Destroyers Stopped at Sea

[-=Spy=-]

A while ago, before I transfered to Silent Hunter 4, I was on my way to a patrol zone from France. On my way I spotted a Destroyer on the horizen. As was my policy back then, I ordered Periscope Depth and engines slow. Before by submerged however, I grabbed a quick glance down the UZO.

_________ Destroyer
Range: 7000 or so
Speed: 0.

Hmm.... a motionless Destroyer.

Well, I have a full load of fish, might as well send a couple at him. I mean, he's just sitting there!

Not wanting a spread, I launch Tube one, wait several seconds and launch tube 2. After a short while, I switch over to the TDC. See my two little lines, my cicle with line and the two red....wait.

Two red squares? Right next to each other? Time to Free Cam it. I pan over and find that another destroyer it sitting mere feet from the other one. Almost perfectly aligned. To sum it up, the first fish hit home, and as it sunk the other epassed over it and got the other. Not bad.

So what in-game reason would they be next to each other? Or it is just to simulate supply transfer?

[flakmonkey]

Couple of potential reasons i can think of, bad weather can sometimes damage ships, i found a merchant on my last patrol that was doing <1kt and listing badly thanks to a huge storm. But it seems unlikley that 2 ships would succumb to bad weather so thats probably not it.

Most likley they had come to the end of their waypoints and the "delete on reaching end of waypoints" option wasnt selected, so theyd just stop.

Theres more than a few random bugs that could account for this one, two DDs for free though, cant complain

[Ford Prefect]

Usually even a ship lacking a waypoint has a speed though, the default speed for any object inserted using the mission editor for example is 5knots. Having them just sat there is very odd indeed. Its as if someone accidentally copied a docked ship and tagged it onto a convoy as escort, the whole convoy would have been rendered if you got close enough but the rest of the ships would have sailed off. Who knows? There are certainly a hell of a lot of oddities in the game!

[Fluffysheap]

Myself I enjoy the oddities like this. You know what they say, "stranger things have happened at sea."

I encountered a stopped minelayer once right off the British coast in (I think) early 1940, maybe late 1939... figured he was laying mines so I blew him up with a torpedo. Well, come to find out, the ship was American and I got tagged with negative renown for it.

[gdogghenrikson]

Isn't that a known vanilla SH3 bug. I have seen that before, but not with a destroyer though. Any one with GWX seen this because I haven't seen that since I started using it.

[evan82]

This also may be a bad script for this destroyer in campaign files.

[Jimbuna]

It shouldn't be too difficult to trace if the necessary information becomes available:

Game version, date, time, vessel class and approximate position.

[-=Spy=-]

I'll be honest with you, this was about two years ago. I have no idea where they were, the date, much less the precise class.




Yeah.

[cawimmer430]

This has happened to me on a few occasions where I encounter stopped merchants in the middle of the Atlantic, usually at night. I always thought the whole crew was sleeping...

[Ford Prefect]

Maybe its a sign that the whole world is a sim? Ships adrift at sea, no one on board, sounds like the Marie Celeste to me! It's all the work of the Flying Spaghetti Monster I tell thee!