There's a Work In Progress mod to increase the visibility range in the sim.
See the 'Can this be a work-around for the 8 KM visibility?' thread.
Basically it increases the 'simmed area' around the boat to about 17km or so. So the U-boat can spot smoke from enemy ships at that range, instead of the 7km max we have now.
This may solve the problem of battleship ranges as well, since with the visibility maximum range increased, the detection and firing ranges of the AI ships could be increased as well.
One drawback I can foresee is that it may not be possible to increase the firing range of battleships without increasing the firing range of destroyers as well. So we could find our U-boats being detected and fired at on the surface by destroyers at ranges of about 15 km! Although the 4.7" guns of a destroyer could fire that far (max range of a 4.7" gun was 17 km), the lookouts are unlikely to spot a surfaced U-boat at that distance due to the curvature of the earth hiding the low silhouette of the boat from the destroyer's view.
Also, the fact that the AI gunnery is unrealistically accurate in SH3 would be a problem at longer ranges.
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