[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Tinkering

I run out of torpedoes about one-quarter of the way to my patrol grid.

There is nothing wrong with turning around and heading home at that point. As mentioned above, if you're playing the stock game you get 500 renown for reaching your grid and another 200 for staying there 24 hours. You can get a lot more than that just sinking a lot of ships. Also as mentioned, it you're playing GWX there is NO renown for doing either, so unless it means something to you as a history buff there is no reason for even going there.

Then finally make my way to the grid and limp back to port about out of fuel.

I'm guessing you're going there at Standard Speed or faster. Use Ahead 1/3 (the second setting, or about 8 knots) and you'll reach your grid with enough fuel to cruise for at least a month and still make it home with juice to spare.

I have renown issues at this point (-300.) I think in Mission 4 I sank way too many neutral ships.

Try not to sink any. Another thing you can do is go into your Silent Hunter 3 folder, and open Data/Cfg. Near the top you'll see the following item:

[RENOWN]
RenownReachGridObjCompleted=500
RenownPatrolGridObjCompleted=200
CompletedPatrol=100
NEUTRAL=-1
ALLIED=1
AXIS=-10
WrongShipSunk=-5000
FirstRankRenown=1000
SecondRankRenown=3500
EndCampaign=-5000

In GWX the first two will both say '0'.
You can change those to say anything you want.

The ones I've changed are

NEUTRAL=0
ALLIED=1
AXIS=-1

And my reason for doing so is based on reality. Sinking a neutral ship was frowned upon by the higher-ups, but if the ship was in a convoy it was considered fair game, and even if not kaluens were almost never punished for it. With it set to '0' I don't get any reward for sinking a neutral, but I don't get rewarded for it either.

On a couple of occasions kaleuns accidentally sank friendly ships. In ever case the kaleun was found 'not guilty' as it was usually a case of the target ship being in the wrong place and disguised as an Allied merchant. I figure I should lose some renown for sinking a friendly, but not ten times' worth.

Still trying to figure out the renown factors. Did a search and found a couple of informing threads.

To see the renown awarded for any particular ship, look in Data/Sea and then the ship folder. The very first file is a Cfg file that can be opened with Notepad. You'll see the Renown Awarded line for that ship. For example, NBBNelson gets you 1400 renown, and NLL (the Liberty Ship) is worth 220.

I was wondering if using the English Channel is a problem..

Not in stock. With GWX it's a lot more dangerous, and should be discouraged. In real life it was a suicide run.

BdU forbade me from going through there in October '39, and was wondering if this caused me problems.

If you're worried about renown, then don't. You never lose renown for going somewhere. Also, that order, like most of the radio messages, is there for flavor only, and in the game means nothing at all.

I am using 1.4b and GWX 3.0, with a few mods.

For a serious improvement in the way you see the game, try SH3 Commander. It's not a mod, it works with any mod, and it changes so many things you won't believe the difference.