Arctic convoys (GWX 3.0)
 

It was December 17, 1942 when I ordered full speed ahead inside submarine pen in Bergen.
My official orders were to go patrolling south of Ireland, but only I and BdU high command knew my secret mission:
- Find the arctic convoy routes from Britain supplying Russia
- Recoinnasance of the Murmansk harbour

I head to find the arctic routes to stop the supplies running to Murmansk in order to help my comrades in Stalingrad.
I followed the coast line since I heard from some drunken kaleun that he had found a convoy of some sort north of Alta some time ago.

The coast was empty: not a trace of anyone and no help from the intelligence via radio.
It was after the journey that I found that the PQ and QP convoys did actually go next to Bear Island so no wonder I saw no one near the coast.
If I ever see that grog sipping pirate again...


I like infiltrating harbours and cause havoc in the early morning while they are at their deepest sleep.
I tried to crawl in to Murmansk, but quickly decided not to since I rammed into submarine net right away at the passage and figured it might only get harder the deeper down the river I would go.

I hang around the river entrance for a week but only saw few small warships driving around. One torpedo boat seemed to be on fixed patrol route in and out of the river.
And so the trip end up to be more of a recoinnasance and research expedition.


I did sank few ore carriers that departed Murmanks and seemed to head towards Archangel:
There were three large ore carriers with lorries on deck, covered with few escorts.
I stumbled on them by accident as I was starting to plot my way back to Bergen.

Once I iniatited the attack, and the TIIIs hit the carriers, the escorts broke from the formation and set to find me.
Getting away from them was easy peasy since their hydrophones worked no better than mine, and they seemed not to be equipped with sonar. Poor ruskies.
They do have radars on their larger war ships though (Storozhevoy), although I think IRL they should not be that common in Russian Navy at that time.

The TI torpedoes (G7a) seemed to be useless at least with magnetic detonator. Not a single one detonated.
I guess they use the same detonator as early TIIs too and were not upgraded (at least I got the old ones).
The TIIIs on the other hand worked great! I wish I had more of those.
Remind me to stock on TIIIs if I ever travel that north again..

The weather up there was all around awful.
Though surface visibility was OK, the waves were horrific which makes the shallow running torpedoes with impulse detonator useless.
Also the hydrophones (KDB) where heavily impacted by either large waves, cold waters, or both. Sound contact to nearby targets was lost even at 25m deep constantly.


So not so good trip in terms of sunken tonnages, but information nonetheless.
What about you fellow kaleuns, have you made any trips to far north to uncharted territory?

TL;DR
Where are the PQ/QP convoys?
What is the most effective place to hunt them?

If you use SH3 Commander, you can set the exact time in port and synchronize your sortie to meet a specific battlefield operation described in the GWX manual, doing so will avoid to get in empty zones.

That's not too difficult because the enemy patrol AI is disabled in a radius around ports, so you will never meet high resistance inside the port area except that you must avoid minefields. I don't think that any mod will change that. Passive ports are in all SH series and it's an easy way to get a high tonnage without risk. It's clearly totally unrealistic, but SH3 (and also SH5 in this regard) has its limits...

SH1 (Commander Edition 1.3) is different, also IMO the AI is the best in all the SH series: if you infiltrate ports you must first get past the destroyers in shallow waters, and they will come looking after you once you start 'havoc'...You are then stucked in shallow waters with not much of a chance. Play it and let's see if you still 'like' it afterwards :)


The early torpedos don't perform well if they don't impact at a 90° angle, if the angle is too high the impact detonator or the magnetic one will most likely fail, thats' historically accurate. But the positive is : they are fast and were prefered by the real skippers at that time.

Agree with you on the right angle with the contact pistol, but magnetic should perform at least as good or better when the angle is smaller (larger) since that way it has more time beneath the hull.

Anyway what I meant was that I thought they would've upgraded the magnetic pistols by 1943 on the TI torpedoes as well by the time TIII was introduced. After all they did prolong the operation time by introducing TI FAT.
Since TIII worked flawlessly where TI did not I can only deduce this was not the case (at least in the game of course).