[Svonne]

Locating Targets

Locating targets can be done in several ways. You can be appraised of ship and convoy positions via radio, you can locate ships using the hydrophone or radar, or you can rely on your watch crew to locate targets visually.
Table of contents [hide]
1 Radio messages
2 Watch Crew
3 Hydrophones
3.1 Hydrophone range
3.2 Contact reporting
3.3 Manual Operation
4 Radar
4.1 Manual operation
4.2 Detecting a contact
5 See Also
6 Credits

Radio messages

Periodically you may receive radio messages from BdU advising of single contacts or convoys in your area.

These messages will not generally appear in your radio log (except for convoy sightings), but will result in a contact marker being placed on the Navigation Map. This is a square box for a merchant ship, or a diamond shaped one for a warship. The icon includes a "tail" which represents the wake of the ship and can be used to find the course.

Clicking on the contact will show various information:

The time of the report
The type of contact. Usually this will simply say "Ship"
The approximate course of the contact (e.g., SW, ENE etc)
The approximate speed of the contact

The possible speed ranges are given below:

Slow: 1-6 kts
Medium: 7-14 kts
Fast: 15-24 kts
Very Fast: 25+ kts

Most merchant contacts will be reported at either slow or medium speed. In general, runing an intercept based on a speed of 6kts for slow, and 10kts for medium will enable you to find your target.

Note that although the course given is an approximation, the "tail" shown on the contact icon is a very accurate measure of the course. If you are careful, you can plot a course within a few degrees of the real course using the ruler tool on the map.

Watch Crew

When running on the surface, your watch crew will automatically report contacts that are in visual range. A contact icon, identical to that shown above for a Radio Contact, will be shown on the map and the contact bearing will be shown in a message from your crew.

A commonly asked question is whether there's any benefit to manually moving your watch officer (WO), when surfaced, to his position on the conning tower, especially when the watch crew is already rated at or near maximum efficiency.

The answer is that with the WO in his watch position, you will be informed of the bearing and distance of spotted ships. Without him, you will simple receive a "ship spotted" message with no additional information.

Hydrophones

Hydrophone range

Hydrophones are, in essence, underwater microphones. They allow you to detect targets from approximately 20km away. In order to use the hydrophones, your sub must be submerged. Note that your hydrophone range is affected by several factors:

Speed of the U-Boat - Ideally, you should be running at Ahead Slow or even All Stop to maximise your hydrophone range.
Depth of the U-Boat - Ideally, you should be between periscope deep (11-12 meters) and 25 meters; but also you can obtain best results at 50 meters & 70 meters; maybe thermal layers?

Contact reporting

If you have a crew member assigned to the sonar room, he will report hydrophone contacts to you. If your realism settings do not include "No map contact update" these contacts will be indicated by black lines extending from your sub in the direction of the contact. The length of the line represents an approximate distance to the target.

Note that currently in patch 1.3 a bug exists whereby sonar contacts are not reported. Solved in patch 1.4b. The contact lines will, however, still appear on your map and time compression will be dropped to 8x if you are running higher compression at the moment of contact.

Manual Operation

To operate the hydrophone manually, sit at the hydrophone station (hotkey H) and rotate the dial by clicking around the perimeter. As the needle rotates around the dial, listen for the sounds of ship engines. The loundness of the sound is an indication of the range of the target.

Be aware that if your own U-boat has its electic motors operating, then you will hear screw noise at 180°. This is your own vessel! You can avoid this by changing to All Stop when you wish to listen with your hydrophones.

Radar
Manual operation

To operate the radar manually, use the switches and the wheel. The upper left switch is power on/off. The sweep/focus changes it from automatic search to manual search. In sweep mode, the wheel rotates continuously. In focus mode, you can click on the wheel much like the sonar station wheel to turn it clockwise or counterclockwise. The range switch changes it from short range band (left) to long range band (right). The display has both range scales marked in hundreds of meters, and the rollover numbers at the bottom left will give you exact range in meters to a contact that is picked up.

Detecting a contact

The display is an oscilloscope. When you find a contact, the display will have a spike.

