Patrol 3 & Strange Behaviour
 

Hello All,

Firstly, I am loving this game, having added on GWX2. Now on Patrol 3 in a VIIB out of Kiel and something strange (to me) is happening.

Just to the East of the Shetlands, I spied a lone warship. It was a crisp, still Jan 40 morning, pink and duck shell blue sky, not a ripple on the sea. I sailed up to this warship, on the surface, for a look (not very clever, but I was curious). It just sat there doing nothing. 5,000, 4,000, 3,000 m: still nothing: It was completely stationary, a C&D classes British Destroyer. At 1,000 m I stopped, manned the deck gun and fired a shell at it: still nothing. 15 shells later, it sank gently, without having so much as fired a peashooter. Is that normal?

2 days later, I encounter my first convoy on a stormy night, inbound, NW of Ireland. I crept alongside it for most of the night, trying to overtake, popping up the periscope occassionally to see what was on offer: a 3 x 4 grid of merchants, mostly 2,000 tonners, but with 3 Ore Carriers in the centre. In the confusion of the storm and the melee of sound contacts, I inadvertendly came to persicope depth INSIDE the convoy. 2 salvoes of 2 at 2 of the ore carriers: one broke in half, the other started burning merrily. THEN, immediately after the torpedoes struck, the ships did a weird thing: the 5 northern most freighters headed due south and the remaining 5 southerly ones head due north, like a bizarre dance routine. I could see the 2 destroyers outside of the convoy zig zagging around like crazy trying to get at me, but couldn't get near in the confusion: this allowed me to sink a Granville on the surface at 250 m with gunfire, sailing alongside, raking the water line, before I headed for the depths, out on the wakeside of the original convoy path. Again, this seems strange behaviour to me: was I just incredibly lucky?

I put the gramophone on and had a beer after that.

No, and yes you were incredibly lucky! So were the merchants who didn't hit each other! :o

First of all, welcome aboard Slateford.

Pasive destroyer:

Was it tea time? :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:
Seriously, never heard of anything like that. Ditto on the convoy.

Welcome Slateford :D

You had an interesting patrol. :yep:

Thank you for the welcome!

As you might have guessed, my luck ran out: I doubled back on the dancing convoy, even though it was getting perilously close to the British mainland, for another nibble. The next evening was quite still but again, I managed to slip inside the destroyer screen at persicope depth silent running, cutting diagonally through the small fry with my eye on 2 large merchants: Then, in my self-satisfied smugness, I popped up the periscope and locked on the furthest of the two LM's, fatally forgetting to check what was going on around me as I licked my lips at the crosshairs ticking down 25,20,15 as the angle on bow ticked up 75,78, 82 degrees, salvo of two for the first one, flood tubes 1 & 3....suddenly the periscope blacked out (or more accurately, greyed out): small merchant 10 m ahead...cue grinding metal noises...

Currently somewhere south of Oslo with nothing but the engines working, wondering gow to explain this to Onkel Karl :nope:

Turn around and head for New York. :p

Sounds like all the ships have entered into the anti collision routine. This happens at times and can take a while for them to sort themselves out again.

Hard coded I'm afraid....nothing can be done about it.