New with questions. :)

[Way2co0l]

Awesome that worked. You guys are seriously great!

About the escorts though, I know they can listen just like the sub can so if I'm making little noise it's difficult to hear it, but their sonar pings can pick you up at anytime right? That's why I'd assume it's such a bad position to sit with your side pointing straight at them while they're approaching as it provides a large target for their pings to hit off of. And as I said earlier, I've had them ping me at some pretty deep depths, between 100-160 feet isn't always safe by the feel of it. I've even had them ping me below the layer as low as 260 feet. I've never tried deeper then that. I forget which sub I'm using. Not the porpoise and not the one after that. I think it might be the Sargo class. Not entirely sure how deep she can go without damage but perhaps I'll test that out sometime.

But anyway, I just sank the one large freighter in a convoy and am attempting to duck away from their escorts and put myself into a position to shadow them until I can get into a position I can strike from again. I'm curious what the measurements translate to. From the video it sounded as if every 2000 yards equaled a NM? Is that correct? Also I think he measured nautical miles traveled to equate into knots, but I want to be sure. Lets say a ship travels 1 NM between the time I first checked him and the second. How do I translate that properly into an actual speed?

Also, I've read some of the issues with the early torpedoes and I've restricted myself to contact only detonations almost exclusively and keeping the depth at bout 5-10 feet above the bottom of their ship. That's called the keel right? I believe that's cut down on the premature detonations I've had and you'll have more duds when firing with fast speed but it'll give them less time to spot and evade them. Obviously all shots should be as close to 90 as possible. Does that all sound about right?

[Way2co0l]

Another question in regards to spending renown. I know I'm a long way off from getting there but when I do, if I spend it for something like a torpedo, is the cost per torp? So a cutie would be 500 for each torp you buy and when you restock it'd be another 500 each?

[Krauter]

About the escorts though, I know they can listen just like the sub can so if I'm making little noise it's difficult to hear it, but their sonar pings can pick you up at anytime right? That's why I'd assume it's such a bad position to sit with your side pointing straight at them while they're approaching as it provides a large target for their pings to hit off of. And as I said earlier, I've had them ping me at some pretty deep depths, between 100-160 feet isn't always safe by the feel of it. I've even had them ping me below the layer as low as 260 feet. I've never tried deeper then that. I forget which sub I'm using. Not the porpoise and not the one after that. I think it might be the Sargo class. Not entirely sure how deep she can go without damage but perhaps I'll test that out sometime.

The thing is, escorts won't usually ping you unless they know you're there. Also, you can make a variation on this technique by pointing yourself towards the escorts and the once they pass turn towards the convoy. I just prefer to sit under and broadside to them as it takes less time to fire and evade.

But anyway, I just sank the one large freighter in a convoy and am attempting to duck away from their escorts and put myself into a position to shadow them until I can get into a position I can strike from again. I'm curious what the measurements translate to. From the video it sounded as if every 2000 yards equaled a NM? Is that correct? Also I think he measured nautical miles traveled to equate into knots, but I want to be sure. Lets say a ship travels 1 NM between the time I first checked him and the second. How do I translate that properly into an actual speed?

I myself do not know the conversion to changes yds into NMs but with a quick check you can find that out. Congratulations by the way on the kill The way you measure speed is by taking into account distance travelled by the timeframe it took. For example, if in 15 minutes you measured your target ad travelled 1 NM, he would obviously be going 4 knts (nautical miles per hour). Thus, usually try to take readings between times you can quickly multiply to an hour (ie: 5,10,15, etc minutes.)

Also, I've read some of the issues with the early torpedoes and I've restricted myself to contact only detonations almost exclusively and keeping the depth at bout 5-10 feet above the bottom of their ship. That's called the keel right? I believe that's cut down on the premature detonations I've had and you'll have more duds when firing with fast speed but it'll give them less time to spot and evade them. Obviously all shots should be as close to 90 as possible. Does that all sound about right?

