Scripted Aircraft in Silent Hunter 3 (SH3)

[Stiebler]

I've now tested fully Hitman's idea of using a moving land-base for aircraft around the Bay of Biscay, using a moving special airbase floating at around 1200m in the air, and fitted with aircraft of limited range. The movement of the airbases can be seen clearly, if they are allowed to transmit their position every six hours.

This idea works very well, with a selection of two special aircraft. The aircraft require ranges of 300km, chosen by experiment, and the speed of the moving airbases is set at 50km/hr. The aircraft will not attack in medium or thick fog.

However, I have persevered with my original idea of using scripted bombers, as an addition to the moving airbases. The modified file SH3Collisions.act, mentioned earlier, prevents the scripted aircraft from appearing during fog.

Two observations are of interest:
1. When the stealth-meter turns red, it does not mean that the aircraft has detected you. You are detected when the time-compression drops to 8.
2. All the aircraft (scripted or spawned from a land-base) seem to be blind to the U-boat if it is not directly in their line of vision ahead as they fly close. As mentioned previously, the spawned aircraft are given a direct line of flight to the U-boat by the code before they are visible from the U-boat. This makes them deadly. The scripted aircraft can fly in a straight line past your U-boat without seeing it, even if it is close, unless the U-boat is by chance almost directly ahead of the flight of the aircraft.

I'm still trying to find out how to switch on the 'U-boat sighted' flag for scripted aircraft. But in the meantime the combination of moving airbase and scripted aircraft in the Bay of Biscay seems to give just the right level of air attack in late 1943.

Stiebler.