TDC and realistic playing

[Daniel Prates]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

First of all, the Germans did not have a high rate of success. They just had a lot of U-Boats out there, most of which never sank a single target. Only 10 percent of them had the lion's share of the tonnage sunk. The statistics on the number of U-Boats sunk having never fired a torpedo in action is just astounding.

What success they had was due to their numbers and the lack of any coordinated anti-submarine tactics early in the war. Once the British perfected how destroyers and planes were to be handled, the sub war was just about over. Then Admiral Daniel Gallery came on the scene with his jeep carrier hunter-killer groups and the nails were all in the coffins. Predictably, the U-Boats were unable to be a decisive influence on the war, aside from the colossal waste of men and resources the Germans flushed down the drain to use a weapon unable to help their cause.

For better or worse, the Germans were entirely dependent on their land-based warfare for any success they were going to have. Anything (read Navy) that subtracted from their land based assets hurt their war effort. The U-Boats did worse than that, sucking the US into the war and guaranteeing complete German defeat.

Once the American boats had radar, THEN deducing AoB from radar plot was more accurate than visual estimate and they used that number. With visual targeting, the AoB estimate was the MOST reliable number they had. When you are analyzing, you always deduce more doubtful numbers based on your most reliable ones. That is what many of the targeting gurus on Subsim have forgotten and why their methods were not used during the war.

These guys in the war were as smart as we are. There's nothing we've thought of that they didn't. If they didn't time ship length by the wire to obtain speed, and they did not, there is a good reason. That is that target identification and actual target lengths were among the least reliable of their information. It would have been foolishness to try to calculate anything based on defective data. So they didn't.

Well then, I stand corrected...

I wasn't thinking about objective data, actually, as indeed the sub vs ship score does not compare to a basketball game - obviously. In that sense, yeah, not successful. I was refering to the fact that u-boats were perceived as a serious threath, dragged a lot of resources to counter them, and is mentioned in some moments as being near to turn comercial shipping inviable, during the first half of the war.

All that without radar. I recall this thread being about radar being indispensable for a minimally-usefull submarine, a thing that the german experience shows otherwise. That's all.