Sounds about right to me, HOWEVER. With contact pistol set on, make sure to set the depth as high as you can (keel shots are for magnetic torpedos). Also, by 1943 most if not all preemy's or duds will have been sorted out.

Cheers!

Krauter

[Way2co0l]

Also it seems they can track your sonar pings pretty well in stock. I've pinged a few escorts to see how much distance I was gaining on them and they seem to be following to the locations I pinged from and dropping charges. I can hear the charges dropping into the water and exploding with sonar. Pretty cool actually, and I think I'm going to stop pinging them now. lol. Wish I had kept track of where the convoy was at because it's looking pretty defenseless right now. lol.

[RodBorza]

Hey man,

Welcome aboard.
For what I can see is that you've already have plenty of help.
But to help you a little bit further, here my two cents:
- First, be it stock or modded, you don't want to ping convoy with escorts, or the destroyers directly as you are doing. Don't do it! Ever! Otherwise they'll come for you. I for one, usually use the active sonar when I have only one ship and it is bad weather.

- I also play with 90% realism, and besides being a veteran in this series, I consider myself to be an intermediate level skipper (cams and map updates on). So if you are starting ate 100% realism that's very dificult. You'd have to manually set and plot the enemy ships course and speed. I don't do it because your workload is already too big and when you are intercepting and doing an attack on convoys things start to happen pretty fast. So I leave it in auto. I like to think that I have a very good XO and a highly trained crew to keep me updated.

- TC can be your best friend and your worst enemy depending how you use it. I usually TC up to 2048. My computer can do better but I think it's a nice speed for the computer to process things when an event happens.
Use TC when cruising through vast extensions of water in the surface. Only use TC submerged if you are cruising, like AFTER escaping an air attack, then you can accelerate the time until it gets dark and you can surface again. When diving or surfacing, if there's no enemy presence around, I TC up to 32 times; if there's enemy (air or surface) I never, ever TC! Why? Because things will happen too fast, and that DD that you thought was way out of range can and will get your position and will start to drop charges at you.

- A good thing about TC is that it can help you locate enemy ships. When you are cruising in 2048 the clock will appear. Keep an eye on that clock. Regardless of the time compression used, if the clock stutters, it means that something is near you. It can be a plane, an enemy ship or even a battery shore. Then it's a good time to go back to normal speed, dive to at least to periscope depth and manually do a search in your sonar array. Many and many times you'll get contacts that your sonar guy can't detect. This little trick works when you are patrolling for two/three weeks without a contact and wants to find something to sink and fast!

- About DD evasion, don't you ever use time compression. Let's say that you did an attack run on a convoy. And now your are being chased. There's a lot of tips and tactics in how to evade DD's, but the point in case here is that you'll have to be patient. So, if you are tired, sleepy, in a hurry or worried with something else, save your game and turn it off. DD evasion usually takes me around one or two hours to sucessfully evade them and get underway.

- Download and read the Silent Hunter 1 manual. It's very comphreensive and gives you a boat load of information that you don't find on the SH4 manual. Good old times when game manuals were that detailed. You can find it in here:
http://www.filefront.com/16158251/Si...r%20Manual.pdf

- And last, but not least, have fun! Although many here are very serious about this sim, with tactics and mods and real charts and everything, in the end it's a game. So, if you are having too much difficulty and to much work and is getting nowhere, relax. Start slowly and increase the settings with time.

Good hunting!

[Way2co0l]

Thanks for the welcome and the tips.

I know I'm kind of biting off a lot but I really love the deep immersive types of games with steeper learning curvs, though I usually stick to large scale strategy type games such as hearts of iron, victoria, and europa universalis. My experience is usually in the area of managing the resources, but I thought it'd be cool to actually get in and get a feel for what it's like at the tactical and functional level. Sadly that's an area I have no real knowledge of. LOL. I'll get better though. I probably will turn on sea contacts so I can compare my work to them to see how far I'm off and in which ways so I can correct the problem more.

