Convoy interception
 

Are there any decent guides on how to intercept convoys during the early period of the war before radar is available. I am mainly referring to map contacts that will just say going SW so you do not get a perfect path. Just wondering if there is a fairly good way that skippers would have used to try to intercept. I am playing with TMO and RSRD without map updates

One more thing I do know about Drebbels old post in Guides and Training but the pictures are broken so I cant get a visual of what hes doing.

You haven't layed eyes on the convoy yet, you just have a report of one, with the co-ordinates in the alerts box?

I pretty much have become very skeptical of radio reports. Most of the time I never can find the buggers unless it's an Ultra intercept. Ultra intercepts I try to find. Others I ignore as most of them seem to be just plain wrong.

Thanks
 

Nice thanks for the quick replies yall. Rockin also looking forward to trying this mod your working on as I saw it posted on your youtube while I was refreshing myself on some manual tactics

Basically, as I recall, the reports are connected to each group created, a value for it, so depending on mods, each group may give more contacts, it's basically a percentage thing. As I recall, stock gives you many. If you set the value high enough, basically you get almost a constant clear path. The problem, with traffic in stock and some other mods, it spawns and despawns damn near anywhere in the sea and the path itself can often make no sense, compared to a mod like RSRD where traffic spawns at a port and despawns at a port. Also, groups change directions along their course several times, but usually head in the general direction as the report. Try to find a bottleneck, a strait, you can catch it in.

RR: What indicates an "Ultra intercept" ?

running SH5 no Mods as of yet

In SH4, your radio message will tell you it's an ULTRA message. This was a decoding of the Japanese war codes, thanks to some Navaho decoders taking advantage of some similarity between Japanese and Navaho. Just as we could intercept German coded messages and read them in real time, also we had that capability in the Pacific.

Of course, when you can read the enemy's mail you can't operate on that information all the time. Churchill infamously sacrificed the city of Coventry to preserve the secret that we could read the Enigma. The mission to shoot down Yamamoto's plane was almost called off because of the possible exposure of the fact that we could read Japanese coded messages. Finally, it was decided that killing Yamamoto would yield greater gains, even if we lost the ability to read Japanese messages.

Thanks, RR, I guess I need to read all of those convoy reported messages a little more closely.

HMMM would those messages run my TC back to 1x? I have that happen now & then for an important message from fleet, or when I get visible targets, or an airplane, and occasionally for nothing in particular .

It's going to depend on the mods you're running, but in stock an ULTRA message will take you down to x1.