[Dogfish40]

Originally Posted by Excelsior82

Hey guys,

I'm not quite new to Silent Hunter although I'm not a god-skipper neither, but I have wasted a decent amount of time on SH1, SH2, SH3 and SH4.

I'm currently on SH4, un-modded, and while on patrol, my watch spots two ships at night, one medium gunboat and a destroyer a bit farther.

I'm trailing the gunboat for 30 minutes and I engage her with my cannon when she's 2160 miles away because she spotted me and was going to escape or attack.

This part is okay, I feed her 5 shots of HE and she started to sink (ain't that a little fast ?).

In the meantime I lost the destroyer from sight, but after keeping up my route, I notice the destroyer sits quietly in the water, waiting for a submerged submarine to send her to Davy Jones locker.

And here I come, submergeing some 2800 miles before I reach her, then I keep going silently, and I manage to approach her at 550 miles without been detected.

I'm very close yet and I decide to take her down now. I send two fishes and wait for the ka-boom, but she started her engines and dodged.

I'm a bit startled and decide to reload and retry, in order to see when she spotted the torpedoes. It appears, she saw the torpedoes some 20 seconds before the hit (that's when I saw her running her engines), she runs for some seconds and sits again... I shoot her again, and she does the same.

I've loaded the game 3 times and was unable to pierce any hole in that crappy destroyer (my sub is a S-18 with Mark10, so I sent let's say 12 torpedoes which all missed, and I am not in realistic aiming mode)


There, I'm no more startled, but astonished, because whatever I do, she always dodge my fishes, and she doesn't even dare to poo grenades on me. She just moves away and continue sitting.
I've tried to attack her from several angles, but no luck.

Anyone has a clue why this happens ?

An Elephant? I don't know about that. One of the things that many Destroyer designs have is being compact. That is, Small, Lightweight and Fast! You will notice that many of the Destroyers in the recognition manual are barely 1000 tons and many of these were considered to be too small to warrent wasting a torpedo on. Because of the fact that they could out-manuver a torpedo, subs generally gave Destroyers or Destroyer patrols a wide berth. It was considered suicidal to attack more than one at any time (or at least a dance with the Devil). Most of the attacks made by US subs on DD's were made in the first few months of the war when the Subs were still learning (quickly) about new wartime tactics.
If you still want to attack a DD, set yourself up for silent running. Either get him to come to you or get him stopped, and fire at him as close as possible (slightly over 500yrds) preferably. If he knows you're there, come back another day! Good Luck and Good Hunting!
D40