boats stop moving, shallow pinging

[minsc_tdp]

So I fired up the ol' voice command and Trigger Maru 1.6 and went off to my first patrol. I literally haven't finished a single patrol since I bought the game and have barely played since 1.0.

My first mission is agent insertion, I decide to save on the way out of the harbor since I knew there was a convoy coming in and decided to hunt them in shallow waters at night. I figured I'd be easily detected and destroyed, this was just to test my voice controls and have a little fun.

So, I manage to sink 1 ship, hit 2 or 3 more (at least 1 or 2 of my torps completely missed but managed to hit another ship I didn't intend due to my own crappy aim.) In the vicinity are two anti-submarine patrol boats patrolling one of the harbor exits. They eventually make their way over to the action after quite a bit of time, longer than it should have taken them.

So, I'm being actively pinged in 60 feet of water. I mean, my keel is practically scraping bottom and my conning tower nearly sticking out of the water and they're within 200 yards, pinging away. Yet I'm not detected. There was maybe one or two half-hearted attempts at depth charging, with just one or two drops. They seemed lazy or asleep. Eventually the ASW boats stopped entirely and refused to move. The merchants kept going. These ASW ships are pretty small and I put something like 8 torpedoes into one of them, at the exact same angle over and over and it didn't sink. I was pretty disappointed at the whole experience.

Now the quiz:

Did the ships stop moving because of SH4 issues or TM issues? Did they run out of fuel?

Is it hard to be detected with active ping in extremely shallow water?

Did that one not sink because the ship "locked" up somehow? (Are frozen ships invincible?)

Or perhaps because it was dead still and I kept hitting the same spot over and over, doing zero damage with all subsequent shots, since the damage radius is the same for that particular contact point and angle?

[Ducimus]

I have to wonder if those patrol units ran into a subnet. They did that alot in SH3. Come at you, and then run into a subnet. They can't cross it, theyll just sit there, being rather stupid, pinging away, wondering why they can't get to you.


Harbor raids in general - you'll get wierdness. Particuarlly if you reloaded a saved game, in, or within 20-30KM of a harbor.

[tater]

That could very well be. And you'd look like you hit with the subnet on some, others might hit, but the ship can't sink cause it's aground...

tater

[Seadogs]

Maybe not related but I ran into a ghost DD once. Found a small convoy of 2 large passengers and a DD. Took out the DD and moped up the passengers.

Feeling rather good about myself I saved and continued along the course the convoy had approched from. Spotted a warship, dove and approched for VID. It was another DD, dead in the water. At this point I thought it was another escort for the convoy that was bugged somehow. Bieng the cheap bastard that I am I decieded that is no escuse for bieng dead in the water during the war and creeped up for an attack

2 fish away, sweet hits (dead in the water, too easy) she was on fire but other than that no sinking or even moving. My interest is peaked on what the game is doing now so I send a few more fish, no reaction. I speed up TC for 10 mins or so and she dissapears, vanishes without a kill or any indication there was ever a ship there. Reloaded the save and got the same results. Creepy.

[Lafferty]

yes i have had something similar to that happen to me on my first patrol. Once i sunk the ship here came two more DD unlucky me.

[Gunner]

Sub Chasers sometimes stop moving cause while depth charging they blow their screws off, noticed this a couple of times using external camera, they had no props