by accounts the boats which made it to Argentina were not the only ones whose crews made the attempt or seriously considered it as an option.

Not confirmed by whom? Do you think the German high command would actually "confirm" a boat to have defected? What do you think that would do for PR?

So Donitz was using the uboat crews as sacrificial lambs to keep the allied birds off Germany's doorstep. Sounds like the Nazi party to me. I heard of an instance where a German Uboat was ordered to fire all torpedos at the D-Day landing fleet, and then ram the biggest ship in a suicide attack. Obviously, that commander disappeared with his crew and was never found again, but the attack was also never carried out. Read D-Day by Stephen Ambrose. He talks about that event and also the Slapton Sands incident.

For allied PR it would be a coup: remember that U-505 was used for war bond tours in 1945, they were not shy about showing off. A defection would have made a for a nice story.
I can't rule out that the crew of a boat might have said "screw it" late in the war, landed somewhere, sunk the boat and somehow go unnoticed. But AFAIK there is no serious proof that it did in fact happen and a lot of reasons to think it was unlikely. For a start you have to have the crew mostly agree with wartime desertion, which was perceived rather differently from the "let's go to Argentina" at war's end. As far as I can tell from interrogations and memoirs does not seem a likely proposition.
Then you have the problem of fifty germans managing to go unnoticed somewhere and keeping their mouths shut.
Not impossible given that there were several german communities in Latin America and that local authorities might be inefficient and/or sympathetic but not the easiest.

Pretty much. Then again considered the losses in air raids it might have seemed worthwhile.

Hence the Hitler Youth Dönitz nickname.
Though honestly I find the ramming order fishy, I recall terms like disregard of survival and such but not something that nutty . As I recall the only u-boat that managed to attack the invasion fleet carried out a conventional torpedo attack and evaded.

What about the Slapton Sands incident? Where U-boats got in and took out a couple troop transport ships off the coast of England while they were practicing the D-Day landings? I don't think the Allied high command let many people on to that until long after the war. Isn't it funny how we support war through blindness and complete and utter lies?

It wasn't U-Boats that hit the landing exercises at Slapton Sands but schnellboots, or S-Boats. Sometimes called E-Boats. Basically, German motor torpedo boats.

The incident was detailed in at least three books at the end of the war, including, Captain Harry C. Butcher 's My Three Years With Eisenhower.

Still used to this day by Royal Marine Commandos and surfers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Tiger

The reason Slapton Sands got buried in obscurity was probably due to security and because D-Day came not long after and captured all the attention of the media at the time. Much as the ugly meatgrinder that the US Army went through at Hurtgen Forest tends to get lost because of the much large Battle of the Bulge that followed. In the afterglow of victory, setbacks on the way there tend to be forgotten.

I've often thought that the negligent loss of the US heavy cruiser Indianapolis in the dying days of the war would have been largely forgotten had it not been a major plot point in the 1975 movie Jaws.

Isn't that sad though? People only notice things when it comes to them in the form of entertainment. I once heard a kid say "Wow! Fallout New Vegas has got AWESOME music!!" Little did he know that the music he was hearing debuted in the 1950's, but he thought the video game developers made it. I blame our education system honestly. What a joke, and what an ignorant, apathetic, aloof, and self-centered society we've become :nope:

Ok so I correct myself, Schnellboots launched the attack, I remember reading that now. Stephen Ambrose briefly covered Slapton Sands in his book D-Day the Normandy Invasion.

The Indianapolis was a tragic affair. I often wonder if their fate really was just happenstance. One major thing I've learned in my short life, nothing is as it seems. There are so many layers to this deception onion that I'm afraid it cannot all be peeled back. Layer upon layer of lies, deceit, misinformation, and disinformation have perverted history into some sick pseudo-version of the real thing. It almost seems like we only know the official story of history, and believing the taboo or unofficial story brings about accusations of being paranoid or crazy from the wholly brainwashed masses.

How free are we really? Think about it. Are we truly sure why WW2 went down and how?

"History is the lies that the victors agree upon." -Napoleon Bonaparte

History can be changed with the stroke of a pen. In one swipe of ink, the reputations of men can be either made or broken in an instant. Stories can be hidden or fabricated at will to exact some form of controlled response from the general public. So ask yourself, do we really have freedom of thought? Or are we merely lemmings marching to the tune of our masters music thinking we do?

One major thing I've learned in a long life is never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Or a better (and more laconic) British English variation, coined by Bernard Ingham. "Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory."

After all, the attempt to cover-up common human traits like ineptitude, complacency , arrogance or stupidity is usually indistinguishable from covering up a conspiracy.

I wonder if it is just simply stupidity though. To say a man who commits suicide by stabbing himself 10 times in the back and throwing himself over a bridge was just lacking human intelligence causes a raised eyebrow for me.

I know an older gentleman who served 37 years in law enforcement, and the final 17 of those years as a detective investigating mysterious deaths. He told me once of a story where a local PD called upon him to investigate a severed head that was found by the banks of a river. To his astonishment, the local PD did not want to investigate it as a murder, but rather as a "terrible accident." Does Hot Fuzz come to mind?

It makes you wonder, is it really just stupidity, or simply the act of playing stupid?

I don't know about you, but heads don't just randomly fall off by accident and not get found until a week after the fact.

I suppose he was out hunting, got excited when he saw his deer, then "lost his head" so to speak...... Terrible accident, I must say.

The local cops took the head for evidence, marked it as an accident, and closed the case. Nothing about that seems in the least bit suspicious to you?

It wasn't a negligent loss.
An enemy sub just happened to be in the area and sunk it.
What was regretable was not searching sooner.
But War, and all that means, has a way of causeing such things.

When I use the term negligent I'm referring to a capital ship with no ASW capabilities of it's own, (other than zig-zagging and luck) sailing alone in the Western Pacific with no escort of any kind. Even a lowly minesweeper tagging along could have radioed in the sinking, pulled some survivors aboard and provided more life rafts and provisions for the rest. Ultimately, that's on the higher authorities that denied the escort than the captain.