Ghost ships?

[rmattio]

I am a relative newbie. I have been on several patrols, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. At times I see a ship on the navigation screen or am notified that there is one nearby and I navigate towards the ship and, poof, it disappears. I go right to the coordinates and nothing! No evidence of any ship on my screen either visible or, when under water, with hydrophone sweep. The crew is well rested. What is going on? Am I missing something? I am running basic vanilla SH3 on Steam.

[Hebe Vollmaus]

Originally Posted by rmattio

I am a relative newbie. I have been on several patrols, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. At times I see a ship on the navigation screen or am notified that there is one nearby and I navigate towards the ship and, poof, it disappears. I go right to the coordinates and nothing! No evidence of any ship on my screen either visible or, when under water, with hydrophone sweep. The crew is well rested. What is going on? Am I missing something? I am running basic vanilla SH3 on Steam.

What do you mean by "poof, it disappears"?
How can a ship disappear when it cannot be seen?

"Disappering ships" in SH3 can have different meanings.
Usually all Ships that are scripted to do so, will disappear on its End-waypoint or sooner when the disappearing is Time-based.

What you get on the Navigation-map are Hints only. Like spionage-support from Headquarter. You have to calculate the distance and direction the Ship can move, within the time you will arrive in that area. The Time, Speed and Course you get on the navi-map from this ship is not the absolute truth. Experience of the captain is needed to capture such ships. This is the easy part.

In SH3 there is also a bug, which can happen when the Ship is scripted to communicate its positions, and are fully sunken some short time before. To distinguish this and the above sittuation is also (more or less) easy, since the ship has constantly shown its position before and you know if you have sunken it or not.

And to the Title: no, in the original unmodified "vanilla" version of SH3 are no Ghost ships. But in some "Big Mods" there are some ghosts. Hided as "Eastereggs". Not sinkable, to animate you waste youre time with it.

Greetings.

[rmattio]

Thanks. I understand better now about my ghost ships. With more experience I should be able to better calculate the location of moving ships for interception. If I don't do it properly, my mysterious ghost ships will continue to 'disappear'.