LMAO :har:

:rotfl2:lol

I agree but in the game you can do anything at a milk cow , even repair the most severe damege. Not like real life but helpful.

Aside from not having the option of dismissing/recruiting crewmen, and the automatically allotted 1 day 'in base' if you are using Commander, I don't think there are any distinctions between docking at your home base and docking at any resupply ship or milk-cow. The game will treat it as the end of a patrol and the start of a new one in all other respects.

Don't forget the inability to upgrade equipment.

With regard to 'One day in base' function....every % point of damage will add one additional day.

Righto, forgot about that one.

Yep, found that out the hard way too, lol. I always edit that out before starting up the next patrol, because that seems more realistic... but lately I don't know, if it's only a few days extra... did u-boats ever hang around a resupply ship longer if they needed to do more extensive repairs? I mean a ship docked in a neutral harbor, not when they rendezvous at sea.

I always imagine resupply at Vigo or Las Palmas to be sort of a furtive, get in and out quickly sort of thing - but that's because of the way it's done in Das Boot, I'm sure, which may or may not reflect the way it was normally or at all stages of the war.

Many types of damage involve replacing things that can't be carried on a ship. Supply ships, especially supply subs, could give a u-boat some food and a couple torpedoes, but a complete resupply was impossible anywhere except in a dedicated base, and repairing damage even more so.

Granted, but I'm more wondering whether or not stopping to resupply at a German ship in a neutral port was necessarily always a cloak & dagger affair, requiring uboats to spend as little time there as possible, or if it was sometimes considered okay for them to hang around longer and do any repairs they could in that location rather than at sea.

The supply ships would have a number of common/key spare parts on hand, but didn't have an onboard machine shop to make any kind of really major repairs. Though not modelled ingame, they also had good medics and better facilities (compared to the u-boat) to deal with serious injuries. They would either take the casualty onboard and hold them until they could be sent back to port or do the best they could to patch them up so that they could (hopefully) go back to duty before the sub left. Being a somewhat stable platform they were also able to use divers to repair external damage (even if it was just to jerry-rig something to get them home) that could never be done sailing alone; they may have only been able to do simple repairs; albeit ones that were impossible to do otherwise.

It is because of the niceties of "obeying" international law. A ship belonging to a combatant is only allowed 48 hours in a neutral port - so the supply ship had to conceal who she was to be able to remain there. The ship/sub being repaired ditto - she couldn't be publiccaly seen receiving aid from the supply ship, otherwise the "neutrality" of said ship was compromised. In reality, EVERYONE knew who they were and what was going on - but as long as "the proprieties" were observed, the "neutral" country had "plausible deny-ability" when pressed by the Allied diplomats.

Ain't politics just somethin' else?

Edit: Just as an example - Graf Spree after the Battle of the River Platte.

The one exception to the 48 hour rule being the one that stated a warship had to wait at least 24 hours if a merchantman from their enemy left port....and this the British did once in a subtefuge for giving the Graff Spee the impression that heavy units would be awaiting her leaving port...which in fact was not the case.

After the 24 hour 'headstart' (a total of 72 hours) Langsdorff swallowed the bait and scuttled, only HMS Cumberland was waiting in addition to the three originals Ajax, Exeter and Achilles.

God Save The Queen :salute:

Would there be a way to copy the damaged ship file, set it aside, do your 1-2 days at the resupply, edit your career file to match that after SH3 had advanced the date for repairs, and then replace the damaged ship file?

So the end result would be only 1-2 days at the resupply, and you'd leave with the same damage you came in with? Or even allowing for reasonable repairs? Like a radio replaced or something plausible for a resupply ship to be carrying.

IIRC I tried editing the ending Hull Integrity from the previous patrol back to 100%, to get rid of the "damage" we'd taken before ending a patrol at a resupply ship, but that didn't do anything to get rid of all the extra days in base that had been assigned because of it.

I've done it twice that way - docked at a resupply ship with hull integrity pretty messed up, and then edited my career files so that I didn't get "days in base" added for the loss of hull integrity. To the best of my memory, here's how:

Dock at your resupply ship, exit the patrol, exit the game.

