Put down the wrench, Bernard!!!

[misha1967]

So there I was, upside down doing Mach 2, the canopy blown off, 200 ft above sea level with one engine on fire and a monkey clinging to my left aileron...

Wait, wrong story...

I was cruising the North Sea, looking for Tommies, when suddenly, during a standard hydrophone sweep, I noticed that I couldn't rig the boat for silent running. My XO would helpfully explain to me that it wasn't possible (without helpfully explaining WHY it suddenly wasn't possible when it had been perfectly possible under the exact same conditions several dozen times before on the same patrol. Perhaps it was some union rule?). My machinist, on the other hand, would happily acknowledge my order, switch his little silent running icon on his engine command bar to yellow, and then promptly ignore actually doing what I'd told him to. He might have thought we were running silent, but nobody in the crew seemed to pay attention and the little "ear icon" at the top of the screen indicating silent running never appeared.

Similarly when I used the keyboard shortcuts (Y and SHIFT-Y): They would work perfectly, but everybody would still be making noise like it was fleet week in Kiel and the "ear icon" would stay absent. Clearly I either had a mutiny on my hands or I'd managed to do something with my mod soup that I shouldn't have. Which couldn't be the case since I'd changed nothing since it worked fine last.

That's when I remembered a couple of Tommy planes who had made a pass at me earlier. We crash dived in plenty time to avoid their machine guns, but they'd managed to drop a few eggs in our general direction and one of them came close enough to shake the boat up a little, scratching the paint to the point where Scheu and Raabe, the lazy buggers who get to hang out all the time in their little cubicles got a few paper cuts (now I'll have to put them up for the Verwundeteabzeichnung when we get back) and the flak gun and periscopes got a scratch too (99% status). Didn't take long to fix, the hull integrity wasn't even touched, so I thought that all was well.

But perhaps? Nah, it couldn't be! Repairs and silent running? Don't go together well. I know that much. But there was nothing left to repair!

And that's when I found Bernard trying to repair the screen door on the conning tower hatch. A repair that was made difficult for the poor dear by the fact that there'd never been one to begin with, but he's not one to give up when he gets an idea into his pointy little head, as I'm sure you all know. Like the time when he tried to stabilize the U-boat's depth by super-gluing the needle on the depth gauge in place.

In game terms, but I like the Bernard explanation better, all I had to do to "fix" the lack of silent running was to access the machinist's menu by clicking on his face, then click on the "toggle repair teams" icon (the one with the hammer on it) and, voila, I could rig for silent running again!

Yes indeed! Even though the repairs had been finished and there was no damage left anywhere on the boat, the damage control team dutifully kept plugging along since nobody had given them the order to stop!

(And I'd still love to know how the Hades they fixed the flak gun while we were at 40m below the surface, but hey... They're good!)

So keep in mind, my fellow Kaleuns who may not be aware of it already: If you take damage, ANY damage, be sure to hit the "hammer" toggle on Erdman's shortcut menu when it's been fixed, or they'll be sitting around fiddling with their wrenches, banging them furtively against the hull and making silent running impossible until you get back to port and start a new patrol.

That being said, I'd still rather have a damage control team who go to work without me having to tell them to and then refuse to STOP working until I tell them to than the opposite.

Now where'd Bernard go? Got to keep an eye on that guy!