Put down the wrench, Bernard!!!

[misha1967]

So there I was, upside down doing Mach 2, the canopy blown off, 200 ft above sea level with one engine on fire and a monkey clinging to my left aileron...

Wait, wrong story...

I was cruising the North Sea, looking for Tommies, when suddenly, during a standard hydrophone sweep, I noticed that I couldn't rig the boat for silent running. My XO would helpfully explain to me that it wasn't possible (without helpfully explaining WHY it suddenly wasn't possible when it had been perfectly possible under the exact same conditions several dozen times before on the same patrol. Perhaps it was some union rule?). My machinist, on the other hand, would happily acknowledge my order, switch his little silent running icon on his engine command bar to yellow, and then promptly ignore actually doing what I'd told him to. He might have thought we were running silent, but nobody in the crew seemed to pay attention and the little "ear icon" at the top of the screen indicating silent running never appeared.

Similarly when I used the keyboard shortcuts (Y and SHIFT-Y): They would work perfectly, but everybody would still be making noise like it was fleet week in Kiel and the "ear icon" would stay absent. Clearly I either had a mutiny on my hands or I'd managed to do something with my mod soup that I shouldn't have. Which couldn't be the case since I'd changed nothing since it worked fine last.

That's when I remembered a couple of Tommy planes who had made a pass at me earlier. We crash dived in plenty time to avoid their machine guns, but they'd managed to drop a few eggs in our general direction and one of them came close enough to shake the boat up a little, scratching the paint to the point where Scheu and Raabe, the lazy buggers who get to hang out all the time in their little cubicles got a few paper cuts (now I'll have to put them up for the Verwundeteabzeichnung when we get back) and the flak gun and periscopes got a scratch too (99% status). Didn't take long to fix, the hull integrity wasn't even touched, so I thought that all was well.

But perhaps? Nah, it couldn't be! Repairs and silent running? Don't go together well. I know that much. But there was nothing left to repair!

And that's when I found Bernard trying to repair the screen door on the conning tower hatch. A repair that was made difficult for the poor dear by the fact that there'd never been one to begin with, but he's not one to give up when he gets an idea into his pointy little head, as I'm sure you all know. Like the time when he tried to stabilize the U-boat's depth by super-gluing the needle on the depth gauge in place.

In game terms, but I like the Bernard explanation better, all I had to do to "fix" the lack of silent running was to access the machinist's menu by clicking on his face, then click on the "toggle repair teams" icon (the one with the hammer on it) and, voila, I could rig for silent running again!

Yes indeed! Even though the repairs had been finished and there was no damage left anywhere on the boat, the damage control team dutifully kept plugging along since nobody had given them the order to stop!

(And I'd still love to know how the Hades they fixed the flak gun while we were at 40m below the surface, but hey... They're good!)

So keep in mind, my fellow Kaleuns who may not be aware of it already: If you take damage, ANY damage, be sure to hit the "hammer" toggle on Erdman's shortcut menu when it's been fixed, or they'll be sitting around fiddling with their wrenches, banging them furtively against the hull and making silent running impossible until you get back to port and start a new patrol.

That being said, I'd still rather have a damage control team who go to work without me having to tell them to and then refuse to STOP working until I tell them to than the opposite.

Now where'd Bernard go? Got to keep an eye on that guy!

[Wodin]

Love it!

You should write an AAR, it would be hilarious.

[Captain_AJ]

Good Story ,, iam laughing away here !! and good advice !!

[Hinrich Schwab]

Bernard, huh...here is a story of how to deal with Bernard.
********************
"Hey Bernard, we have a problem in the stern torpedo tube. Check it out for us."

"Jawohl, Herr Kaleun"

*Bernard crawls into tube*

"SEAL TUBE 5!"

"Sealed, sir!"

"Ready Tube 5!"

"Flooded and equalized, Sir!"

"Open Muzzle Door!"

"Tube 5 Ready, Sir!"

"Tube 5, LOS!!!!!!"

FWOOOSH!!!!

"Sir, was it necessary to launch the man out the tube?"

