On the subject of home brewing - If you do it right, with malt and hops, rather than extracts, you can make better beer than many commercial breweries do - It can be tricky having 40 pints of beer, brewed to your exact taste, just lying around the house though....
As far as our esteemed Royal Family goes - They're German - of course they appreciate good beer
And because this is a story thread, I guess I'd better tell one. Having stepped back to 1939 and changed shirts, I found myself in a Type IX U-Boat off the Portugese coast. Tracking a Southbound convoy, I was detected by the lead escort, the sea was fairly rough and I dived deep and I found that at 500', they couldn't detect me. So I went to 4 kts and headed for the convoy. It was a pretty big one, so there was still a lot of it left when I reached its track. I came to periscope depth, pretty much in the middle of them, and saw this as I passed 90 ft.....
Guess where my first torpedo went........
All in all I stayed under the convoy for a long time, I fired all my tubes, went deep, and matched their course. I was never detected. I managed to reload and come up for another attack. The only reason I didn't get huge tonnage was that although most of the torpedoes hit their targets, most of the hits failed to detonate
I made the mistake of saving whilst under the convoy, and subsequently was unable to reload - but after some experimentation, it seems that if there are a lot of ships in the vicinity, the best thing to do is get clear of them before saving - any saved game in proximity to the convoy crashed the game when reloaded - just like I did with the fourth wall there
The sinking dynamics in OM seem different - I have no idea what realistic looks like, but certainly they don't go down as quick. Thanks to the Game Booster software you pointed me at, I have these photos of a French freighter I met. I gave it two torpedoes, surfaced and finished it with the deck gun. It went down fairly quickly [about 15 mins], but I've had them take much longer.
Incidentally, one thing that amuses me is the difference in language between the event as it's happening and what goes in the log. Like those Edwardian gentlemen climbers
"Mr Hartington-Smythe negotiated the overhang, with some difficulty and a few choice epithets...." In the case above, my
"Tracking a Southbound convoy, I was detected by the lead escort" - would have been more like
:
"Captain, he's spotted us."
"Don't panic Number One, we're well outside his visual range"
"Have you been in the medicine chest!!? Look at that bow wave - You think the Captain just decided to try out his water skis? - pointed at us?
"That's a very good point Number One - Crash dive!!"
Obviously the choicest epithets have been omitted for reasons of public decency. I'm guessing that I'm not the only one who has conversations like this with themselves when making decisions. Given the decisions I'm given to making, my imaginary First Lieutenant tends towards insubordination - on the premise that a Court Martial is preferable to a memorial service.....