977 U-boat

[bobchase]

[quote=Kapt Z;1086354][quote=joegrundman;1086186]
the author suggests that U-boats were really quite stable in even very rough weather

That does seem hard to believe. I myself have seen photos taken from the bridge aft that show a u-boat rolling to (what appears to be)about 50-60 degrees in a storm.

40,000 ton aircraft carriers got tossed like rowboats in bad storms...

a 700-1200 ton u-boat would have been stable on the surface?

It would depend on the sea-state how the U-boat behaves. I've never been across the Atlantic on anything small than a DE but ships are much more stable than what is modeled in SH3. The word that comes to mind is ponderous and the larger the ship the more ponderous they are. The airdales will tell you that a CV will rock & roll in heavy seas but that is both their bravado talking and their relative world of living inside a giant. For them, their ship really is moving hard in those seas but let a DD or DE come alongside for refueling. If they pay attention, what constitutes rock & roll gets seriously re-written when you watch the smaller ship half-buried in seas that cause a carrier's deck to only pitch or roll +/- 5 degrees.

A little DE does move about in almost any sea so one would presume that a surfaced U-Boat would behave much like that. However, there is a sea-state where the swells (waves) are very sharp, almost vertical, and far enough apart where a DE's hull won't rise to meet the swell. The water just simply breaks onto the foredeck and rolls off at the forward the breakwater. Down below you'd think that you were in much calmer seas if it wasn't for the big 'shudder' that goes though the ship every time a wave breaks. On a U-Boat, in that sea state, one would imagine that the sea would simply roll over the whole sub and never even break.

Bob