[R3dakted]

The craziest thing to happen to me so far in SH4 has to be my first encounter with a Yamato-class BB.

I received a Flash message during the ingress to my official patrol area that said that a Jap TF was enroute from Truk to Home Waters. Since I was within range of the projected track of the TF, I throttled up and moseyed over to patrol the area the TF was likely to transit on the final leg of its journey to the Mainland.

After patrolling for about 24hrs my radar op spotted a blip on his scope that was further offshore from my patrol area, but roughly on track for the heading I was expecting the TF to steam in from.

I turned to face the new contact, doing a gentle 10kts and letting them continue to head toward me. Lo and behold, a little while later the radar screen suddenly had around ten more contacts, and they were tracking in my direction at a steady rate. I tracked them on the scope for a while, enough to get a rough idea of their speed, which i tagged as being somewhere around 17kts. As the weather was a little too calm for my liking I elected to submerge and wait for them to come into visual range - and I did NOT want to be spotted prematurely by patrolling aircraft. In the meantime, my hydrophone operators kept me informed of the rough track of the contacts - and they were still heading straight towards me. All the better for my batteries. I kept an ear on the hydrophones and waited, in the meantime calculating approximately when the contacts would be in visual range.

At the allotted time I slid up to periscope depth, raised the Attack scope and nearly choked - where there had been fine weather, there was now a bleeding great thunderstorm and visibility was close to zero. More than a little annoyed I surfaced the boat and flicked the radars on. The TF was still on its expected track and I decided that I was going to take a shot at it, thunderstorm or not. To that end I chose to approach them from their starboard beam as it seemed to me that there were only one or two escorts on that side of the TF.

I set the solution up to 340 degrees, 17kts, AoB at 70 degrees starboard. There would be no TDC tracking for this shot. I took position at 80ft and waited, and went to Silent Running.

After what seemed like forever I had at least two strong contacts coming up to 340 degrees on the hydrophone. I fired a full spread of torps with around ten seconds between them. I ducked down to 150ft and turned parallel to the line of advance of the TF, as there were contacts coming up fast on my port beam and I really didn't feel like getting rammed by them.

Three hits!

I turned and came up to 80ft depth and shot the rear tubes with a wide spread in the general direction of the other passing ships, hoping to score a lucky hit or two. Sadly, no torps connected this time around. We heard pinging, but no depth charge drops.

Ducking down to 200ft we set about reloading the tubes, which attracted some attention. Still, no depth charges in the water, just more pinging. After the tubes were finally reloaded we slid up to periscope depth for a quick look around - and saw that the weather and visibility were still terrible. There were no hydrophone contacts nearby that we knew of. Surfacing, the radar guy told me that the TF was hightailing it out of the area towards the general direction of Tokyo.. but that there was also a single contact about 6000 yds away, back near where I'd fired the first shots. The contact was stationary. I figured it was most likely a DD, but decided to go back and investigate anyway. So back we went, ducking under the thermal layer so that we could risk Ahead 2/3rds.

A bit later on we risked coming up to Radar depth for a quick sweep and found that the contact was still roughly in the same place. We stalked in for a closer look, keeping the scope up. At a range of around 1000 yards I decided to take a shot. Hit! No kill though, and the shape we saw looming out of the fog when the torp exploded was far too tall for a DD. So I fired the rest of the tubes toward the glow of flames. Hits! But STILL the target was refusing to die.

So we kept shooting at it, setting torps for around 20ft depth.

After around the tenth torpedo hit, the beast was revealed by a series of almighty explosions. Yamato! It must have had its engines stopped by our initial attack. After eating (probably) its thirteenth torpedo, it had finally decided to die, victim of the Ghost of the Storm.