Evading escorts

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by Powerthighs

Couple of questions:

1) What is the normal range at which you will be detected visually on the surface? I assume this is affected by the sea state and your ships heading, etc.
2) What is the depth of the layer? Is it fixed? If not, is there any way to detect it?

2) the thermal layer changes every mission, it appears to be between 150 and 200 feet. You hear a message "passing thermal layer" when you go through. If you go at 1/3 speed and dip regularly below the thermal layer, the escorts dont pick you up, I tried again last night.

The point where the escorts pick you appear to be based on speed and distance. The first time I played the "Philippines Sea" mission, I headed at the carriers at standard speed and stayed at periscope depth. I think the escorts picked me up from fairly far away since I saw a DD heading right for me. When he was about 1,000 yds away, he started pinging at which point I ordered a hard right turn dive to 400 feet, but his first stick of depth charges got me, one way ticket to crush depth, so escorts can be deadly if you are not careful.

Right now, I am trying different speed and approaches, using and not using thermal layers to figure out when the AI picks you up.

1) visually, I get the impression the AI picks you up from farther away than in SH3, but I have not really tested it yet.