1st Patrol to U.S. coast and.......
 

So I get my first assignment to the U.S. coast. Grid CA87. I'm trying out the convoy route map mod so I follow one route all the way. Setup outside of Norfolk. Days go by and ..... nothing. No contacts, no convoys, no warships, nothing. So I went north to New York and still nothing. :damn: It's March of 1942, shouldn't I be getting something? Has anyone found anything big here? Also I just added radar to my boat. Anyone with info on how well this works in the game. Is it an automatic contact thing if something is in range or do I have to move the boat to use it effectively? :hmm:

ARe you playing vanilla sh3 or modded version ????

I'm using the improved convoys mod.

Don't know about improved convoys mod but I'd bet you'll find convoys outside Sydney, in BB59 and nearby. At least with vanilla 1.4b there's almost more you can handle. Watch out for shallow waters and planes, though. Or you could follow Halifax-Liverpool lane east and, past the shallow seabed. Do not engage while in there= :dead:

I am playing without Rub and have always found convoys leaving out of Halifax.

I think with the Radar, I always put it on continuous sweep after surfacing.

the first radar available has only a 20 degree search angle in front of your sub. You´ll have to turn the boat for covering a bigger area.
I guess a good watchcrew is better than that one. Maybe it has some use at night and foggy weather.

I've done several missions to the US coast in early to mid 42 and found very little. Few merchants, lots of DD's and armed trawlers. I though this was supposed to be the second "Happy Times". I have found ships and convoys off Nova Scotia, little to nothing off the US.

I only made one patrol to the East Coast, where I managed to find and sink only a couple of lone merchants (small coastal and a C2) around Boston - When I tried to head into NY I found nothing but tons of DDs and Elco/PT boats, eventually getting killed by some uber-early-radar-toting 4-stacker DD that somehow spotted me as soon as I surfaced at all-ahead-slow at 2am on a moonless night from 6,800m away :(

So much for the Second Happy Times :nope:

Now I'm on my second patrol in my Type IIA in October 1939, so it looks like it'll be a while before I get to see the East Coast again.

What random and scripted layer mods are you using? The American escorts ought to be utterly incompetent up until maybe late 1942 or 43. What's more, there seem to be excessive #'s of destroyers available to the allies during the Happy Times. These elite crews and heavy patrols simply bear no resemblence to reality. In fact there were barely any large escorts available, and the heavy single merchant traffic to most major U.S. ports was nearly defenceless.

My experience is that the convoys form slightly south east of Norfolk (right at the deep water mark) then head west towards norfolk, before turning Northeast into the convoy lane.

I don't have much experience in those sectors though, but playing vanilla 1.3 at the time I recall the traffic as a little dissapointing (my first trip went basically the same as yours, only with the bonus of my experience of relentless air patrols :)

iambecomelife is correct !! During the first 4 months, only coast
guard vessels and a few armed trawlers from the Brits were the
only sub protection for the entire east coast. After 4 months, a
couple of old 4-stackers were included too. Admiral King would
not allow any modern DDs to leave the Fleets at the major
American ports. Even aircraft were in short supply against subs
till so many merchants were being sunk that everone started
screaming about it....


JIM

Yeah - that's what I was figuring too - I was sorely disappointed to find that 4-stacker bearing down on me from 6,800m away like that, and I was still too shallow to survive it when he got to me and started dropping his DCs :( (In fact, I was so ticked at the time that I actually did some research to try to figure out if he might have had some radar to spot me with, but everything I found indicated that it was highly unlikely that he would have been able to spot me from that range even if he had been equipped with the surface radar available at that time, but I just chalked it up to bad luck/game glitch and started another career anyway.)

IIRC, I was not running any mods other than some crew graphic and sound/speech/radio traffic mods at the time - just plain 1.4b - I'm not absolutely sure about that because I had been having some CTD problems with RUB 1.41/1.42 for some reason and was experimenting back and forth a bit with and without RUB back when this happened a few weeks ago.