Snorkel: mixed blessing?
 

It's Oct., 1943, in the Mediterranean. Allied aircraft are making surface travel (even at night) increasingly dangerous. My radar and/or radar detector have given me just enough warning of approaching planes that I 've been able (so far) to avoid serious damage by crash diving.

I've just equipped my VIIB with a snorkel so I can spend more time submerged. However, I'm finding out that when I use the snorkel, enemy planes still can spot me. When this happens, I have no way of detecting their approach. :cry: I only find out that planes are attacking me when the S.O. yells "depth charges in the water!"

Is there a way to detect approaching aircraft when using the snorkel, other than continuously sweeping the sky with the observational periscope (something that would be quite tiring)? How do other captains deal with this problem?

i run on batteries until they are about 20% depleated then i raise the snorkel and recharge to 100% then lower it. this minimized the time that the snorkel is raised above the water... also there is the snorkel mounted radar detector in GWX though i have not used it yet.

enemy aircraft are detecting the raised snorkel on radar and homing in on it and bombing you.

There are radar detectors mounted on the top of snorkels but it depends of the date and year. :yep:

this helps in detect enemy radars while snorkeling.

Do you have a scope up while snorting? In the past I found that helped, was also the practice in real life.

Historically that is what the u-boat captains did: Spend most of the time on batteries, and only use the snorkel to recharge the batteries.

That made the job of hunting them down much tougher for the Allies, but the flip side of that is that it took the boats forever to get anywhere. It limited their mobility to the point where it seriously reduced the time they could spend in an operational area.

It's cheesy, but if you have your Obs scope up, the arrival of a plane will take you out of high TC. When that happens you can lower the schnorks and dive. Actually, I don't use the snorkel much because, as you see, it doesn't hide you very well. I only use it to approach convoys faster at PD (it's slightly harder for escorts to see than your surfaced boat). Otherwise, since you can always crash dive in time given a 'Radar Signal Detected' warning, you might as well run on the surface to recharge - that way you also go faster. It's too bad that the radar signature of the schnorkel isn't modelled as smaller than that of your boat (correct me if it actually is).

Just wondering, if you are doing this what speed do you guys run at while using the batteries?

You end up running at around 3 knots or so on batteries, to maximize the amount of time you are on batteries and to minimize the amount of time that you expose the snort. If you go faster than that, you have to recharge the batteries more often.

Have a look at the back of the GWX manual for what is probably all the info you need :up:
http://mysite.orange.co.uk/manual/GWX/GWX_MANUAL_EN_PF.pdf

Until radar and the late war antenas are developed I have the scope up with the snorkel. It help seeing what's going on around you on the surface, especially in good weather conditions

Actually, in real life they had to do that: Running the diesels pretty much wiped out the possibility of a sonar contact for all but the loudest and closest targets. With the snorkel up and the diesels running, the boat was essentially deaf as a post. I'm not sure, as it's been a while since I had a snorkel, but I don't think SHIII models this behavior.

Since you already have a rather large piece of hardware sticking above the surface, it would have been prudent to keep watch with a scope, which is what they did.

Some of the others have mentioned the time compression notification and that is what I use. I try to only use the snorkel at night and I have the attack periscope raised pointing at 0 bearing and the observation periscope raised and pointed at 180 bearing. I rarely go above 32x compression and when I see it all of a sudden drop to 8x compression I know that something is nearby (either a ship or a plane). I just pretend this is my notification from the scope operators or hydrophone operator and I go down to a deeper depth and listen for any ships or splashes in the water.

Thanks,
Ron

Thanks for all the suggestions.

What I'm doing now is using the snorkel almost all the time during daylight hours, with both periscopes raised. When sea conditions permit, I run the boat at a depth of 11m (rather than the default snorkel depth of 10m). I don't know if that extra meter actually makes a difference in terms of the game's AI, but it seems more realistic to do that.

I've noticed that when running at snorkel depth, approaching aircraft do show up on the Navigation Chart (F5), giving me time to react. Maybe this was happening before I kept the periscopes raised, and I just wasn't on that screen at the time.

Actually I think GWX has fixed that radar signature problem. However I have read reports on this forum that the Schnokel actually seems to SPAWN more aircraft when its raised (either a bug or a designers attempt to make undersea travel more interesting).