I'm not sure what to think. I am leaning toward the DD's having better gear later in the war.
It's april '43, I approach this convoy and attack when they are in a good group.
The DD's start pinging away. They find me and are closing towards me. I crash dive, then go to silent running. I drop down to 250 ft, a little below the thermal, but not good enough, they start dropping cans. All my evasion tactics fail, they keep finding me. Eventually they killed me.
I reloaded the mission several times to test it. I found it is apparently my own fault.
Even though I was below the thermal and running silent, it would not do.
I was using the speed helm at default, running it's slowest setting, however, that is still too much noise. I dropped down to 320 ft... still finding me.
What I needed to do is switch the speed helm to the "incremental" view, where I could set a slower turn.
When I hear them ramp up speed to make a run on me, I would go flank, then do a hard port or starboard shut down and coast.
I found they would lose me if I went no faster than 1.5 maybe 2 kts.
I was able to very slowly creep away and they would just pound the water from where they detected me.
I'm sure some guys probably discussed doing this in other posts and I missed it. But that's the only way I could escape them, and in '43 is when I noticed them being tougher.
Don't know about surface shootouts, as I try to avoid that if I can.
