A few more questions...

[Pisces]

Originally Posted by Naga

1. I have found that I am running into fewer and fewer merchant ships, or at least the map updates with the red box and heading are no longer appearing with as much frequency. Could this be a result of me using 1024x time compression? How do I go about making these appear more often?

Yes, read the quoted text from Letum. With high TC the non-player units kind of jump over your sensor areas.

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=150558

Originally Posted by Naga

2. Do the contacts, particularly large convoys, appear randomly, or do they follow assigned routes? If they follow assigned routes, is there somewhere that these routes are listed? Could someone give me some lucrative routes with approximate years of activity for those routes?

They have predetermined routes. Open up the campaign files in the mission editor to see and don't mind getting spoiled. Some of those routes spawn units at certain time intervals, based on random chance (in the random layer), and perhaps with random unit type. In the scripted layer units get spawned only once, exactly at the time as scripted. And then there is the land-layer, but that's just for static scenery.

You didn't mention if you used stock Silent Hutner 3 or a mod(ified campaign). There should be a map with general convoy routes in the documentation folder of the game: SH3_MAP.jpg