How did I miss another hack at the VII/IX debate? Maybe I'm still learning to read this new forum style. Anyway - Ducimus - if you want to sail over open seas, for weeks at a time, then you need an IX (except when Milkcows are about). I do envy the ability to hunt regularly off of Halifax because I find the fattest convoys there. You're right - there is a different feel in the IX - running on the surface for long periods, unchallenged, into strange distant areas with sporadic single merchant contacts is a different vibe altogether. The problem is that I find no thrill or challenge in hunting single merchants. You can't get killed doing it, even if you surface and fight it out with the DG. Single merchants (or even small convoys) can't kill you. And there's no real need for stealth - I'll often sail up to single merchants, discover they are unarmed, and line up a shot abeam while surfaced in full view. No problem. They sink, I continue. In an IX you have to be resigned to death by air attack; the one time that the sunderland or liberator gets lucky and bombs you dead on. I need convoy attacks. I don't care to wait for hours under time compression for them. Why travel across the altantic when everything you could ask for is floating in the western approaches? I leap out of biscay and grab the first convoy I find and beat it down. If patrol requires then I'll head down to the Gibraltar approach. Or even out to the mid atlantic if required. Wherever there are convoys. With convoys, there are escorts, and they can destroy you. That's the challenge that makes it worth while. Death by air attack seems too chancy; I need the strategic convoy hunt, the surprise attack, the relentlessly cruelty of DCing and the honourable death that follows, which is best met in the VII.
Kb