But like you said, I realized pinging escorts was definitely attracting their attention but my question is how much can I get away with if I wanted to? Is there any angle, where there are no escorts within that angle, for a ping that I'll be safe at? Otherwise I'm really not sure how I can establish any kind of range once I get too close for radar but while I'm still too far out to get reliable ranges from the mast range tool. On that matter, is the enemy able to detect when I'm using radar at all?

But I'm definitely having fun. It's been tough to come in and try to do it with nearly no basic knowledge beforehand but I'm confident I'll get it all sorted in time and you guys have been great. Just a matter of learning and experiencing now, but definitely a lot of fun.

Last night I picked up a couple warships and attempted to close the distance while I tried to determine their course so I could get a visual and decide what to do from there. It was late and there was a heavy fog and I managed to spot them from a much larger range (according to my sonar pings) then I usually would have in those conditions so it made me assume they were larger ships. They appeared to have many mast similarities to Ise battleships but I had a hard time believing two of those were sailing about unescorted so I kept looking. I also found a couple cruisers that somewhat matched the look of what I was seeing so I went with that. The really curious thing was I was only able to get a sonar sniff on the trailing one. The one at the head was leaving no apparent sonar trail for me to track except visually and they where both going at a very high speed. Much more then I could hope to intercept without surfacing so I did. I figured even if they spotted me I could get them into evasive maneuvers which would ultimately slow their progress down enough for me to get into an interceptable position and then it'd be good practice to see if I could manage any hits on targets attempting to dodge.

Well I do that and they're simply going so freaking fast I have a real tough time getting ahead of them. I believe surfaced at flank I was making 23 knotts. They had to be over 20 themselves, and still no sonar noise from the lead one. That as weird as it seems to me? Well after a long time attempting to get into better position, about 5k off of them with the dark of night, rough seas and heavy fog keeping me hidden to that point I started lowering myself to try to get early stadimeter readings. The problem is they where all far off of what my Sonar was telling me. As much as 9k whereas sonar was telling me 5k. I started looking through the possible ship types again at the smaller destroyers and such and couldn't identify any that resembled the targets better then the cruisers, and couldn't believe I would have initially spotted something as small from that initial distance in the fog anyway so I assumed I was just taking the readings wrong and kept at it. I just couldn't seem to get the readings to get any more accurate until finally I was close enough to get a much better view. Turns out I was wrong all along and they where a destroyer and the lead ship was something even smaller though I forget what. Gunboat or something.

Anticlimatic I know. lol. But you play and you learn and I need to become acquainted with ship profiles more to make better guesses at what I'm looking at. It's all about learning and I'm having fun doing it. I'll have even more fun when I actually do it right! lol.

Cheers guys and thanks again. Going to check out the mods now and see what I want to do then start a new campaign to start with them and see what I can do.

[Way2co0l]

I've been looking through the mods and I don't want to go with too many off the bat to avoid unknowingly creating conflicts since I don't really know what all is compatible with what so I'm thinking I'll probably keep it simple with RFB and RSRD for now and maybe look at TMO and other mods later.

Edit: NVM, figured it out.

[RodBorza]

Do that!. Try them out.
They are very nice.
Very shalow and generally speaking: RFB makes the boat more "realistic", TMO makes the overall sim more difficult. What adds up to this is that with both mods you'll have to play more realistic. Think more strategically, pay attention to every detail in order not to make mistakes. Both of them forces you to account for lack of boat maneuverability, more realistic scorts and enemy behavior among other things.

Regarding your last post, if your trying to get measurements out of the stadimeter...hmmm...I got say that's really difficult to accomplish. First because the japanese destroyer models variety is very big and it is very hard to tell one from another. As I use TMO, in there is this nice tool ("cheat") that is the Identify Target button. That surely helps me a lot.

And more importantly than that, is NOT using the stadimeter. It's, in the game, is very imprecise. Controling it with the mouse, in a small picture, in the sim is very cumbersome. As you watched in the videos, taking measurements with it is not necessary at all to get a shot at.

However I'm not saying that you should'nt try doing it if you are playing with map updates off. I think if you are up to the challenge go for it. Just remember the limitations of the tools that the game gives us. And after you get the hang out of it, good hunting!