Escaping from sonar

[ralphnader23]

I was playing last night, approaching a convoy that had changed directions about 10km before my intercept point. I was about 4km off, running at 2 knots, when a Frigate starts pinging me. I've been spotted.

I crash dive, and then head down to 150m and start taking evasive action. In just a couple minutes all three escorts are on top of me. I take some damage and end up at about 230m, before I can get the sub repaired and headed up again.

I continue taking evasive action for 7 hours, making turns, starting and stopping, always moving slow and getting constantly depth charged, but I cannot shake them off my tail. All three escort ships seem to have decided that they want me very dead. Every 5-10 minutes I'm getting pinged, which seems to make it impossible to shake them.

Shortly after the 7 hour mark point they stop depth charging me, and I don't get another depth charge for over an hour, even though I can still hear them circling on the surface. I decide it's time to be more aggressive and I head to periscope depth. I still have most of my torps, maybe I can kill all three.

It's very difficult to hit warships who already know your location, who are making constant course changes, and whose speed you can only really estimate. Plus every time I come to the surface they try to ram my periscope. However I manage to hit and sink one of the three, before I run out of torpedoes.

Now I have two escorts over me, still constantly pinging me. I head back down to 40m, and cruise along at 2 knots, waiting for night. Sooner or later I will run out of air or battery and there is no way to change the status quo.

They continue circling and pinging for another 10 hours, until it's late at night. I'm past the 50% mark on air, and impatient at having been on only 8x tc for 20 hours, so I give the command to surface the boat. I end up surfacing 10m from one of the escorts and we begin to trade shots. I'm taking heavy damage and losing the gun crews fast. I manage to set off a few explosions on the escort, before I'm finally sunk. End of career.

Obviously the real trick is not to get in a situation where you have multiple boats circling and pinging out. But once in that situation is there anything I could have done differently? Is there any way to hide from the pinging at all? What kind of range does the active sonar have?