I was speaking with a friend a while back and went round to his house for coffee. He showed me some of the arrangements for his computer, the setup he uses for playing Silent Hunter (in this case III). He had a load of really nice books there, some posters, and even a real-life stopwatch for timing the torpedoes - his Captain's Bunk.
Over the last few months I've been building up quite a collection of these items, mostly with the intent of increasing the realism of my games by having real-world items to help - like the stopwatch. Most of these items are things that are already in the game, or that you can get mods for. But doing it in real life (flicking through a real hardcopy recognition manual rather than clicking on the screen, for example).
Have a look at some of the photos:
Main gaming area - I use the stopwatch instead of the one on the attack scope - and also for timing speed when they cross the scope.
Reference guides. Top to bottom, the U-Jagd, then controls (and yes, that compass is to tell me the difference between port and starboard
), below that thing's for making my war diaries. Top is a hours per week chart (so when the LI says "576 hours until course end", I know he means 24 days). Then there's a tool for working out how far a target was based on the run time of your torpedoes - helpful when you have map updates disabled. And below that, sea state charts.
Books for those Atlantic crossings.
Other ref docs - Beaufort scale pictures and a nomograph (like the pullout one on the map).
All good Kaleuns need their white cap!
A full sized map (printed and badly selotaped by me) but kindly provided by Reinhard Hardegen.
What sort of setup do you guys and gals have? Not everyone has a shared computer and can customize like this. But it's interesting to see
.