Evading: when to go flank speed?

[ryanglavin]

If its clear weather, and your caught by more than 1 ship past 1943, your just dead.

If its cloudy weather and your caught by more than 1 ship past 1943, you might get lucky.

[Scape]

Stay still. Your not going to outrun them. Keep only the bare min speed to keep depth. Wait 30 min then creep away. Once they are long range then surface and run flank to out flank conviy but not to outrun DD.

[sharkbit]

Stay still. Your not going to outrun them.

No you won't outrun them, but you may avoid the DC's raining down on you.

Still, I try to use my time at flank pretty judiciously. Slow and silent is usually best.

I get constant reports from my hydro guy when under attack.
If the bearing is starting to lag(going behind me), I'll stay silent with maybe a course change thrown in now and again. He's probably going to miss astern.

If the bearings stay pretty constant(collision course), all hell will probably be breaking loose pretty soon and I'll hit flank when I get the "Wasserbomben!!" and do a course change (and maybe depth change), pray he doesn't have hedgehogs , then cut the motors and coast when the DC's go off(and do a little more praying ). I'll start the motors back up to slow when my speed drops to 1kt.

If the bearings are starting to lead me(going toward the bow), probably a course change is in order and I'll wait and see before I pour the coals on depending on my gut feelings.

You can get a feel for the rate of bearing change and how close the destroyer is to aid in evasion and help you make the decision on course and speed changes.

Also, if you are being pinged and the escort is closing on you and the pinging stops, assume that you are out of the sonar cone. That might be the time to do something drastic, depending on the hydro information you have and your gut instinct.

[TarJak]

Rule #1 is avoid getting detected in the first place. To do this loose your eels, dive immediately to 200m+ (speed tends not to matter much but the faster you dive the better). and change course to move away from the datum of your firing point. I aim for being at least 100m depth and 1km away from the datum by the time my first torpedo hits. This means using slow speed torps sometimes or shooting at ranges of ~1500m.

The datum is where the escorts will congregate to initiate their search. The further away from this point, the harder it will be for them to locate you.

I've been playing this way for the past 6 months with careers starting in 1941 and have largely been undetected in about 85% of attacks until reaching late 1943. Things get much much harder then as there are both more escorts and they have better detection capabilities which means detection often means death.

Once getting detected though, I tend to stay silent running on a relatively steady course for most of my evasion relying on depth (230-240m), to make it harder for the escorts to get a hit. I usually only use flank when I know the DC's are coming down almost directly on my boat and run for 20 seconds from the explosion of the last DC before returning to silent routine.

[Sailor Steve]

In my experience the best time to go flank is when you can hear his propellors. If you're a 70 meters or more, when you can hear him inside your boat he's to close to know where you are. Waiting until they explode is kind of like waiting until you hear a bullet whiz by to duck. The next one might already have you. Go to flank and change your depth by at least 20 meters.

Once they're exploding, go silent again and turn your tail toward him to decrease your signature. Of course if there are several everything changes, since one of them will be listening to see where you go when you accelerate.

[Dissaray]

In my experiance, limited though it may be, flank speed is realy only warranted when you need to dodge a bulet. If you hear them pass over you and then splashes you may well be about to get hit. Dive 20-30m, go hard over so your course is oposite that of your attacker, put some distance between you, and hit flank. Diving is always preferable to going up, going up you may well intersept a charge that would have missed you otherwise. That should get you some breathing room and out from underneeth the attack. As soon as the charges start poping or you determine the ship has turned and can hear you again cut engens and coast and watch your scopes to see if he is going to re-engage you. If he dose you get to dance some more, if not slip away nice and quiet or set up to kill him for trubbling you so.

[tomfon]

The big problem are hedgehogs. If you have both of the external views disabled (external and event camera) you are in a really miserable and helpless state. There is nothing to warn you if the destroyer has hedgehogs aboard. I usually go to flank and change direction before i can hear the destroyer closing. This kind of evasion works well with one opponent. When it comes to 2+ destroyers and the weather is excellent... well, i usually kiss my crew goodbye. This is why i restrain myself from performing a convoy attack under calm seas (past mid-'43, that is)... a lesson i learned the hard way.