Every once in a while between all the light-boat incidents and accidental beaching I actually manage to do something right.
The Image above was taken seconds after a miracle happened. Patrol 6, I was traveling through scapa flow on my way to my favorite hunting grounds when my sonar-man picks up a merchant heading toward me.
Now usually:
Heavy Rains + Heavy Fog + Heavy Winds = No attempting to shoot at the floaty things that BDU doesn't like.
Also I'm not the best manual TDC man. My average shots go like this.
- Get the data to the best of my abilities, I usually double check myself twice.
- Fire a torpedo that religiously always goes a few meters behind my intended target.
- Re-position my gyroscope to be aiming in front of the merchant to compensate for my poor aiming abilities.
- Fire a torpedo that hits the ship.
Only one time have I managed to hit my intended target the first time with the tdc, and it was a dud.
And that's peak weather conditions.
Now don't ask me why I decided to go after this one. It could've been the fact that I wasn't thinking straight, or the fact that I hadn't got a single kill yet that patrol. But I did.
I was about 500-450m away (I didn't even bother collecting his data so this is just a rough estimate.) and he was about to pass right in front of me. I didn't bother fooling with my TDC because there was no way I was going to get an accurate reading in this weather. Despite this I did actually bother with setting my torpedo.
- Fast Speed setting
- Impact only
- Gyro angle 0
Open Torpedo Tube
Torpedo Los!
The torpedo launched out the front and I already knew....there's no way this is going to work, I can't even hit them in nice weather WITH the tdc how is this one going to...
"Torpedo Impact!"
The ship slowly grinded to a halt and I hit it with my stern torpedo to finish it off a few minutes later. Sometimes you get lucky I guess. 