Hi guys,
I've been lurking on subsim for one month now and learned a lot thanks to your generosity. Thank you for your help!
I bought Silent Hunter AFAIR in '05 or '06, as soon as it became available in Polish stores. However my computer couldn't deal with this game, so I waited 'till I got a new one and had enough spare time to loose
I'm playing stock SH3 v.1.4b (I think
. I've read a lot about mods but I want to finish my first career before tweaking the game. Currently I'm on my 5th patrol, it's April 1940. From the start I play on high realism, I only left external view for screenshots and dud torpedos (I'm not ready for this yet
The biggest challenge of my career so far was my stupid raid on Scapa
After reading Prien's book I told myself 'I can do this'. I waited till night, surfaced, set all ahead (i'm not sure about English terms here), set TC for 1024 and was pretty happy, when my crew shouted 'ship spotted'. To my suprise I was being shot at by a DD so close it was scary. For sure closer than 500m he was. I ordered crash dive, changed depth orders (there wasn't enough space under the keel, water was pretty shallow).
I was pretty sure I was a goner, so I used external view to watch the show. After very short period I was being attacked by 5 destroyers. By cheating (pressing dot to see all contacts) I learned that 5 ships were speeding to my position, 2 additional destroyers and 3 trawlers or something like this.
The funny part is that by running close to the bottom (I don't remember exact depth but it was pretty shallow) and running with speed of 1 knot I managed to escape with more than 80% of hull integrity. It took me at least 2 hours RT, but I was still more suprised than reliefed.
I mean - this is my first sim, I'm a newbie and 5 DD's cannot kill me? Maybe that's beacuse the year was 1939, I don't know. I was in a VIIB, of course running with top speed on a surface I didn't even get close to port entrance, and that's probably saved me.
It takes me a lot of RT hours to finish a patrol, this game is time consuming. For now I'm somewhat displeased with the game engine - crew fatigue, constant (I mean constant) bad weather, it's virtually impossible to get distance to contact through periscope). I only got one BdU convoy report, of course I was out of torps back then. So after so many days at sea I never saw more than 2 merchants at once. This is dissapointing. The word 'convoy' is still a mystery to me
By playing I learned that in AN13 one can find a lot of lonely C2's, rarely C3's. In my game I only encounter C2, C3, DD and some small merchants and trawlers. Nothing big. This is becoming rather dull
And here for my questions:
1. in some post I stumbled upon a place on map called 'tanker alley'. Can someone tell me in which grid this alley can be found?
2. where (in stock game) can I find convoys?
3. what's wrong with this forum?
When I was lurking everything was OK. Now that I registered (being logged in)
I see posts in some wacky order. First post on first page of a thread is always the newest, so in order to find a firstly-posted post in a thread I have to click my way to the last page and then scroll down to the bottom, and, when first post is long, scroll a little up. This IS frustrating
I'm viewing forum in a linear mode. I searched for some options to fix the order but failed. Can someone please help me with this issue? I'm using Chrome.
Greetings from Poland!
Kubryk
PS
Thanks to subsim I learned the silliness of riding with TC 1024 on enemy-infested waters, so please don't point that out :rotfl: