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Originally Posted by Onkel Neal
Very good analysis, very useful. I've had destroyer experience with Iron Wolves, Enigma and Destroyer Command and playing against human sub players one on one. Constituting a destroyer with 5 players and managing the roles and activities is going to be an interesting puzzle.
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Thanks, I think it would be fascinating and a very "personal" combat. A couple more points come to mind to tweak the above.
The bands of depth settable by DC officer should not, early war, be capable of being set with precision to attain depths towards 200m, as it was not known, or forseen, how deep U-boats could go. What historically, they could be set to when, can of course be researched. There was a "work-around" by which the aperture admitting ambient water-pressure to the fuse was "soaped", which allowed DC's to sink further before exploding. So, perhaps in early war you could have A, B and C settings, with "soaped" providing a deeper band, but with greater vertical extent within the band, essentially making it less accurate. Mid and late war, you might have A, B, C, D, where the D band is deeper but more precise.
Regarding the Convoy commander being able to "zig-zag" the convoy course. Again research is needed to establish how and under what circumstances this occurred. For example, plainly there needs to be hard limits on the frequency, duration and interval of such course changes. It's reasonable to suppose (although I don't know) that a pre-arranged large convoy course change occurred in the event of a torpedo impact. Likewise that zig-zags were performed alternating port and starboard, so that a mean general course was achieved. Play-testing would need to occur to define within what angular limits, how frequently and the minimum interval between Zig and Zag so to speak.
If the player position of "Convoy commander" was instituted, provision would need to be made to transfer the role to a different escort in the event of "his" ship being sunk.
Regarding Hydrophones on Escorts. I think as well as the usual hearable sounds emanating from U-boats, as currently modelled, it might be interesting to revisit the re-loading of torpedoes, so that this too makes noise, especially when winches are in use, and can be suspended in the event that the u-boat goes "all quiet". The Silent Hunter III method for this worked well.