Frustrated - Can't pass torpedo tutorial

[Akela]

First off, are you using any mods or just vanilla SH3? GW and NYGM both make ships harder to sink, so the training missions are near impossible

Great question, yes I left out some important information didn't I? No this is just a vanilla install. I've downloaded GW and Tonnage but I haven't implemented either one yet. Also, I'm running the 1.4b patch.

My first advice to you is, if you feel confident in your abillities in general you're ready for the big show You don't have to finish the training missions if you don't want to.

LOL, now you are really going to think I'm dumb. I'm so pedantic it never occured to me that I could just start playing the game without finishing these missions. ROTFLMAO. Still, now it's become a matter of pride.

A few hints to remember, you don't have to stay submerged, u-boats were designed to fire from the surface, so you can surface up to get speed to catch up with anything that's far away.

Oooo, now that's an interesting idea that maybe should have been obvious. If I surface though, won't they automatically detect me, turn away and run leaving me with that annoying stern shot?

[TarJak]

Akela, If you can finish the torp tutorial with GW installed you are ready for the big show! Sinking ships within this mod is meant to be harder but if you aim just right you can scupper them with a single shot.

Don't feel bad about it there are some older hands that are still finding out new things about this game even after more than 12 months playing it, myself especially included.

Don't worry too much about their "evasion" techniques. They may zigzag a bit but they are too slow to stop you catching em and killing em.


Gute Jagd!

[Akela]

TarJak and Kylania, thank you for your encouragement and advice. I think I'm about to finish off the second target.

I decided to take out the ship to the west. It was about 1680m away and appeared to be headed away from me but since I don't have an auto-updating map I decided to take the time to figure it's course. Unfortunately, I don't know how to figure a target's course while moving, so I turned to face the target and brought my boat to a stop. By that time the target was at a bearing of 347 with a range of 1950m. Three minutes and 15 seconds later it was at 353 with a range of 2388, so a few moments on pause with the nav map let's me figure his course at 330. The speed checked out to be 5kts, just what the periscope display was showing.

At this point I'd like to mention that, as far as I've been able to tell, there doesn't seem to be any way to save this game during one of these missions. I certainly hope that's just a limitation with the Naval Academy missions, but right now it's a little annoying because I sure would like to be able to experiment with various courses of action without giving up my first kill. But since I can't figure that out I'm forced to do a lot of thinking before I take a course of action because I'm not going to be able to go back.

I decide that I proabably won't hit the ship from here, based on the distance and angle involved. I think it's possible that a lot of the frustration I've been experiencing with misses has been because I've taken shots with yellow triangles. Based on Kylania's excellent suggestion about running on the surface, bolstered by TarJak's encouragement that, even if they spot me and run it ain't so bad, I decide that I'm going to try to run a box pattern to get ahead of this fellow and nail him from 90 degrees. I turned my boat to 330, hit the afterburners and took it to the surface. (While I was at it I lowered the periscope because I didn't want the other Captains to laugh at me for running flank on the surface with my periscope up.)

It took about 15 minutes of running on the surface to catch up with the Merchant. During that time I've learned that the crew of the merchant ship is either asleep, drunk, or both. At this moment I am 1200m directly port of them, running on the surface at flank speed, and my little submarine is still green. They probably dumbed this down for the tutorial. I wish I had tried this a week ago. Thank you Kylania, thank you, thank you, thank you!

At this point I have to give up for the night. Since I can't figure out how to save the game I'm leaving the computer running because I'm NOT giving up this run now! This is the best I've done in weeks! When I get up tomorrow my plan is to run a little further ahead, turn to 240, wait for him to go green and fire torps until he's dead. Hopefully it will take only one.

Thank you all for your help.

Dan

[THE_MASK]

Look how close i am at night on the surface and not detected there are 5 destroyers ahead of the convoy not far away. A little surprise awaits if you stay surfaced when the torps hits though.

[AVGWarhawk]

If you are getting within 2000m or less, the intended target is as good as dead. What I do is manually dial in the speed of the merchants. Normally they do 7kts. I dial that in. I position myself to be somewhere around 90 degrees to the target. I never use magnetic, only contact on the torps. That is just me I guess. Once your intended target has come into your settings before letting the torps go, fire away. Make sure those doors are open because you will loose three seconds on the run time of the torpedo and probably miss. I like to position myself so I can sit and wait for the victim to come to me. That gives me plenty of time to get my settings where I want them. Once done, I kick back and wait for my numbers to match and watch the fireworks.

[Akela]

Woohooo! This is great! The Coastal Merchant is also sunk with a single torpedo. I kept moving a little past him, turned the boat to 240, rigged tube 1 for fast running, opened the door, and let him have it when his triangle went green. Range was just under 1km. I've been banging my head against the bulkhead for 2 weeks now and all of a sudden this seems easy!

Since this is going so well, I've decided to get greedy. I only need the C2 and one other, but I've decided to go after all three. The Coastal Merchant to the south is 6.3 klicks away, moving at 5kts. I guess he slowed down a bit. He's my next victim.

I'm 18 minutes into this scenario, based on the time stamps on the messages. It seems to me that in previous runs my crew has fatigued shortly after catching the second ship. I don't know how long into the mission it was (I was running underwater then, so longer than now). I'm not sure when/if to move crew around. There are only 4 rested guys and a couple of officers. Everyone in the electric rooms seems to have moved to the diesel room, which is fine. No one is showing any exclamation points. What do you guys normally do? Do you move crew before they fatigue, or just take care of it after they fatigue? How long should these guys last?

Time to plot an intercept course. I'll post again in a little bit.

As always, thanks for the helpful suggestions. You guys are great!

Dan

[Akela]

...and I hope I did it correctly. The point seems a long way away, 11+ klicks. That should take me almost 40 minutes to reach. [edit] Correction, that would take me 40 minutes to reach at 1kt. I'm travelling at 13kts, so only a few minutes.

One thing that's weird. I'm over 5 clicks away from this merchant, and everything seems the same as before when I was running down the previous merchant, except now for some reason my little visibility indicator is turning yellow, then orange, then red. I can't figure out why it stayed green last time and is moving to red this time. There isn't a lot of time between the two so the lighting shouldn't change that much. I don't know, it's weird.