Me next....
I would play with Grey Wolves Expansion (GWX) installed right from the start, if for nothing more than the improved graphics and additional ships. It's just SHIII perked up, it doesn't make massive changes to the way you play anyway. You need nothing further for now.
Manual solutions on moving ships with no assistance require a fair bit of practice, start with the weapons officer doing it all and you just picking the targets and pulling the trigger. On a single ship it is do-able, but with multiple convoy targets it gets mental.
As for attacks, yes you are best to take the time to set up with a side on attack. End on shots are possible, but makes things more difficult for yourself. Also the impact trigger on torps only works reliably almost straight on. The more angled the hit, the more likely it will bounce off harmlessly. You can use magnetic triggering by firing just under the keel of the ship, theoretically much more destructive, but early torps are rather unreliable and as likely to blow up half way there as blow the ship in half.
Sonar issues have been explained, they're mounted on the sides so can't hear well directly front or backwards, particularly with your engines whirling away. If you want to hear well, go deep and go slow & quiet. You can upgrade to better systems later in the war, but you still can't hear behind you. That wasn't fixed until much later in the late cold war with towed arrays a mile behind the sub.
When on patrol I tend to head straight for the patrol grid, but make sure to submerge a few times a day and slow to a couple of knots to see if I hear anything nearby. Once I've got my 24 hours in the patrol grid done, I tend to go wait in the western approaches for convoys. Convoys to and from America have to go around Ireland to get to the British ports, so hanging around south or north west of Ireland you will eventually find one. Lone ships are good practice, but convoys have the big targets.
When attacking convoys you can fire a couple of eels at a couple of big targets, or fire off one each at 4 targets. I favour a single torp per target, and they either sink from the lucky shot, or more often they are slowed or go dead in the water. This means I just need to hang around till the escorts move off with the rest of the convoy before surfacing to finish them off with the deck gun. Easy pickings and saves torpedoes. Later in the war they are usually armed with their own deck guns, so it's a case of setting up an easy shot on a sitting duck.
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