Evading: when to go flank speed?

[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.

[Hook]

I have some techniques I worked out in the Silent Hunter 2 and Destroyer Command days. They enabled me to escape attacks by destroyers commanded by humans. I learned more about evading destroyers by playing Destroyer Command than I ever did by playing Silent Hunter alone. Two main things were that destroyers could only hear you in their front 180 degree arc and depth charges fell at 3 meters per second.

Go as deep as you can before the attack. I haven't timed it in SH3, but at 90 meters you should have 30 seconds before the depth charges explode.

Basically, if you hear his engines AND you hear the depth charges in the water warning, go to flank speed until the depth charges stop exploding. If you're going to change direction, do it near the end of this run because turning slows down your boat and you want as much distance as possible from your previous location. Don't bother trying to turn more than about 45 degrees. Changing depth slows you down as well, but I haven't measured how much.

If you don't hear his engines when you get the depth charge in the water warning, don't bother going to flank speed as he's probably going to miss and going to flank speed just lets him know where you are. This is different in SH3 as at least some ships seem to be able to hear you anywhere around the boat, not just in their front arc. This includes hearing you in their baffles.

If your hydrophones still work, either have your sonarman constantly tracking the attacker, or track him yourself. You can get a good idea where he is and what he's doing. For example, if he goes to fast speed and his bearing doesn't change for several seconds, it's likely he's setting up an attack run on your position. It may weave back and forth by a couple of degrees in this case.

It would be nice if we could get positive verification on the arcs where a ship can hear you. It was a frigate that detected me when I went to flank speed for a few seconds when I was in his baffles.

Hook

[ppk]

From my experience a destroyer will search for you where it expects you would be if you kept the course he last saw you on before making a pass. For that reason I often deliberately run at 2/3 or reload torpedoes when I know it's on to me so as to make sure to be heard, and give about 15-20 degrees of rudder when it's pinging. Then as he begins dropping the depth charges I go to flank and make a radical course change to the opposite direction and stay at flank for 20-30 seconds, checking where he is to present a minimal profile. This way he will [hopefully] be slightly put off and drop his next line of DCs somewhere else than on my head.

It goes something like this (please excuse my poor MS Paint skills )...


Of course this works better at near-critical depth and before 1943, but it's still adequate later as long as you're not getting pounded by a full horde of DDs. But then if there are only one or two DDs, it's sometimes easier to go to periscope depth and sink 'em...

[Bosje]

ideally, i want the DD to come at me from behind, slightly off to one side
say, bearing 160. only possible if you already turned away from him after the previous attack.
sonar guy tracks him when he comes back, as he starts to close in i order a turn the other way (in this case to starboard) and change depth at least 20m
all this still on silent running so the changes will not have much effect yet but they are 'pre-ordered'

then, when i am pretty sure that he has me (the ping-ping or i made a lot of noise earlier) i'll start speeding up when i can hear him from inside the boat
when the depthcharges fall i'll get to flank speed and that means my 'pre-ordered' evasion manouvre is executed swiftly

then silent again

the important thing is to only actually do this to avoid being blasted to shreds, so only use flank speed if the depthcharges are about to nail you (as far as you know).
if there's more than one escort, you will give yourself away and you'll have to keep playing that little game over and over

i often find that escorts (even multiple, even in 1943) will spend a long time blasting a certain spot where you were some time ago. if they didn't actually nail you with ping-ping and if you think you didnt make enough noise to be picked up passively... they may not actually have you and they may simply do an attackrun on your last known location from the previous run. it will appear as if they are coming right at you but in fact they're not

if they trick you into using flank speed without good cause, they'll re-acquire

at some point, they WILL temporarily lose you. the trick is to figure out when that is

steel nerves and a good sonar guy are required

god how i love that cat and mouse game

[dfscott]

Thanks, everyone, for all the excellent feedback.

I thought I'd share another version of evasion techniques -- this is based on info/pics in the GWX manual (I'm playing GWX, BTW).