The reason that no Swordfish was shot down by Bismarck is that the crew of the ship overestimated the planes speed and manoeuvre ability, thus aiming their anti-air weapons too far ahead of the planes. And the planes didn't do any real harm anyway, except for one of course, flown by John Moffat, which torpedo (as we all know by now) struck the rudder and stayed there.

Well, does anyone else like to stay surfaced and fight these buggers. Personally i man the flak guns if i see the radar warning moving quickly towards me. I only dive in 3 situations. 1) i'm already damaged 2)out of ammo and 3) if i think an asw group is around (or any DD). They tend to sneak up on you after plane contact. Then relentless catalina patrols.

Never underestimate anything that can move and manouvre faster than you....not to mention the fact they carry livery that can destroy you :arrgh!:

And the Italian fleet at Taranto

Damn straight, Swordfish were nasty little buggers and reletivly few of them were lost or shot down, they were very agile if not as fast as more modern designs. I guess Sh3 doesnt represent them very well - especially since they cant lob torpedos about.. :oops:
Just like Eclos, they are hindered due to some poor decision making by the dev team.

Yes, I've heard that; and also that the sighting systems for the 10.5cm heavy flak guns were unable to compensate for such a slow target; but they also had 16 3.7cm and 18 2cm guns, hand fired and similar to what you have on your u-boat. If they couldn't bring them down, why should you?

I disagree with everyone. How's that? :smug:

Your entitled to your opinion just like everyone else :yep:

In the end it comes down to two things:

1. Skill.

2. The fact that SHIII is a game, and why anyone would input enemies in a game that are near impossible to defeat goes beyond my intelligence.

Beaufighter,

;) I use it myself to sink Uboats and german shipping in IL2.
oops...Now in this section I,m a traitor :p

Not really....I've seen how lousy your aim is ;)

And I don't understand why anyone would play a sim that lets them shoot down airplanes like they were swatting flies.

But then I always dive when I see one, so it doesn't affect me too much.

You can always tweak reality abit. There isn't just one or the other; it's not like you either can shoot down the enemy or you can not do it, I only mean that by making it a tad easier to shoot down airplanes in SHIII, it'll get more interesting and fun. Let's face it: In real world, the planes were a nightmare for these skippers (just as they may be for us), but they had more to lose and to stay and fight was a very unnecessary risk in most cases. If we get blown up by a plane in SHIII, what do we lose? A good career? If they got blown up by a plane, they lost their lives. Obviously they mostly dived during contact, since it was very dangerous and very hard to defeat a flying enemy like that. But the basis for any game in the world is that it gotta be enjoyable, and making airplanes in SHIII nothing more than annoying and dangerous enemies that you can't defeat would've gotten against that principle, so by tweaking the realism a bit, and making those pesky Hurricanes a little less manuverable (yes they ARE fast and small, but the real deal was much faster and didn't fly in a straight line all the time) opens up the game a little, giving it a new area of strategy: Shall I stay and fight or go under, instead of just go under.

Wow, this became a long reply, and I'm sure someone will dug up something against me in this text that doesn't make sense, but it's late so....;)

I read recently that during the attack on the Bismarck they didn't hit the swordfish as they didn't believe anything could fly that slowly!

See above posts #45, 46 and 51.