[2026.1] Depth Charge Guesswork
Historically, ASDIC gave a destroyer your bearing and your range – but not your depth. That’s a WWII fact the game quietly ignores: the moment any escort gets a contact on you, its depth charges are set to your exact depth. Alberich coating, sonar decoys, silent running, the thermal layer – they can delay a destroyer finding you, but once it has, none of them stop it hitting you. This mod puts that uncertainty back where it belongs.
- Depth charges are set from what the escort actually knows – not from your true depth. The worse its contact on you, the wider its charges miss, exploding too shallow or too deep instead of right on your hull.
- Every countermeasure you already use finally affects the blast, not just detection. Alberich, sonar decoys (Bold / Pillenwerfer), the thermal layer and silent running all degrade the escort’s firing solution – so for the first time they make charges miss in depth, instead of only buying you time.
- The escort’s aim sharpens the longer it holds you. Sit still under a solid contact and it brackets you tighter with every pass, exactly like the real thing. Slip away, go quiet, and its solution decays – so its next salvo guesses.
- Decoys finally have teeth. An escort chasing your Bold canister drops its charges on the decoy’s own weak contact instead of on you – the payoff the countermeasure never had.
Get spotted and sit still under a full-strength ping and nothing changes – a locked-on escort still nails you, same as vanilla. But go quiet, pop a decoy, or duck under the thermal layer, and it finally pays off: charges start missing in depth, not just arriving late. The mod rewards the evasion tactics real U-boat captains lived and died by, instead of leaving them cosmetic.
- One clean, focused change to how charges are aimed in depth – detection, alarm state, contact tracking and the escort’s horizontal aim all stay 100% vanilla, so it plays nice with other mods.
- Pairs especially well with my Shadow Zone mod: its realistic thermal-layer depth lets more boat classes actually reach the layer – exactly where charges start to miss.
- Save-game friendly: nothing is written to your saves, so it’s safe to add or remove mid-campaign.
- For UBOAT 2026.1.
It ships with sensible defaults – most players never need to touch a thing. But everything lives in a plain-text config file you can edit with the game closed. The dials worth knowing:
- How hard charges miss (maxDepthErrorMeters) – the overall strength of the effect. Turn it down for tense near-misses; up to reward a clean evasion more.
- Which way they miss (shallowBiasProbability) – whether the escort’s bad guesses land too shallow or too deep. Defaults lean shallow, the way real escorts underestimated diving depth.
- How blind a lost contact really is (missingObservationAccuracy) – how wildly an escort drops when it’s bombing you without a solid fix.
- How long it remembers you (accuracyMemorySeconds) – how long a broken contact keeps its old accuracy before the escort has to start guessing from scratch.
I don’t recommend to change these settings unless you know what you’re doing.
Config file: %LocalLow%Deep Water StudioUBOATdepth-charge-guesswork-config.json
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