Hey, count me in on this action, I wanna play too.
I like your idea Poetic Hunter regarding a tutorial for the absolute newbie beginner. I have never played SHIII yet. I bought the game about a month ago and have just barely (over the Labor day weekend) loaded it onto my laptop. Unfortunately, I've run into a little snag trying to update it to v1.4b so I can't even get the mods on it yet.
<uh oh, long story coming on ...
trying to resist>
I've read enough to claim a five credit hour course stretching months worth of work from an accredited university. But my schedule only allows me an hour or two a week to mess with this. So I can read all about it, but I can't participate much. Hopefully this coming weekend I'll get the v1.4b update and the mods going. From all I've read, I'm going to bypass the stock SH3 and go straight for GWX3.0 to start. I've worked out a 10 year plan so I should be good for sub work for a while. In five years I will pull GWX off and load Living SH3 v5, it sounds like a really good mod too.
I'm anticipating the starting of a career and hopefully by the first weekend of October I can begin. They say, "in a classroom setting, the teacher always learns the most"; I'd love to help in writing a newbies crash course on how to start this game, but I'm afraid my schedule would hold everyone back, much like the convoy can only go as fast as the slowest ship.
So don't fret. I'm sure I'll see you out there on the vast expanse and stop you for some helpful information.
Lemme think here; 52 weeks (weekends) in a year, two hours a weekend will give me 104 hours. A 60 day patrol could take ... what, 12 hours on 8x speed.?. That's 12*2 = 24 weekends ... I should be able to get two whole patrols done in a years time. If I can manage to last the entire war, I'd need the whole 10 year plan just on GWX3.0, but given the odds of history, I should only last until 1941-42. That's do-able. 
By the way, keep the questions rolling. I can learn from these and so - in five years - I won't be asking questions regarding SH III and these guys here are working with SH VIII.