What would be nice to have, is when you're in shallower water, ie: 120 meters, and you're running close to the sea floor, is have the ASDISK pinging lose you as a contact, as the ping also bounces off the sea floor masking your whereabouts. Granted you'll have to stay within 1 or 2 meters of the bottom. It happens with my fish finder which is more accurate than the detection equiptment of WWII. If the school of fish changes depth, and gets close to the bottom of the river or lake, I'll lose part of it, or sometimes all of it from the backround noise created. Granted a school of fish is nowhere near the size of our boats, but the effect would be similar with the primitive gear used then. At least make it harder for them to get a location on us in those circumstances.

I've noticed that I can get away fairly easily from early war convoy escorts as long as I'm in deep water, using the tactics described above. Dive deep (100-150m), go to silent running and 2 or 1 knots, and travel away from the escorts (keeping your profile small). I've also found it handy to make sure there's some distance between you and the escorts, and travel at 1/3 or standard at periscope for a length of time (I usually keep at p-depth until I'm on the fringe of the convoy). From a sim point of view, I don't know if the escorts are confusing my noise with the convoy's, but it's seemed to work so far. They'll end up DC'ing a spot several hundred to thousands of meters away.

I've also tried it in shallow water (40-60m), without much success. I managed to avoid his DC's alright, but he kept detecting me every time he'd come around after his run. ASDIC would start up, and he painted me like a deer in the headlights. I ended up fooling around with time compression so he'd leave, rather than be stuck at the computer for several hours at 1x TC.

The weather in most of the accounts above was around 6-10 m/s winds, decent visibility (fog=light, no precip., etc.).

On the other hand, I had the opposite situation last night. Time was midnight, weather was 15 m/s winds & clear skies. I had spent what seemed like weeks in rotten weather with no visibility (15 m/s winds, heavy precip, heavy fog), so I had nothing but 2,000 tons on my kill list. Then I come across a Class C destroy, patrolling above Loch Ewe.

Remember, 15 m/s winds and midnight. I was abeam of him (AOB 90 Port), took a couple plottings, and fired off a fish. I cheated a bit, and used the external camera to watch the torpedo pass a few meters off his stern. Fired off a second, passed in front of him by just a hair. :damn:

At that point, I got frustrated. He hadn't noticed me, so I figured I'd fire up the engines, start taking depth readings, whatever... anything to get him to come around so I could place a torp in his teeth.

Nothing worked. Finally, I got irritated enough to pull in about 800m behind him and follow him. Fired a magnetic torp off (missed), fired an impact and hit him in the stern. Got some sort of secondary explosions... and he turned on his searchlight. Pointed straight forward. No course change (does the sim track damage to AI steering gear?). He just kept motoring along until he took in enough water to bring his stern under the waves, then pitched to starboard until he capsized. Not a shot fired, nothing except his searchlight pointed forward after the torpedo hit.

Worst part is, once I ID'd him, I told myself that I was going to have to apologize to the crew for hunting a Class C (and probably getting myself sunk in the process). :nope: