Terrific Site for U-Boat Fans

There's an interesting site I just stumbled on called SubSim http://www.subsim.com/index.php . It's purpose to be cover reviews of naval military simulations of all sorts (I used to love these things: thought they'd died out: they haven't). The real gem is on the forum. One of the members from France has uploaded about 600 photos that include over half the WWII U-Boat fleet. (All photos are external views: nothing from the inside like you'd find in many find books dealing with the U-boat war. It's the boats, not the crew, that get the attention.) He has them organized by boat and notes the fate of each of them - with several photos of sinkings. The gents forum starts on
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=149950 .
A real labor of love: never seen anything quite like it and I know the major U-boat sites, many of which have been around for some time now.

It's both helping and confusing me. I'm trying to figure out how to weather subs and it's a very hard job indeed: there's no question that a boat returning from a few weeks in the North Atlantic was really beat up. A 50 page article originally written for subcommittee.com by Doug Martindale covers U-boat colors for the modeler and he deals with many very important matters but ultimately leaves much to artistic imagination simply because the B&W photo evidence clearly shows many boats heavily weathered but doesn't tell you what they were weathered by.

http://www.artitec.nl/downloads/instructions/uboat/uboat_colours.pdf

The photos referenced above (several of which were taken in drydock or in pens), however, do confirm many of generalizations made by Martindale. If, as is likely, boats received a fresh paint job at every trip to a drydock it explains why some photos show nearly pristine boats. If one was coming back before the paint job it fits in nicely with some anecdotal descriptions that talk about rust "along the entire deck", paint peeling down to bare metal etc. Heavy fading is certain: what isn't is how to portray it. The "close up" photos from the collection above were most likely taken of the conning tower and what appears to be to be paint blistering is quite common. But a lot of that wouldn't show up at 350 scale. But major paint peeling would both above and below the waterline. How to handle rust, especially below the waterline, is going to make my brain hurt. There's was always commission day ceremony. As I understand Martindale, a crew and submarine were joined at when the boat was commissioned and then went off together to the Baltic for training: one day of picture pretty U-boat.
Eric