I use 2 eng + 1 repair, and goes 40knt, repair is very important in SS vs SS or when your SD is down, that is my answer because you are keeping your gunner

To me, repair is nice, but only after you've been clobbered. I try to avoid contact with enemy weaponry and rely more on speed and stealth. For me, speed and OH duration are more important. The Seaman offers similar repair capabiliites by upgrading ALL of the crew's rep/rest rates (which are enhanced on SS). My SD is only a few points lower than when I load the repairman on board. Also, the KM SS5 gun is mostly useless. You couldn't sink a DD with less than 20 shells. Good luck with that. THe U-Flak guns are awesome and I would gladly exchange one Engineer and Seaman for my two gunners and those guns, but not on the SDE "To-Do" list.

I had to scrounge up enough credits to buy a good Chief Engineer (L93) the other day. With three Chief Engineers (L108, L93, L76) and a Seaman (L94) in the gunner slot, the best I can attain is 37 Knots OH surfaced, 32 Knots OH Submerged at this time.

At some point my Engineers will get good enough to achieve 40 knots OH surfaced, but not for a while. However, my OH time well over 1 1/2 minutes, so my transit time in OH is very good across no man's land.

The KM SS4 would achieve that quite easily with that crew. But looking forward as most people will upgrade from SS4 to SS5 at L95, instead of at a higher level. As a result, most SS4 going forward won't be achieving those speeds because they will move up to the SS5 and start over at a low level in a higher ship.

My first advice is to get a bb crew for the nation u want to play sub with. The reason is very simple. subs require good supporters to be very effective and grinding in a sub is hardly possible. Furthermore it will give u a sufficient amount of reps/engis to try different setups. Furthermore u will avoid setups as Ultra_Dog which make u much weaker then u can be. I doubt he has 900sd and has 7mil+ rep ability and thus will have a very very low rep rate (at 7mil rep ability reprate does a huge jump from 20dps to 80dps). If u have high supporters (110+) u will see that u will have very awesome OH time and a good reprate and 900sd which is very important too.(small sidenote on SD: watchout when u are heavyly dmged and start critdiving. when the blue health arrow is below 0 but u are still green u will see that crit diving still kills u instantly!)

at Ultra_dog sell that lvl 76 engi! for 2 reasons:
- he is 19lvl below ship and thus wount get any exp (near 0 since sub exp is very low
- take a close look at your ship speed. it can be that he makes your ship even slower because of the way OH speed is calculated.

The 1st engi works to 100% of his ability (no surprise) Adding a second engi - makes BOTH
engis aboard only effective to 71% - or more precice to 1/sqrt(2)= 70.71..%
3rd engi : all work at 1/sqrt(3) = 57.73%
4th engi : 50%
5th engi : 44.72% and so on...

yes he adds OH time at full ability but might reduces your maxspeed (besides adding wight). lvl him on a ship or buy a better one.

I'm running 3 Engineers, 1 Sonar, 1 Planesman, and 1 Repair in R slot. Goes 40 knots.

Seeing SDE let us sell for olive, you may want to reconsider this .