[Rockin Robbins]

Yet we have people on Subsim claiming that their whole strategy is to charge at convoys, picking off the destroyers with the deck gun, then taking the merchies at their leisure. That's why I raise the point. That and a strange comment on You Tube about how stupid those real submariners must have been and how their brains were atrophied because they lacked computer joystick experience, followed by the typical Rambo deck gun bragging.

The deck gun in SH4 is MUCH more effective than the real one except for the fact that laundry is not modeled in the game.

As for AA guns, that is even MORE overstated in the game. Again, pointing with your finger and saying "Bang! Bang!" was the preferred method of shooting at planes. Because you had about three seconds to get to the hatch before it closed on you and the sub dove without you. Any sub that elected to stay on the surface to battle even one airplane at a time would have come home to have their captain assigned to a shore battery. The ridiculous cost/benefits ratio: a cheap, easy to replace airplane with one crew against an expensive, difficult and slow to replace sub with 80 men aboard automatically makes never allowing yourself to be seen by an aircraft and diving before you are spotted the right thing to do every time. Even being seen by an aircraft, forget about being attacked by one, is a grave error in tactics.

In plane vs submarine, the plane is casually expendable, the submarine not expendable. That's all you need to know.