The mounting of only small guns on subs has nothing to do with need, but practicalities. Some subs mounted very large guns but they were not very succesful. Large guns were heavy and caused instability in the boat, were slow to load and use. They caused drag and slowed the boat underwater, besides making the boat easier to detect on sonar (modern subs are smooth and streamlined with the minimum of stantions and protusions precisely for this reason). Small guns could only be mounted because of the limitations of the size of fleet bouts and U boats. If they could have mounted larger guns they would have. Bigger guns=more damage. Nothing to do with the fact merchants are unarmoured.
The deck gun was a weapon of last resort. Submarines make poor gun platforms and carry no appropriate gun laying and ranging equipment beyond the scopes on the gun itself. It exposes the crew and the boat to easy damage by the enemy. Most of all it would give away a boats main weapon: stealth. Sinking a ship takes time so while a sub surfaces and begins to bombard a target, that merchant will be busy radioing its location and the fact that its under attack. A sub skipper was placing his boat under considerable risk attempting to sink targets by gunfire and generally standing orders to sub crews reflected this. Hence it only occured with small targets and to finnish off smaller merchants, usually if they had already been abandoned. Not 6000GRT merchants.
Tankers may well catch fire when hit but that isn't what sinks them. They can burn for days without sinking (remember the burning tanker in Das Boot?). Burnt out, derelict ships were not unknown drifting on the seas, days, weeks even months after they had been attacked and abandoned.
I've been searching for a while and can find no references to U boats sinking 2000+ ton merchants on a reguar basis by gunfire. Most references I can find talk of boats finnishing off ships that had first been crippled by torpedoes, or, refer to very small merchants. After 1943 most U boats discarded their deck guns as they were of little use and replaced them with extra AA guns, if at all.
Deck guns as modeled in SH3 and SH4 are way too effective IMO. They are too accurate, and cause too much damage to be very realistic. TM and NSM attempt to counter this, and are pretty succesful at that. They are attempts to simulate RL effects in SH4. If you want to cruise the seas, gunning down merchants left right and centre then do so, nothing wrong with that at all. Its not for me to say how other people should play their own game. But, IMO, its not realistic or authentic to the way U Boats and fleet boats operated in RL.
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