About the verity of ATO MOD

[Scottlu]

In stock game,an oil tanker/merchant usually flows at 6 knots(or 9 knots)

But in Operation Monsun,I frequently found the merchant whose speed at 10+ knots. Is that the truth?

I never image such a corpulent vessvel(tonnage 9000GRT) runs at 12 knots for more than 20 hours.....

SO powerful engines to propel the 9000 tonnage ship in WWII?

[Sailor Steve]

It varied. Most merchants travelled in the 6-9 knots range, but some were capable of 15 knots or more. The US Navy's Cimarron class were capable of 18 knots. The T-2 tankers made 14 knots, the T-3s 15.

I can show you British merchants that made 17 knots, and ones that made 7 knots. The Liberty ships and their Canadian counterparts were all capable of around 11 knots.

Convoys were limited by the speed of the slowest ship, but lone ships could and did travel faster, as they considered speed to be protection, and it was the larger ones that were faster.

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by Scottlu

In stock game,an oil tanker/merchant usually flows at 6 knots(or 9 knots)

But in Operation Monsun,I frequently found the merchant whose speed at 10+ knots. Is that the truth?

I never image such a corpulent vessvel(tonnage 9000GRT) runs at 12 knots for more than 20 hours.....

SO powerful engines to propel the 9000 tonnage ship in WWII?

10+ knots is probably a bit too fast.

In an emergency situation, an old steam merchant like a Hog Islander could do about 14 knots with a calm sea state. However, I doubt that could be maintained for long without damaging the machinery.

Some modern cargo ships built during the 1930's and 40's could achieve those speeds throughout a voyage, but they would not have made up most of any country's merchant fleet.

Liberty ships were pretty slow, as Sailor Steve says. Some of them only had a speed of 10 knots loaded, not 11. Although they were all sister ships, maybe the quality of boilers, etc. wasn't always good.

[Wilcke]

In OM, Lurker coded a variety of speeds for the various ships. So it adds an element of surprise and uncertainty. Sometimes you have the ideal setup and at the last instance the target will speed up or slow down.

It adds a lot to OM and gets rid of the 'turkey shoot' factor in the early years of the ATO.

[CCIP]

The size of ship is also not a good indicator. In fact many of the larger ships are also faster ships (this certainly applies to the tankers Steve mentioned), because they have more space for powerful machinery, and because often they're also the more modern ships with newer technology. It's usually the smaller, older merchants that are slow.

10kt is really not that fast. For lone-sailing merchants in a warzone, that's not unexpected - and indeed as the war went on, only the fastest ships would usually risk passage without escorts.

It's still not the most practical thing, and of course you'll only rarely run into convoys (usually made up of troop ships or high-value tankers) that run at that speed. But for high-value lone ships - not that unusual. A tanker pilot who knew his ship was in a war zone would probably run a pretty swift course.