Believe it or not, but I decided to pick up Silent Hunter 3 for a good price a week ago....that's right, the submarine sim series.

Contrary to what one would expect, it's pretty darn awesome fun. The graphics are ok (well 90% of the time it's just open sea anyway), but the atmosphere...omg! It's just great.

You can opt for as much realism as you want, but the standard mode has the AI taking over quite a few tasks (thankgod). The sub is a huge collection of gauges, options, stations, signals, etc.

There's a career mode that lets you start as a lieutenant in a crappy sub at the beginning of the war, 1939, when the allied fleet was still pretty defenseless. You get assigned patrol zones, but you are (relatively) free to roam the seas in search of prey. As you sink ships, you gain in renown and are able to recruit better crew/commandeer better subs.

It's hard to describe the feeling of satisfaction you get after a clean, quick attack...pick up sounds/signals, plot out estimated collision course, dive to periscope depth and aim...and then disappear before the convoy even realises the torpedo hit.

Last mission I managed to enter the allied port of Hartlepool undetected...I started diving from a long way out, alternating between low speed (to minimize chances of sounds being picked up by ships near) and shutting off the engines entirely when an allied military ship passed by. When i came in the actual docks, I went to periscope depth and sunk a merchant and a cargo ship in its berth in a space of 2 minutes. They didn't know what hit them. And if it weren't for me running out of torpedos, I might have sunk another tanker as well (didn't have a deck cannon and flak wasn't doing shit on the thing). I made my getaway as cruisers rolled in from all over the area, though I did lose my sonarman through an unlucky depth charge hit on my radio quarters.

Erh...sorry. It's just great fun. I changed the speech in-game to German, too. Torpedos los!! Seriously, nothing breaks immersion like English-speaking crew on a U-Boot.

Got this Silent Hunter 3 'story' from a walkthrough. Enjoy.

hah. Sounds fun, in a dry and time-wasting kind of way. :p

I saw some screenshots of this in a mag some time ago and thought the atmosphere could be really good. Boats n shit isn't really my bag, but I do like bits in Master And Commander ("STARBOARD BATTERY!") and that Gene Hackman vs Denzel film. I assumed Silent Hunter would be too hardcore for me to dive into. Is it so, you think Ox?

I'm not much of a boatsman and/or sim guy either man, so don't worry...it's definitely worth it even if you don't want to do the whole immersion shabang thing where you have to do pretty much everything manually.

There is range of paramaters you can switch on or off depending on your taste, which will determine your "realism" percentage. The realism is standard at 29% in career mode.

You want to know how insane you can get wrt realism? Normally speaking, your watchman provides you with accurate info on the distance, type, speed, angle, etc of a ship in your view. But you can turn that off. What you need to do then is...

-get ship on visual (periscope, deck)
-pull out ship recognition manual
-basing yourself on its silhouet and size, you make an assumption as to which type you're dealing with. You call the ship type out to the crew.
-you measure distance, by checking its top mast length (provided in manual, IF you made the correct assumption on the ship type) against the waterline. The shorter, the further, etc. Obviously.
-you measure speed, usually by setting your stop watch between two set points. Harder than it sounds at sea (no landmarks) and heavily dependent on your skill to assess distance first.
-you measure angle using all of the above. (ship type, distance, speed)
-you fire your torpedos, subtracting the time the torpedos need to cross the distance to the ship from the ship's speed and ETA at a given point.

I don't think I need to say that this is HARD when you're over a 1000m away, on a stormy sea, with little or no visibility.


But in normal game mode, your watcher will estimate all that shit for your, you can 'lock on' to a target and your torpedoman will make his best effort to hit the target smack in the middle. The most important things you need to do as a captain is plotting the course and calculating interception points. And avoiding detection by warships. And calling the shots in combat situations (when attacking convoys etc.). And managing your crew. etc There's still a whole lot to do without resorting to extreme realisme. So if you're interested and can pick up SH3 for a few quid, I'd encourage it.

(Silent Hunter IV is good too but that's in the pacific with American subs. Fuck that shit, U-boot is where it's at!)

This pretty cool: because you can look around in the inside of the U-boat in SH but only SOME compartiments (captain's bunk, navigation/radio room and control room), some modders took it up themselves to create interiors for the other rooms such as the engine and torpedo chambers.

This thread has a few (very cool) early drafts of the mod

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthr ... 58&page=37