well somehow i managed to get a lot of damage repaired this last time around.
agan it was an aircraft which got me on the surface at 1am in pitch dark as i was trying to crash dive to evade it.
bombs were more or less a direct hit this time. blew off the rudder so even if i get everything repaired i can only manage about a heading of 180 degrees that would put me in new guinea somewhere.
blew the ballast and surfaced to repair damage. got the bulkheads repaired, stayed afloat despite severe flooding in aft compartments. pumped the water out. repairs took the better part of a day and a half but everything was fixed... wanted to run back to port but couldnt steer, no option for differential power of the engines. another aicraft spotted at sunrise. had no choice but to at least attempt periscope depth. attained a depth of 60 feet for about 10 minutes and i was happy with that. at least we can hold 60 feet of depth if we have to... now we have to work on this steering issue. beach the boat in new guinea?
then suddenly the deep water depth gauge (not the shallow one) pegged off the scale depth in literally a matter of about 40 seconds. 60 feet to over 600 feet in a matter of literally about 40 seconds. real time 1x compression when this happened.
again i blew every ounce of compressed air in the system - nothing could save this boat from its unexplainable plunge. which i estimated would have been in excess of 1,000 feet per minute. by the time we got to over 500 feet everything failed completely and we were dead - once again the MPs located the wreck, hauld my corpse out of the water and sat my waterlogged body in a trial for sinking a vital ship.
the damage scenario presented a fairly realistic set of challenges i thought. but the game should not crash dive your boat to the sea floor just for going to periscope depth with damage. especially after the damage is repaired and you are able to teasingly hold periscope depth for several minutes - just about the time you say "ok---looks like we can at least get away with some kind of depth." BAM! your sinking like a stone.