weapons officer asleep on the job
 

i just started a new campaign this morning in 1941 with a type IX and sailed south towards dakar. about halfway there i got a report of a small convoy just 30 miles east of me so i hustled over there. it was about midnight, 7 knot winds and heavy rain. the ships seemed very spread out with only one escort. i could only see ships within about 800-1000m but that was enough i think. after a couple of hurried attempts went bad, i made a perfect attack on a freighter. distance was about 550m and i was lined up perfectly, and on the surface. i COULD NOT get a lock on the guy. no one on my crew even recognized that there was a ship there even though it was plain as day. my watch crew was maxed out too. so the freighter sailed on and i missed my chance. it was so discouraging i just quit the game right there.

this is in GWX3. why is it so hard to get a lock on targets in gwx? what am i supposed to do about this? its so frustrating!

What's the green bar above your watch crew look like? I'm assuming you're making a surfaced attack, based on your description. Either way, switch everyone on the bridge out for rested crewmembers, and if at all possible, crewmembers with watchman training. That's the only advice I can offer.

I got the same thing happen to me recently, i started a new career with GW3 in january 42 in a IXB and for my maiden patrol i got some blind watch crew in the conning tower.

Twice in a row they failed to spot a destroyer, actually they failed to spot the whole 3 ships convoy. I mean i had this happen to me before, but the weather was awful or it was at night, once i got rammed by a destroyer in the med and another time an armed freighter emerged from the fog right in front of the U-boat but here it was different. The weather was clear, during the day and in the F4 view i could see the ships on the horizon, it was less than 3 kms but no contact report or anything from the WO and nothing on the map. I also shadowed this small convoy and waited submerged in ambush but the hydrophone failed to spot anything and i missed the convoy. It was a little odd.

I sailed back to the harbour and the next mission was fine. I blamed it on the fact it was my first patrol with a green crew. :dead:

Was the ship you were trying to lock onto one you may have hit earlier?
Because the only time this happens to me is when trying to lock onto a ship that is already going down. I hit one once and it showed no damage, and took hours to go down, I knew I hit it with two direct hits and after that could not keep a lock. So I just sat there forever watching till it finnaly went down.

It's not the weapon officer, but the watch officer that goes on the brigge. If he's not on the bridge I seem to get very few visual reports, if not nothing at all. Or could the crew be too tired?

thanks i meant the watch officer. maybe it was a tired crew because we had been running in the rain chasing down this convoy for a long time but none of them showed fatigue and the watch officer was on the conning tower with them and i had a full green bar up there. i guess if this happens again i'll try switching out the crew right before an attack just for good measure.