Safe Distances/Depths?

[Raticon]

Also remember to use the periscope very sparingly when in calm seas at day, dusk or dawn as even merchants can spot your periscope peeping up from the surface at short distances, making them start to zig-zag, making harder targets, while they are screaming in panic over the radio for the Royal Navy and/or the RAF to come and make your day miserable. Just a quick "up-pan the horizon-note bearings and distances-down"-maneuver.

Some merchants are (in the GWX-mod at least) "armed" with searchlights that will search the surface after your scope if they are somehow alarmed by your presence. Besides showing your poition to everyone withing several kilometers it will blind you and make aiming with guns or torpedoes difficult.

During the D-day operations, every soldier not assigned a task on the landing ships on their way trough the channel was ordered to stand watch for any periscopes and / or flashes from passing light in the scopes lenses, this eventually lead to some degree of panic among the ships as a floating piece of garbage, swimming seagulls or anything else passed as lurking submarines with scopes. This made the US and British navies place professional sailors as guards against scopes on the surface as inexperienced and nervous soldiers spotting something else caused unneccesary panic and disorientation aboard the large ships ferrying tanks and troops.