"Bernard was a problem. BdU has a saying when dealing with anything, especially a problem; Be more aggressive."

"I see, sir."
****************
That is what I would do with Bernard.

[krashkart]

We keep Bernard busy with a woodcarver's puzzle. As long as he has plenty of bandages, scrap wood and a chip knife we're happy and he's out of the way.

[misha1967]

Thanks!

It's one of the things I do to add immersion. Think up background stories that fit, more or less, with what's going on in the game. And then sometimes I just go plain silly

[krashkart]

Originally Posted by misha1967

Thanks!

It's one of the things I do to add immersion. Think up background stories that fit, more or less, with what's going on in the game. And then sometimes I just go plain silly

I do that from time to time, depending on how humorously sour a patrol goes. In SH3 I had a bad habit of beaching my sub near Portsmouth, much to the delight of the coastal defense guards. Nearby citizens held a community picnic while we tried to jigger the boat off the banks with borrowed planks and towing trucks. Eventual capture of my crew led to Good Times for the constables, and a local newspaper headline summed up our glorious attack on the harbor:

Local Heroes: Gerry Submarine Aids Spring Plowing

...complete with a full-page picture of our Uboat rolled over on its side in a pasture like a dead whale.

I'm surprised that BdU gave me another command after that. The longshoremen in the area had made Admiral Doenitz aware of our presence when they wrote to him and told him that they could hear our Uboat clanging and scraping over the anti-sub nets shortly before we plowed our way out of the water. They even told him to either start training our crews or stop sending Uboats to England, that simple.

Some days it's tough being a Kaleun.



EDIT:

Clipping from the paper that day:

..."Even the Yanks can sail better than that", one local man told the Portsmouth Herald after a German Uboat beached itself near the harbor on Monday, apparently in an attempt to defect to the United Kingdom; although the constabulary will not yet release details as to why the German crew decided to...

[misha1967]

Originally Posted by krashkart

I do that from time to time, depending on how humorously sour a patrol goes. In SH3 I had a bad habit of beaching my sub near Portsmouth, much to the delight of the coastal defense guards. Nearby citizens held a community picnic while we tried to jigger the boat off the banks with borrowed planks and towing trucks. Eventual capture of my crew led to Good Times for the constables, and a local newspaper headline summed up our glorious attack on the harbor:

Local Heroes: Gerry Submarine Aids Spring Plowing

...complete with a full-page picture of our Uboat rolled over on its side in a pasture like a dead whale.

That's some good writing there, my fellow Kaleun! You're an inspiration!

If you want a true story about the single most inept warship in naval history (although it's neither German nor a U-boat, but it DOES have destroyers, WWII, torpedoes and even a depth charge there, so it's not completely off topic) that had my sides splitting for hours after I read it, read the sad (and hilarious!) tale of the USS William D. Porter.

I have in the past been told that I have a knack for creative writing, but nothing I could ever think up in my wildest imagination can top that true story.

I think, based on the dates, that it is the "what happened next?" story that covers what happened between the time that Bernard went overboard off the coast of South Carolina as I was patrolling there during Paukenschlag in one of my SH3 careers (he so wanted to go swimming with the dolphins and we sort of forgot about him when we had to crash dive) and when he showed up some time thereafter in Lorient. He never wanted to talk about it, though, but I suspect that he somehow managed to sneak aboard the USS William D. Porter as a seaman of the US Navy in his attempt to get back home).

[Wodin]

Is Bernard a character of SH3...as he is missing from my U Boat!

It's been years since I played SH3, and I barely played 4 as it wasn't the same in those yankee subs.

[misha1967]

Originally Posted by Wodin

Is Bernard a character of SH3...as he is missing from my U Boat!

It's been years since I played SH3, and I barely played 4 as it wasn't the same in those yankee subs.

Bernard is an institution around here. He's the guy you blame all of your mistakes on, the rot-brained naval school reject who somehow managed to get himself on a U-boat anyway, the guy who will spend 4 hours searching for BBC on the hydrophone... that guy. And it all started with this thread.