[in_vino_vomitus]

Well - I finally had a couple of excursions. Unfortunately my first Captain, obviously something of a chinless wonder, laid in a course to the patrol area from Tricomalee and retired to his bunk, not realising his course included an overland segment. I suspect his crew thought his continued command was prejudicial to their chances of surviving the war, since they obeyed their orders to the letter and ran the boat aground.

Anyway, his replacement managed to make it into the Malacca strait, where he's seen lots of aircraft and a small fishing fleet and since one does not shell fishermen, we have yet to hear shots fired in anger.

During training though, our intrepid Captain found the Deck gun to be somewhat underpowered, and the torpedoes require some care. My understanding of MkVIII***'s, is that they basically had one gyro angle setting, which was 90 degrees. in the game you can set a maximum of ten degrees each way, I think - anyway, I've decided in this game to just use zero gyro shots and cut out the TDC altogether, so I'm planning on using the vector analysis method pretty much exclusively - we'll see how that turns out.

As it stands the game has a somewhat unfinished feel to it, mainly because it hasn't been finished yet. A British Language pack would go a long way towards helping with the feel of the game, as would a better periscope screen with the British torpedo controls [whatever they were] rather than the US TDC - North Sea and Med campaigns would be nice too.

I suspect that all of the above will be made more likely with greater use of the mod, and there's enough in it already to make it interesting. We'll see what happens when and if we run into any ASW vessels in the shallow waters we're currently patrolling - Watch this space......