Convoy attack on rough weather
 

Hello everyone,

great forum you got here for a great game, plenty of useful info.

But enough brown nosing and on to the question :)

Is there any way to attack an escorted convoy in rough weather conditions?

My situation is as follows: sky is clear (day or night), no rain; but there are 5 to 10 meters waves, so I can't hardly use the periscope; at periscope depth I see only water, and if I go at 45 or so sometimes the sub is mostly out of the water and clearly visible

If a lonly Merchant passes my way I set up an attack using "sonar only" as WenerSobe explains in his excellent video :yep:

But what if I detect a convoy, I don't dare using the sonar in fear of being detected, and as said before the periscope is mostly useless.

So should I just let them go showing my teeth to them and bitting my nails

By the way, I'm using patch 1.4 and no mods, and of course manual targeting.

Cheers.

You can try and raise your depth to 55 or 50 feet and see if this does anything. Other than that you are going to have to rely on snapshot observations if you want to sink any of the ships. Trial and error and hope for luck.

The snapshot blinks between waves should work well. That's what I do.

Notice though that in high waves, your sub deck and/or sail is only visible in the troughs between the waves. For the enemy to see you, they would have to be able to see down into the trough from a distance.

I suspect this is why the game designers created the wave model the way it is so vessels are riding a base level "depth" and the waves are built up upon this base level and the vessel never really changes height to climb up onto a wave, but rides the bottom of the low waves while the high ones slosh over (with a little "porpoise" pitch action thrown in.) In other words, you never really increase height by riding up onto the top of a wave. Rather, you ride accross the bottom of the base line and waves wash over the top of you.


This model simplifies the sighting calculations for the game designer. They only need to check if part(s) of the model appear above the wave height based on the base depth comparison. They don't also have to figure out if your riding the top or bottom of a wave since you are always riding the bottom and the bottom is your depth.

I've had successful attacks against convoys by constantly checking the distance to the closest contact and using the distance my sub parts are exposed above the average waves as my exposure height. Needless to say, the closer you are to the target, the more exposed you are. At night in rough weather and fog, I've been able to get very close to 1000 yards to low-skill merchants as long as an aware escort wasn't close enough to spot me with their extended awareness level. If you are that close to two or more merchants, the sighting probability goes up.
-Pv-

Well, I've tried using this snapshot technique your are talking about on a couple lonsome merchants I found on my way to the China see but I have to rise up to 45 feet to see anything and still I have to wait for them to get close (under 3500 feet) to identify the boat and be able to start measuring parameters, but still feel more confortable using the sonar than the periscope.

Something new a found is that my torpedoes tend to go under the keel of the merchants in this high waves sea, and that even when I set the traveling depth of the torpedo to 5 or 7 feet. This seems to go agains what -Pv- said about the boats not moving up and down with the waves. Did any of you experience this too?

Oh, and its funny to see the torpedos fly above the water in a perfect straight line :o when they go through the depression between two waves.

There's two things at work here:
1) The simplified wave model.
2) The historic modeling of early torpedo failures where the torp would not run at the selected depth, but tend to run deeper. Tops set too shallow would get damaged by the waves and forced off course or into circle runs.
-Pv-