Why am I sinking ?

[pmcmull]

So I got to my patrol area off of Hokkaido. And out of the air attacks. I am patrolling around in the area so I get credit for the objective. I get a solo ship or two to attack - one was a large modern tanker so very nice for the stats. And I find a nice convoy cutting through with 6 or 8 merchants. And get in position to get close. And suddenly I get sunk! So load from a recent save and try again with a convoy in a slightly different location. And get sunk again! And reload and repeat and sunk again! And I'm not even getting actively attacked by any thing I can see. The first time I am maneuvering in to get past the destroyer screen and at a little over 200 feet. Another time I have taken to boat down to 220 feet to avoid getting pounded, and it happens again. Suddenly messages start coming in rapidly about damage and flooding and then in a few seconds the sub is spinning and it is the end. Depth charges are not even exploding yet.

I study the damage control panel, trying to figure out what the H is going on. And I see that hull damage is at 44 percent. So apparently that reduced the depth for the hull to fail by about half. To just about 220 ft. This is a Gar class sub. There was no warning at all.

I must have got the damage from near-miss bombs from the airplane attacks earlier. Never looked at the hull damage.

After that on the reload, I was Very Careful. Avoided warships as much as possible. And convoys. Picked off a couple of unguarded merchant ships. Got the credit for the first patrol area. Research on the forum said the repair could only be at the base at the end of patrol. So I headed directly back to Pearl, picking no fights. And crash diving a couple of time for planes. But going no deeper than 120 ft for anything.

At the end of patrol I got credit for one objective completed and I did sink 16K of cargo ships. So no awards, but able to repair and reload and head back out.



So watch out for that hull damage.



Pat