A few points, most of them already covered to varying degrees:
TC: I never hunt at more than 128x. If I'm in transit through an area with a reasonable chance of contact, or aircraft, I do so at no more than 256x.
Unless the visibility is unrestricted, I spend a lot of time submerged if hunting. If you set your speed manually to 1knt you can stay under until you reach 50% on the O2 guage without depleting your battery to any extent. Throw in some course changes of 60 degrees here and there to avoid a fixed blindspot arc in your hunt area. With half decent crew member on hydrophone, nothing much will get past you. It also removes the issue of aircraft for much of your hunting.
The other benefit to this is you use very little in the way of fuel - people posting that they struggle with fuel on a 'normal' patrol simply must be burning it up running around with to no real purpose. My rule is this: if I've nowhere to go, I run at low speed if on the surface. You can easily spend 12-18hrs submerged at 1knt and then recharge the battery in a matter of hours. Even if you don't recharge, you'll still have 90%+ of capacity after such a period submerged. The only thing that drives me to the surface is O2.
IF the system allowed you to spot smoke on horizon, etc, then there would be more reaon for being on the surface (fact is the smoke from a convoy could be seen well over the horizon vs. the ships themselves).
Cheers
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