Originally Posted by Zosimus
Well, I think you need to go back and read the post again and/or take some remedial English lessons.
As I said, the numbers of U-boats ranged into the thousands. Assuming that there were 500 in operation at one time, each with 500 captains, your average captain is number 250 on the list.
We do not have stats for the top 500 u-boat captains. What we do have stats for is the top 50, and even in the top 30 we have some captains who return from patrols with an average of 3 merchants sunk per patrol. Some of these are big name people—names that students of u-boats would recognize. So if the top of the top are returning with 3 under their belt, a good number of mediocre captains are returning patrol after patrol with 0 kills.
By way of comparison, I returned from my latest patrol with 11 merchant kills—10 by torpedo and one by deck gun. Every merchant ship kill was with a two-torpedo salvo striking fore and aft. So yes, this is different from Kretschmer's slogan of one torpedo one ship. On the other hand, he enjoyed an advantage that I do not. In real life, ships hit by torpedoes fall out of formation and can be picked up later with the deck gun. The ships that I hit generally do not fall out of formation—only hits to the aft of the ship bring the ship out of formation. So your 45% error is just a bunch of bullcrud. If you hit a ship in the fore area and the rear shot misses, bounces, or prematures, the ship will pump out the water and continue on as though nothing ever happened.
Plus, in most cases, my crew cannot man the deck gun. Rain or high winds make manning the deck gun impossible, and I can easily experience 30 days straight of bad weather without so much as a 15 minute break to deliver a two-shot coup de grace to a stationary ship. We all know that SH3 weather is broken.
What do I attribute my success to? Patience and perfectionism. While others on here take 3m15s to figure out the course and speed of a ship, I generally take 65 minutes—more than an hour to make certain that alles in Ordnung. I calculate the exact angle to steer when I'm behind the convoy, one that takes me out to a safe distance quickly without falling farther behind the convoy. I submerge every 32 minutes to ensure that the convoy is still on course. I even calculate the exact angle the ship should be at when I'm leading the pack and planning to dive. Using that angle, I calculate the approach angle to use to put myself in optimum position in front of the convoy.
And I do it all with a compass, a ruler, and a protractor. I don't use any trigonometry at all. I just draw a few lines, sketch a couple of circles, draw a similar triangle or two, and measure the angles I need. There's no "high school science project in trigonometry." Just good, old fashioned human ingenuity—the same thing that let the Egyptians build the pyramids with nothing more than a 3,4,5 right triangle in their hand.
|