Submarine Sitting on the bottom

[thehiredgun]

All the old sub movies usually have at least one scene of the sub sitting on the bottom of the ocean evading detection by virtue of the sub becoming part of the bottom & making it hard for the destroyer sonar to detect it. First question, Was this a valid fact? & if so does GWX make it possible to do this? I myself have never been able to do this without also causing some damage from setting on the bottom of the ocean. This is of course assuming that you not beyond crush depth.

[bigboywooly]

It is possible to sit on the bottom
The trouble is the AI see straight through any land mass so you are still visible

[Safe-Keeper]

I don't know if the fact that you're at the bottom counts. The fact that your propellers are still certainly does. The fact that you're as deep as you can be likewise. But I sincerely doubt that the game makes a distinction between "sitting on the sea-floor" and "not sitting on the sea-floor".

As a side note, the trick to settling down is to not move forward or backwards. Make your sub dead in the water about a metre off of the sea-floor and hit "D". The sub should start drifting vertically towards the bottom, landing lightly without taking damage. To get off of the bottom, hit "S" for surface, or manually set your new desired depth to something shallower by means of "P" or the Depth dials.

The trouble is the AI see straight through any land mass so you are still visible

Yesh. It'd be infinitely nice if you could do things like hiding in underwater cracks and holes or even caves, but it's a no-go in Silent Hunter III. Not that the game has that kind of detail in the first place.

[Tikigod]

Best way to test is to run game in easy mode with the detection meter visible.

There are 2 methods the AI use to detect uboats that it lists in the manual. ASDIC and the Hydrophone.

Hydrophone:
Ways to defeat hydrophone: "keep noisy activity to a minimum by giving the rig for silent running order and running your engines on slow speed"

ASDIC: Horizontal Beam in front of boat. Is fixed and cannot be tilted on vertical plane.

Weaknesses:
1. Does not give depth of target (only direction)
2. Contact is lost once ship passes the target.

Ways to defeat ASDIC (as quoted from SH3 manual): "Present the minimum possible silhouette to the escorts. This may create a weak echo that will be ignored or lost on the way back to the sensor. Another way to avoid detection would be to use the vertical. Move on the surface the waves create distortions that prohibit the proper travel of ASDIC waves."

So, what this is saying is laying on the bottom isn't an issue. Since none of the devices can tell your depth anyway. What it does say is turn your boat in the direction of the ping in order to minimize the strength of your return signature. You don't want your uboat perpendicular to the ping. Since the seafloor is flat I would guess it doesn't matter if you are laying on the bottom or not. The manual only recommends using the waves on the surface to scramble the ping. I'm sure it would have included laying on the bottom as a strategy if it was modeled in the game. But, it looks to me it is not.

What Im wondering is how the AI determines a uboats depth to set depth charges if it doesn't have a device modeled to do so.

[bigboywooly]

Well the DD always seem to know the right depth to drop the charges at
And I have been detected sat on the floor in the channel before ( another career down the drain ) not tried it in GWX though
Try not to attack in shallow depths too often

[thehiredgun]

Thanks to all of you