U-Boat-behaviour in GWX?

[AS]

Hi all,

I was just testing and playing around using SH3 1.4b and GW1.1a. Here´s what really annoys me and what I´d love to see changed in GWX (IF that is possible!)

1. Fuel and battery consumption doesn´t play any vital role in SH3, because
- you can always teleport back to base without any fuel left
- BdU does NOT consider your remaining fuel (e.g. at 0% fuel I send a status report and they wanted to send me some 500miles away)
- even without ANY fuel left and NO battery capacity you can do 1kt forever when submerged AND you can refill your compressed air, which is nonsense because compressed air needed compressors running on - guess what - FUEL!
- battery power was VITAL. Without any power left, submarines had to surface. There was no hovering or whatever some people say on this forum. Truth is, once the battery was too low, U-Boats had only one chance: surface and hope the Destroyers aren´t already waiting for you.

2. Flooding cannot be countermeasured in an realistic, active way. In reality, flooding could be countermeasured by either using pumps (which certainly made a lot of noise), increasing speed (dynamic effect) or - in great depth or when flooding was really heavy, compressed air was used intensively.

In SH3 we are condemned to passively stare at the repair screen and hope that things will work out fine in the end. I´d love to have full controll over
a) pumps!
b) compressed air (and not only in those uncontrollable heavy doses)
c) dive planes with speed making a difference
(Strangely enough both SH2 and AoD were more accurate in these points.)

3. Food and water supply is also NOT simulated at all. Maybe tweaking the infamous crew fatigue could solve this problem, e.g. having your crew´s "power" slowly decrease to almost zero after 4 or 6 weeks (in a VIIc that is)

Back to my first statement: why do I stress the point "fuel" so much? Well, because dfrom all that I´ve read fuel consumption and possible speed was one of THE main factors in U-Boat tactics and captain´s decisions. So what I ´d love to see in SH3 is that I get a contact and really have to calculate whether or not I can reach it AND make it back home at so and so many knots. This is one of the aspects real submarines always had to deal with, especially the small VII-types.

In "Das Boot" (the novel!) there´s a long passage about how the diesels stuttered because on the way back home they had to reduce speed in a way that the engines almost "died" and ran very un-smoothly. It is also said how angry the captain was because he couldn´t afford hunting a fast travelling ship because the LI always warned him (this is also shortly referred to in the movie).

In short: a main aspect is the way U-Boat actually behaved like. I want to feel the fear of running on a low battery while Destroyers are around, I´d like to calculate fuel consumption and I´d like to be aware of how crucial compressed air is!

Now I know many of the things I mention have been said before and I am aware of the fact that some features may be hard-coded thus making it impossible to do something about it. However, this is what I´d love to see - maybe SH4 will ship with full U-Boat controll (the flight sims have it, too!)

My two cents, AS