[panthercules]

Originally Posted by von Zelda

For your information, in one of my most recently read u-boat books it was stated that externals had to be loaded during daylight hours only. .

Any cite? I hadn't heard that, but it would make some sense that you would need pretty decent light to manage that task, so at least you would need pretty clear, moonlit conditions to do it at night.

Originally Posted by von Zelda

I've also read that late in the war (approximately 1943 on) most u-boats sailing into the North Atlantic were not allowed to carry externals. This being due to the impossibility to transfer externals due to the increase in Coastal Command attacks and the inherent danger of depth charges and bombs setting off the externals while they were stored under the deck. However, with BdU consent, the larger long range boats were allowed to carry the externals if they were traveling to the South Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Far East. Therefore, having Type VII's with externals late in the war would not be truely realistic..

Good point, especially if you can't really do this task at night as indicated above - the way this latest patrol (June '43) has been going, I've had to be traveling submerged all day 'cause the air attacks are so common - I certainly wouldn't be able to comfortably count on being undisturbed long enough during daylight to get the externals loaded in.

Originally Posted by von Zelda

One more important point to ponder, the external torpedos were always the air driven G7a variety, never the electric G7e variety. I don't recall the exact reason for this at the moment but probably had something to do with the electric batteries having to be kept within the presure hull.

I had read this before as well, so I always put only the steamers in my external slots - I think it had something to do with needing to do fairly frequent maintenance on the electrics (probably battery-related) during the voyage, which you couldn't do if they were in the external storage slots. I finally got tired of having to move them around every time I left port (and especially having them wrong when leaving a milkcow where you can't move them around) so I went in and tweaked the .cfg file to correct the default loadout slots.