Realism

[Sea Sap]

Ahoy shipmates! . I'm a bit of a sucker for realism and I'm trying to make the SH3 experience as realistic as possible. I'm on 100%, I have GWX3, dead is dead, I've found a way to give new crews different names (I was starting to have dreams about the ghost of Adolf Carlwitz) and I'm only eating bread when it has a healthy white coating on it. I've trawled the forum and elsewhere on the net and found a pile of info about U boats but one thing I'm still a bit unsure about - Did commanders periodically submerge their boats to listen for contacts? I can understand them doing so if they already had the scent but on the off chance? Would they really have done this every hour or so?

[Venatore]

Originally Posted by Sea Sap

Would they really have done this every hour or so?

Quotes from the movie Das Boot

Lt. Werner: What's going on? Why are we diving?

2nd Lieutenant: Hydrophone check. At sea, even in a storm you can hear more down here than you can see up there.

[danlisa]

Welcome to Subsim.

Originally Posted by Sea Sap

Did commanders periodically submerge their boats to listen for contacts? I can understand them doing so if they already had the scent but on the off chance? Would they really have done this every hour or so?

Every hour or so is probably too frequent considering the distance they traversed. They certainly periodically submerged when they were at their patrol area because, as you know, sound travels further in water than the eye can see, so it makes sense. The game simulated this with better hydrophone range than that of the MKI eyeball.

TBH, if you are transiting anywhere you consider enemy traffic to be, then it is advisable to submerge (approx 25 - 50m) and listen either manually for a couple of sweeps and allow you crew to do it (allow longer for them to report contacts though, they're a little slow ).

[RConch]

I have made it a habit to submerge every night after dark till dawn.
I can hear farther than I can see and it also allows the crew to rest, especially in storms and rough seas.

[Sea Sap]

Just been browsing one or two other sites and they are saying that hydrophones could detect convoys up to 100k away and that on a good day you can see over 20k by eyeball. My guess is, they would submerge maybe every 100k looking for convoys and possibly sometimes pick-up smaller, closer targets by chance when doing so. What I'm looking to do is get as near as possible, within the limitations of the game, to the real behaviour of a u boat patrol and I'm debating with myself whether or not to consider some of the grey box contacts as picked up by periodic stop, submerge, listen techniques rather than actually submerging and doing the listening myself.

[Sea Sap]

What's with the paragraphs on this site?

[Jimbuna]

There is some information here:

http://www.uboataces.com/hydrophones.shtml

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Sea Sap

I've found a way to give new crews different names (I was starting to have dreams about the ghost of Adolf Carlwitz) and I'm only eating bread when it has a healthy white coating on it.

SH3 Commander does that for you. With a database of 42,000 first names and the same amount of last names, you get a randomized combination of roughly 1,700,000,000 names.

It does a bunch of other cool stuff too, like naming the merchants you sink and givin cargo and crew information about them.

[Sea Sap]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

SH3 Commander does that for you. With a database of 42,000 first names and the same amount of last names, you get a randomized combination of roughly 1,700,000,000 names.

It does a bunch of other cool stuff too, like naming the merchants you sink and givin cargo and crew information about them.

Thanks Steve, I didn't know it did the name thing. I've been toying with the idea of loading SH3 Commander because I can foresee a time when I may want to use the days in base feature. However, I'm reluctant to load any more mods as I have a very low software problem threshold caused by decades of shouting at computer screens. Also My computer reached crush depth on leaving Kiel harbour after loading GWX3, no problems since but it's made me wary of venturing any deeper.