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Originally Posted by Dietrich
If the "class" of ship was identified, then the "tonnage" was indeed a precise number. It is the registered cargo capacity of the ship.
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Exactly so. Ships could be identified from the ID books available. I actually copied this note from a cargo ship I was researching:
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Empire Explorer: Converted from liner Inanda. What did it look like? U-boat captain who sank her reported sinking Inanda, which means that A) his ID book contained precise information, and B) the ship still looked enough like her old self to be recognizable. Details - 75 survivors were rescued by a single MTB.
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For some ships (such as the Liberty cargo ship), the registered tonnage was fixed and that type of ship was mass produced and easily recognised.
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Actually that's not quite true. The GRT (Gross Registered Tonnage) was actually the number registered with the insurance company, and indeed it never changed. However, even the mass-produced Liberties varied a lot, and I'm still not sure why. American Liberties ranged from 7176 tons all the way up to 7240, and the British ones went from 7219 to 7255. That said, they were confined to a few specific numbers within those ranges, and were not random.
One other thing to remember is that a lot of reported tonnages were indeed wrong. The exact tonnages we get in the game should probably be considered the number arrived at after BdU confirmed the sinking via records obtained before the war, or the number confirmed after the war. Unfortunately, as with 'Weapons Officer Assistance', the numbers are probably a lot more precise than what they knew at the time.