Go into the career folder for that commander (in the My Documents folder that the game uses for player files) and open the Patrols.cfg file. Scroll down to the bottom of the file, where you'll find all the data for the patrol you just completed.

Near the very bottom of that last block of data, you'll see the following lines:

NbDaysInBase=36
HullIntegrity=64.140869
DeltaRenown=2600.350098
NbSaves=5
ChangedRank=No

This the data from my last completed patrol - naturally yours will vary.

The line NbDaysInBase controls how many extra days in base the game is going to require before the start of the next patrol because of the hull integrity of the boat at the end of this one (shown in the next line).

Now if you've docked at a resupply ship, SH3 Commander will automatically give you 1 day in base - but the game will add the extra days noted in NbDaysInBase because of the loss of hull integrity.

So - if you want to spend 1 day at the resupply ship, edit that line of data to read NbDaysInBase=0 and you won't get any extra days added to the 1 day that Commander gives you automatically.

If you want to spend 2 days docked, change it to NbDaysInBase=1 and Commander will add its 1 day for a total of 2 days in base.

Close Patrols.cfg and save your changes.

Now open Patrols_0.cfg and scroll down to the last block of data, which will be data for your next patrol, the one that will start when you load the game again and leave the resupply ship. At the top of that block of data you'll see the following lines:

PatrolNumber=0
StartYear=1940
StartMonth=12
StartDay=21
StartHour=21
StartMin=20

Lines 2-5 show the start year, month, day, hour and minute already set for the beginning of your next patrol. Edit these lines as needed to sync it up with the total number of days "in base" you will be spending docked at your resupply ship. For instance, in the data shown above I've been given a start date of Dec 21 1940. If I'd just docked at a resupply ship on Dec 11 and edited the other file as noted above to show NbDaysInBase=0, then I would be expecting only 1 day in base (given by Commander). So I'd change the line

StartDay=21

to

StartDay=12

to show that the next patrol will start on Dec 12 and not Dec 21. If I'd edited the other file to give me 2 days in base (1 for HI loss, plus the 1 from Commander), then I'd change it to StartDay=13 so we'd be leaving the resupply ship on Dec 13 instead.

Close that file and save the changes.

When you open Commander and launch the game to start the next patrol of that career, it should show you starting out from the resupply ship on the date you put in for that patrol in Patrols_0.cfg, after having spent 1 day in base (given by Commander) plus however many extra days you gave yourself in the previous patrol's NbDaysInBase line in Patrols.cfg.

And of course when you restart the patrol, your HI will be back to 100%, because when you end a patrol the game repairs all your damage before you start another one. If there's a way to "recreate" specific damage in one patrol that was done in the previous patrol but presumably not repaired because you docked at a resupply ship instead of a base, I don't know what it is. Someone else may have an answer to that question.

I have edited the starting HI for a next patrol starting from a resupply ship back down to what it was when I got there and ended the previous patrol, but that doesn't seem to translate into anything that was obviously broken staying broken - and things like radios and periscopes don't really have anything to do with hull integitry anyway AFAIK. If I've taken serious damage to multiple major systems before stopping at a resupply ship, I usually just go straight home after my 1-2 days there and pretend that we jury-rigged enough stuff to get us home but not to allow for another full combat patrol.

Wow tyvm FK

You're welcome. At the very least you won't be stuck sitting next to a resupply ship for an extra 2-3 weeks just because you took a beating before you got there. :yeah:

I'm pretty sure if you do the edits I talked about, when you open Commander to start the next patrol and look at the "Status" line for your kaleun (#3 on the list at right), it should show you at your resupply location with a date that will sync up with the short layover that you edited in. That's how I always knew it worked when I did it. The game should follow suit when you load it up.

If it doesn't, you can just back out of there and exit the game without starting the patrol and go back into the files and try to figure out what's causing it. It took me several tries to get it right, lol, and I've recreated the process from memory and from looking back over my own cfg files... but I think I covered all the necessary steps.