Map with mined areas!
 

i wonder if there is a map with mined areas off the british coast. in my last career i tried to wait for ships about 30(!) miles away from a british harbour on the east coast, when sailing into a minefield - dead.

i loaded the savegame and was sailing carefully mile for mile near to the shore. and then i saw them: MINES! hell a lot of them, under the water surface. this was ugly to see...these spikey, rusty balls...

i know, that there only was a small channel without mines, that lead to the harbours, but is there a map somewhere, to know exactly how the british mined their harbour entrances?

The best you can do is take a snapshot of the Mission Editor.

IRL both sides extensively mined each others waterways and channels. The safe routes around the UK were less than a km across and had to be constantly swept to keep them safe. Even then there were numerous losses, and the Luftwaffe used to regularly mine inside the 'safe' routes.

A u-boat captain had little to no idea where enemy and friendly mines were once he left base and he had to work on educated guesses. There was a programme on TV not long ago where three u-boat wrecks were discovered within a couple of km of each other - they all fell victim to a new UK minefield within a couple of days.

I have a ME snapshot that shows the whole of the UK with mined areas - it's enough to give me a general feel for where mines are, but not enough to do any detailed planning. Bear in mind that minefield density is important and that minefields were laid at varying depths - the UK minefields were designed to sink surface ships but there were still mines below keel level (15-20m) within the safe lanes that were designed to sink u-boats.

interesting! thanks!

The minefields scripted into GWX are pretty close to what the real deal was.

We were fortunate enough to be given copies of the Admiralty charts but unfortunately and to the best of my belief they have never been released for public viewing by the authorities.

I just watched few DVD's of u-boat and battle of atlantic documents. Learning material:know:

Area around Orkney and Shetland island very heavily mined and germans called it the rose garden. Dover strait got plenty of those awful and surprising things too. Entrance to Irirsh sea and areas south of Ireland vere mined too. This was before french atlantic ports. Idea was to prevent access from german u boats to atlantic.

It is very likely there are more areas too.

how did the uboat commanders noticed them if they had a high suspiscion of mines?

did they use sonar? or hydro ? or submerge a bit and look thru the periscope? how did they steer between them irl ?

U-boat commanders would avoid known mined areas and new enemy minefields would be reported when found,either by a ship hitting them or by sighting of mine laying by ship or aircraft. They generally had to apply the 'big sea, small mine' theory.

Passive sonar (hydrophones) won't pick up anything that's not making noise. Active sonar might bounce off the mines in the proper fashion, but that many small objects would give a hard-to-determine return. The water is far too dark and murky to see mines (or falling depth charges) through a periscope lens.

The answer is they didn't have a clue, except as has been described above.

no wonder, many boats where sunk by mines...especially when leaving/returning harbours, or sailing in the entrance of the western areas to the british isle.

The approaches to the Irish Sea and English Channel were called Winston's doormat. Lots of mines and the welcome sign was definately not out.

In reality there were a lot more mines out there in RL than in game
Game cannot handle the amount and density there should be

I've encountered that in both GWX and vanilla SH3 and that ***t is HAIR RAISING!

I was snooping the west entrance to Scapa in early 1940 the next patrol after pulling a duplication of Prien's feat...when I left in late '39, the run out that west channel was wide open (aside from frantically dodging the elco boats and trying to reach open water before the shore batteries could see me).

When I came back in early '40, I was snooping and happened to see a mine as the periscope was going up...

I went to external view and I was sitting in a pocket between several mines (it gave me the "how the hell did I not hit ANY of them!?!!?:o" reaction) and ended up slowly backing out then hauling butt out to clear waters.

The only way to deal with it is to avoid known minefields and trust that you'll slide between any mines you come across...if you're wrong, that'll be all she wrote in short order!

in RL you probably could have walked from england to france without getting your torso wet just walking on the mines

Terrible weapon...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_mine

The real intelligent Kaleuns carried trained seagulls similar to the carrier pigeons used by the army.

http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/1309/seagullmine.jpg