Destroyer Evasion Question

[vumuse]

Hello all; been lurking for a few weeks now, finally had a question I couldn't find an answer to (thanks for being such an incredible resource for the game by the way --- no way I stick with it without the help found on this board).

I'm going to give you a bit of setup --- apologies if it runs a little long (skip to the end if you'd just like the question). I'm running 1.5 with TMO + RSRD, and I'm finally getting the hang of finding shipping lanes and manually using the hydrophone (I want to fire my sonar man). It's March of '42 and I'm cruising in the shipping lane east of Singapore when I stumble on two heavy cruisers and a destroyer. The water's shallow at about 120 feet under keel, but it's been a dull patrol so far --- started over in the Celebes Sea and got nothing; took me a month to steam over to Singapore to find some action --- so I figure 'why not?'.

It's around midnight, and they're only pulling about 10 knots, so the approach is really easy. I put 4 fish into the lead ship, pull a quick 180 and pump another 4 into the chaser --- 2 heavy cruisers on fire and heading to the bottom (I realize now that 4 for each is overkill, but I didn't know what was necessary at the time and I wanted that tonnage). Now the destroyer's on my scent and we've come to the meat of my question.

I dive down to 115 ft and I'm scraping the bottom (4 ft under keel). I'd heard that TMO destroyers are evil, so I figure I'm going to be lucky to get out of this alive. The first depth charge salvo seems to bear that up, as they get close enough to cause damage to the fore torpedo tubes. But after that, the destroyer pretty much couldn't hit me for anything --- a few times he steamed right over me with a strong sonar ping, but couldn't even drop the charges close enough for me to hear the explosions. I don't chalk this up to anything I was doing, because I was being pretty basic on my evasives and eventually I decided to just suck it up and run at flanking speed for deeper water where I could get under a thermal layer. I very quickly lost the destroyer this way, and he never really even got a good run at me after his first salvo.

So, finally, my question(s): Is it possible that being right on the bottom messed up the destroyer's sonar contact and made it harder to pinpoint my location, or did I just get lucky? Can the game even model the sonar contacts with that sort of fidelity (and am I even right in assuming that the sea-bottom would mess up a sonar contact IRL)?

[Rockin Robbins]

There's a range of skill levels that an escort might have. Sounds like you may have picked up one of the lower skill levels. Which is a good thing in shallow water.

Ducimus is your real expert here. I know in practice engagements that I've been toasted on many shallow water attacks with active escorts. In fact, in shallow water situations it may be better to remain at periscope depth than head for the bottom. They seem to have to be closer before they detect me then.