Stories and Patrol Logs + Screenshots and Videos (merged)

[Cpt Aurora]

Dammit, im realy waiting for a sale on this game..

(Sorry for being off-topic, admiring the screens!)

[R3dakted]

The craziest thing to happen to me so far in SH4 has to be my first encounter with a Yamato-class BB.

I received a Flash message during the ingress to my official patrol area that said that a Jap TF was enroute from Truk to Home Waters. Since I was within range of the projected track of the TF, I throttled up and moseyed over to patrol the area the TF was likely to transit on the final leg of its journey to the Mainland.

After patrolling for about 24hrs my radar op spotted a blip on his scope that was further offshore from my patrol area, but roughly on track for the heading I was expecting the TF to steam in from.

I turned to face the new contact, doing a gentle 10kts and letting them continue to head toward me. Lo and behold, a little while later the radar screen suddenly had around ten more contacts, and they were tracking in my direction at a steady rate. I tracked them on the scope for a while, enough to get a rough idea of their speed, which i tagged as being somewhere around 17kts. As the weather was a little too calm for my liking I elected to submerge and wait for them to come into visual range - and I did NOT want to be spotted prematurely by patrolling aircraft. In the meantime, my hydrophone operators kept me informed of the rough track of the contacts - and they were still heading straight towards me. All the better for my batteries. I kept an ear on the hydrophones and waited, in the meantime calculating approximately when the contacts would be in visual range.

At the allotted time I slid up to periscope depth, raised the Attack scope and nearly choked - where there had been fine weather, there was now a bleeding great thunderstorm and visibility was close to zero. More than a little annoyed I surfaced the boat and flicked the radars on. The TF was still on its expected track and I decided that I was going to take a shot at it, thunderstorm or not. To that end I chose to approach them from their starboard beam as it seemed to me that there were only one or two escorts on that side of the TF.

I set the solution up to 340 degrees, 17kts, AoB at 70 degrees starboard. There would be no TDC tracking for this shot. I took position at 80ft and waited, and went to Silent Running.

After what seemed like forever I had at least two strong contacts coming up to 340 degrees on the hydrophone. I fired a full spread of torps with around ten seconds between them. I ducked down to 150ft and turned parallel to the line of advance of the TF, as there were contacts coming up fast on my port beam and I really didn't feel like getting rammed by them.

Three hits!

I turned and came up to 80ft depth and shot the rear tubes with a wide spread in the general direction of the other passing ships, hoping to score a lucky hit or two. Sadly, no torps connected this time around. We heard pinging, but no depth charge drops.

Ducking down to 200ft we set about reloading the tubes, which attracted some attention. Still, no depth charges in the water, just more pinging. After the tubes were finally reloaded we slid up to periscope depth for a quick look around - and saw that the weather and visibility were still terrible. There were no hydrophone contacts nearby that we knew of. Surfacing, the radar guy told me that the TF was hightailing it out of the area towards the general direction of Tokyo.. but that there was also a single contact about 6000 yds away, back near where I'd fired the first shots. The contact was stationary. I figured it was most likely a DD, but decided to go back and investigate anyway. So back we went, ducking under the thermal layer so that we could risk Ahead 2/3rds.

A bit later on we risked coming up to Radar depth for a quick sweep and found that the contact was still roughly in the same place. We stalked in for a closer look, keeping the scope up. At a range of around 1000 yards I decided to take a shot. Hit! No kill though, and the shape we saw looming out of the fog when the torp exploded was far too tall for a DD. So I fired the rest of the tubes toward the glow of flames. Hits! But STILL the target was refusing to die.

So we kept shooting at it, setting torps for around 20ft depth.

After around the tenth torpedo hit, the beast was revealed by a series of almighty explosions. Yamato! It must have had its engines stopped by our initial attack. After eating (probably) its thirteenth torpedo, it had finally decided to die, victim of the Ghost of the Storm.

[Father Goose]

R3dakted, one of the best first posts I've ever read!
Welcome to SubSim.

[R3dakted]

Thanks, Father Goose!

Admittedly, I've been lurking around here for a while .. had to surface eventually though, was in need of new supplies / Mods

[Father Goose]

With your excellent writing ability I hope you share other "war stories" with us if you have the time.
Down the road, your own campaign thread would be awesome!

Happy hunting!