The vertical location of the spike on the occilloscope indicates a rough range to the target. The little display in the bottom left will give you the exact range to the target.

To find the bearing, you're supposed to read the numbers on the dial behind the wheel (radar wheel), but a bug causes the numbers to be reversed. The radioman will call out the correct bearing, but the numbers are backwards.

The FuMO29 only covers a few degrees span to the front of the boat, but that wheel will still turn a complete circle, even though it can't possibly pick up anything for most of that time. You'll be better off just doing it manually when you're really looking for something. Once you get the FuMO30, it mounts the antenna on a rotating mount, so you get full coverage that way.

Because the radar is on by default when you load a saved game, you must manually turn it off. If you return to the station, it will automatically turn on again.

Hunting Grounds
Table of contents [hide]
1 The Supercavitation shipping lane
2 The Alyebard areas
3 Mediterranean hunting grounds
4 U-Flak hunting grounds
5 Cyprus
6 Hagers Hage
7 Drumbeat
8 Moored capital ships (spoiler)

The Supercavitation shipping lane

Added by Supercavitation, ICQ 13007026, 29 April 2005

If you are having troubles locating targets, try this out. This helper assumes you are sailing from the western coast - aka occupied France - from Brest, Lorient, St. Nazaire, etc. and that you are utilizing Silent Hunter with the 1.2 patch with no mods. I am not aware of any mods that interfere with this strategy but you never know.

Receive your orders and exfiltrate the sub pen. Plot a course for grid BF 13. Upon reaching BF 13, run a diagonal course between BF 13 and BF 15, repeatedly.

This is a major pipe of merchant and convoy travel that remains throughout the game years. You will continually receive updates via your map screen (F5) and every 12 hours you can submerge and usually detect a lone merchant or possibly even a full convoy if you aren't too busy cleaning up the updates you receive. It is not uncommon to patrol this area and exhaust your torpedos in two to three days, to say nothing of your deck gun. Enemy aircraft will appear to cover this area usually after 1941 but if you stay sharp they are a minimal threat. In fact, they appear less often in BF 15, making it a perfect gridsquare to recharge batteries in.

It is possible to radio contacts in to BdU from here and see Luftwaffe attacks, but they happen about 1 in 7 tries.

You can exhaust your torpedo load here and continue onward to your patrol grid, having utilized a minimum of diesel fuel, provided you never exceed Ahead Standard for long periods of time.

This area is minimally policed by the Allies. You will rarely encounter a lone corvette or destroyer.

There are depths of + 100 meters in this area, making for good escape.

You are close to home port.


Supercavitation

The Alyebard areas

Added by Alyebard, 19 May 2005

Also the AM 51, AM 52 gridsquares are a good places to hunt convoys inbound to the North Channel (between Ireland and Scotland) You will receive updates in your map screen (F5), also if you are not so impatient every two or three days you can detect a big convoy. And deeps are good enought, more than 1000 meters. AM 53 is a good place, but is more patrolled by the enemy and have shallow waters. And this area is avalaible from bases in Germany and from France


Alyebard

Added by rls669: The southeast corner of AM53 is a major choke point and is loaded with convoys. It's not uncommon to be in contact with two convoys at once here. Naval and air traffic is very heavy here and water is shallow, so risk is as great as the potential reward.

Mediterranean hunting grounds

Well, there are two bottlenecks in the Mediterranian. One is obviously the Gibraltar strait and the other is between Sicily and the North of Africa. Every convoy, taskforce or lone merchant will be forced to pass a few km from you.

U-Flak hunting grounds

Around Scapa Flow seems to be pretty good - all but the channel to the south. There seems to be a lot of biplanes and a smaller number of hurricanes.

In my experinces I have found BF13(yes the hot spot) to be loaded with aircraft later in the war(Suderlands and Huracanes). There are calm seas almost all of the time. And I have not seen many DD's.

Good Luck and Good Hunting, Wilhelm.

