Encountered my first ever Task Force.....
 

.....in the Irish Sea aroundabout mid-October 1939 but alas it was on the tail end of my patrol and we'd only one torp left in the stern tube. We spotted 2 Dido light cruisers and a Southampton cruiser being escorted by a Tribal, a Hunt and 2 J class destroyers belting Northwards at 25knots off my port beam about 6000meters. No chance in hell of getting a shot off even if we'd had more fish to spare. At least I didn't have to let a carrier or a big ass battleship go, I'd never have forgiven myself!!

:arrgh!: :88) :arrgh!:

Now that is not really the way it was done. No Task Force would
have DEs or Corvettes as escorts. They are too slow and would
not let the faster Cruisers and Desroyers reach max speed if
they had too....


JIM


PS. 25 kts would have a Hunt DE running at Flank speed to keep
up and would eventually cause an engine breakdown !!

Really? I didn't know that, I thought almost all DE's/DD's were capable of making around 25-30knots, even in 1939. I had thought originally that as the war progressed, the faster escorts were manufactured directly in line with the U-boot threat and their speed was upped to 30-36knots.

Why does the game do this? Surely the devs wouldn't do something as half-assed as that!! I mean hell, it wouldn't take anybody very long to search the web and find out everything needed to make the game more historically accurate, and these guys got paid big bucks to do that. To be honest, I'm starting to get pretty disappointed with some of the features of the game, although it's still the best WWII subsim around, no questions asked, there is still sooooo much room for improvement and thats a shame.

I mean, who the hell wants uberleet escorts, inaccurate and mismatched convoy composition and innacurate historical information?? Not this Kapitane anyway!!

In SH3 all of those classes of ships are considered DDs, though. They also can all move at atleast 21 kts, too.

I guess you're right. I was about to post that all the escorts listed are destroyers but you have a point about the Hunts, which were slow for DD's. The convoy and taskforce composition for the default game is strange at times - for instance, the excessively heavy escorts for early war convoys, and large fleet units sailing at 7-9 kts in convoy. We need a way to get escorting battleships and cruisers to keep station several miles away at high speed, but I guess that would be impossible with the current AI.

That's something I've been thinking about as well. When the Hood was smashed, the German ships held sufficient distance between themselves, as the doctrine told them to! If they were too close, the observers/rangers would have an easy task of plotting fire, and it also takes the gunners a tad longer to aim.