[magic452]

Welcome to the boat mate.
I agree excellent first post, keep up the good work.

Magic

[Jimbuna]

Welcome to SubSim R3dakted...great first post

[R3dakted]

Cheers for the great welcome, guys!

[in_vino_vomitus]

When we got our orders to sail into Taipei harbour and take some pictures I asked around. The consensus seemed to be that the best bet would be to stay at home, throw a huge party and try to drink ourselves to death. The Navy would be minus a crew, but would at least get to keep the boat. A net gain on the probable result of an attempt at harbour infiltration. The trouble with orders is all in the name. Requests can be denied, suggestions can be dismissed, but orders are, in the end, orders. So that was that.

Approaching the harbour via the deep water channel in the small hours revealed a Subchaser and a DD on picket duty. With impeccable timing and some luck, we might have slipped between them, but my timing is generally held to be pretty poor, and luck is a thing that, if not for the bad kind, I'd have none of at all. In any case, dawn was going to break while we were in there, and there was no way I was doing this in daylight, so we withdrew a few miles offshore to think.

The obvious thing to do seemed to be to go around, and this we did, at dusk that evening, heading into shallow water to the west of the harbour and running in at about 7 knots with decks awash, cutting speed to 4 knots as we passed what I thought would be the Subchaser's closest point of approach. As the lighthouse hove into view we went to radar depth, and then, once we'd charted the positions of the two groups at anchor, we went to PD and went silent.

To my surprise, this tactic seemed to be working. I'd got off a couple of photos and was on my way to look at the TF at anchor, when my sonarman reported a warship at medium speed closing. Had he detected us? [How??] was it his normal patrol track? Was it the evil machinations of a certain Captain Scurvy? I'd heard he'd given some kind of intelligence boosting formula to Japanese DD captains, this seemed more like a superpower......

Right then, the situation looked decidedly sub-optimal. We were in shallow water, in a harbour, with a destroyer approaching our beam, between us and the open water. Our only hope of survival seemed to be him not spotting us. No sooner had I let that thought fly, than his active sonar started playing that delightful tune we all know and love.....

I went to flank speed, he passed close astern, dropped a pattern of depth charges, that we survived with minor damage, I swung hard to port, wanting more water under the keel and to be closer to open water. His second pass seemed to be taking longer to arrive than I'd thought. I popped up the periscope and saw him parallelling our course about 500 yards off our port beam. He seemed to have smoke and the glow of a fire at his stern. An own goal, from one of his depth charges?

It didn't take him too long to reacquire us, and I didn't hold out much hope of evading repeated attacks. After all, we could dodge him a thousand times. He only had to hit us once. As he steamed towards us, I wished I'd loaded some mark 10's into the stern tubes.......

Anyway, I figured since he knew where we were, and we'd be sunk soon enough, there was no point in saving ammo until we had a perfect solution. I set the stern torpedoes for minimum depth. Set the target speed for zero and the range to the maximum. The bearing wasn't changing much, and I thought that by hitting the send button on the ADT before each shot, I could fire a spread of torpedoes, one of which he might catch as he tried to evade the others. Provided none were duds or prematures or just ran deep, there was very definitely a slim chance of a hit.

No.7 was a premature detonation, two of the others just plain missed, but imagine my surprise when one of the four detonated under his stern. By the look of it, a near miss that the magnetic exploder had set off. I was less happy about the fact that he was still afloat and still pinging, but the fact is, that was the closest he came to us from that point on. He seemed to find the other side of the harbour far more interesting, so we left him checking out the Western approaches, while we slipped away to the Northeast.

And to add icing to the cake, while we were scurrying around after his first run, I managed to get the photos that we came for. Harbour infiltration? nothing to it. - Only joking... - my advice is to stay at home and have the party.......

[Jimbuna]

SINK EM ALL!!

[CaptainNemo]

[Father Goose]

CaptainNemo, that may be the most realistic picture I've ever seen from SH4. I'm still not sure it's not real!

[Armistead]

[R3dakted]

Originally Posted by Father Goose

CaptainNemo, that may be the most realistic picture I've ever seen from SH4. I'm still not sure it's not real!

I second that
Very nice pic.

[fireftr18]

Originally Posted by R3dakted

I second that
Very nice pic.

That is a nice pic. How about that last one from Armistead? That's beautiful.