Cyprus

If you have enough patience for a little and somewhat dangerous trip, it may eventually pay off with tons of unprotected merchant ships. The place is Cyprus, a small island to the south of Turkey (that sorta looks like a pointy shoe. Departing from somewhere on the French coast, you'll have to pass the treacherous straights of Gibraltar, after which it is across mideterrenean to the east most part of the sea. Simply set your trajectory to move around the island in a circle (clockwise seems to work best) and you will bump into tons of unprotected sea traffic. Since most of it is an enclosed location, weather is always great for both spotting and using deck gun. After about 3-4 days of patrols, I usually score about 7-8 merchants and not a single destroyer or an aircraft in the area. Cyprus was an English colony in WW2, so most of the merchants there are from either England or Canada. If you get bored, you can even try to score some hits near Alexandria, but that place is usually highly protected.

The road to Cyprus is probably the most challenging part. The easiest way to cross Gibraltar is to go deep and quiet. Set your depth to 200 (max depth is around 300 there) and rig for silent running and none of those destroyers will touch you. If you happen to hear a merchant closing in, I suggest ingnoring it because even if you do sink it, you will have about 5-6 destroyers depth charging you for an hour.

Hagers Hage

In the Arctic, there are convoys that travel from Canada, Iceland and Britain, taking a route over the top of Norway and on to Russian ports (such as Murmansk). The infamous Convoy PQ17 took such a route. This hunting ground is ideal for U-Boat activity, as it is generally out of range of allied air-cover, and there is a chance of support from other German forces. Both Kriegsmarine surface ships and the Luftwaffe patrol the area. Thus, if you send a radio report of a convoy sighting, you may receive some support.

A good place to pick up the trail of a convoy is just south of Jan Mayen island. They generally head eastwards (although returning westward convoys are also known) and pass halfway between Bjørnøya (=Bear Island) and Fastlandet (= the Norwegian mainland). If you use SH3 Commander (or some other program that allows you to set your patrol grid), then AE37 is a good place to get started.

Air-support from the Luftwaffe is limited in range. To get an idea of how far out you can expect support, draw a circle on the map, centered on grid AF93, and with a radius 1500km. The Luftwaffe operate in force between just after the invasion of Norway (mid-1940) until the end of 1942.

"Hagers Hage" is Norwegian and means "Hager's Garden". It is named after Paul Hager who has posted countless articles, patrol reports and screenshots on the SH3 Forums about tracking down Arctic Convoys. Although he didn't write this section, he was the main inspiration and driving force in opening up this theatre, as represented in the game, and deserves the credit.

Drumbeat

After December 11 1941 the US East coast is rich for the harvest. Sail up and down from New York to Cape Hattras(the cape south of Norfork) along the 20 meter line. At the begining of the conflict the U.S destroyers will be no match for you but this area will become more dangrous as late 42 early 43.

Happy Hunting

Moored capital ships (spoiler)

Below are the dates and locations of moored capital ships, extracted from the game data files and listed in chronological order. Note that the dates only seem approximate.

1939/09/15 - 1939/10/10, Auxiliary Cruiser, Scapa Flow
1939/10/04 - 1939/10/14, Battleship Revenge, Scapa Flow
1939/11/01 - 1940/01/05, Battleship Nelson, Loch Ewe
1939/11/05 - 1939/12/05, Battleship Revenge, Loch Ewe
1940/03/01 - 1940/05/01, Auxiliary Cruiser, Scapa Flow
1940/03/07 - 1940/04/25, Aircraft Carrier Illustrious, Scapa Flow
1940/04/01 - 1940/06/01, Auxiliary Cruiser, Scapa Flow
1940/05/17 - 1945/01/01, Fiji Light Cruiser, Loch Ewe
1940/05/24 - 1940/06/30, Dido Light Cruiser, Scapa Flow
1940/12/11 - 1940/12/31, Battleship King George V, Scapa Flow
1941/02/01 - 1941/02/17, Auxiliary Cruiser, Scapa Flow
1941/02/10 - 1941/03/20, Auxiliary Cruiser, Scapa Flow
1941/03/15 - 1945/04/30, Fiji Light Cruiser, Scapa Flow
1942/02/03 - 1942/02/28, Battleship King George V, Scapa Flow
1942/02/15 - 1943/09/03, Aircraft Carrier Illustrious, Loch Ewe