Have we had an "auto-hide toolbar" in this before?... The little icon thingies stay visible, but the bar itself, that you can change the speed, direction and depth from, drops down below the bottom edge of my display, as soon as the mouse pointer gets close to them. I also can't get to the TC + / - buttons, nor the Captain's log from there. All the other functions work great. But I do not remember encountering this "auto-hide toolbar", ala MS Windows...
Anyway, on schedule for a good arrival time off Honshu after re-fueling at Midway, we encountered heavy seas and rain. Then more heavy seas and rain... continually. Just like the last dozen new campaigns I've done from Pearl departure on the 8th of Dec. Must have been a bad storm that December... Well, on December 23, 1941 (still raining, still heavy seas), about 0600 just East of our patrol zone, we got a sonar contact bearing 148. What to do what to do? So we went to check it out. Took a while, but finally figured they were going mostly West-southwesterly, so we kept adjusting for intercept, doing Standard. By like 0945, I'm thinking that I *should* be able to see ~something~ of him, going by how he's tracked on sonar. Drop down to Ahead 2/3... Should I submerge, and see if he crosses my path where I think he will, or stay on the surface where I can maneuver easier? So I stayed up top. Ahead 1/3... At 1011, I can all of a sudden see his exhaust smoke, nothing else, just about where I figured he would be. But where is the rest of him? I need a *target* to shoot at. With that, there's his stern (say WHAT??!? - did I miscalculate this?) and the computer says 176 yards. All STOP! We're gonna T-bone 'em... too close for torps, and facing the wrong direction for my pea-shooter of a "cannon" (which I wouldn't want to have to use anyway). But they apparently can see thru brick walls, and all their gunners open fire - close range, can't miss - along with everything else they had on that freighter... "Crash Dive!" is all I've got, and I really don't have room to do it, without hitting the freighter, which I can *still* only see the backside of for some reason, and he's sitting broadside to me... Hit the freighter trying to turn & dive under him and get out of the way of his guns. All sorts of damage on the way down. Bullet & small cannon holes, and impact damage to the Hull, conning tower, periscope, deck gun, AA gun, radar antennae, sonar, one of the pumps, diesel & electric engines - not all of them, just a couple each, yet somehow, no one got hurt... and we start to sink like a rock, water coming in everywhere it seems. I've never had this happen on a first patrol before... I'm gonna lose my crew and boat before we even fire a shot! But it stabilized finally at about 200 foot, and we inched our way back up to periscope depth, with the sonar man announcing "merchant, bearing 159, close range, moving away"... Say whuh? I thought the sonar was damaged... Oh well. Up scope, open 5 & 6 please thank you. Take a peek, and I see the exhaust smoke again, nothing else... Well, last time, that was probably at about 200 yards... so I let the sonar guy keep announcing bearing, and shot blind up 178 once he got up to 170, as a guess. Naturally, I missed... "Torpedoe missed, ~sir~!" Almost sounded insubordinate with that tone ~Mister~!...
I've done all sorts of night attacks, night with rain attacks, daylight storm attacks, etc. on the surface, but never had a ship not show at all until less than 200 yards... I survived, but when we get done with our patrolling duties, and we can't go very deep I don't imagine, with a "24" damage on the hull of this Porpoise boat. We're inside of our little patrol zone "circle", tooling around for the next bit. When we got here, there's a radio report that showed "WD Chapple of the USS S-38 has sunk the Hayo Maru Freighter"... I would have had the first one of the war, but I didn't... Not a very good way to start an excellent adventure.
- I'll quit boring you all with drivel and get me back to my "testing" of this game and mod...
FotRS Ultimate finding of this day for me: "Auto-Hide Toolbar" - not desired.
Oh, I went and did me a screen grab of that dude after-the-fact. Can *you* identify this ship?:
Pretty nice clothes, eh?... - Also, notice the bottom edge of the screen? My "auto-hide toolbar"... I dunna like it...
Gots-to go... There's a few other pix from this portion of the adventure on photobucket, linked to in that picture.