Have a bit of a question for those of you who have some experience with Silent Hunter 3. I started a career on August 2, 1939 which went very well. However, upon returning to port I learned of the negative renown that you gain for destroying neutral vessels.
My question would be, who am I supposed to attack until Great Britain and her allies declare war on September 3rd? The game says that I should be attacking British shipping, but they're currently neutral and I'd prefer to not be losing renown.
I should also note that I am running the Grey Wolves mod, which according to the manual, handles renown in essentially the same way as the default game.

You could try starting your career a month later, in september. Or you can just patrol a bit and wait for Poland to aggravate Germany into war (joke). If the mission briefing specifically told you to attack neutral ships, it's a bug or an oversight.

On the same topic, how come when a fire a torpedo and it hits it doesn't explode? I get this sometimes....

Thats called realism. Torpedoes in the 40s were pretty unreliable, glancing hits are unlikely to detonate, you need a solid contact with the hull and even if you do there's like a 30% chance it'll be a dud

Yeh, I guessed it was realism, wasn't sure if there was an exact reason though...
Thanks though that answered it, I'll try lower, perpendicular shots to the hull!

Unfortunately, I only see options to adjust the year, and not the month. So I'm going to have to go with Alias' suggestion. It was somewhat fun, acting as a spy and reporting contacts pre-conflict anyways. Thanks all.

That's right, I forgot. Grey Wolves doesn't have SH3 Commander integrated, does it? With it, you could set a waiting period in the base, or you could do it like in the vanilla version, where you constantly buy a "free" addition to the U-boat and the time it took to put it on made time go by.
But of corse, that's the lazy man's way out. Real U-boat capitains get up close and personal, do a mission or two, and get a few specialists just before the war starts.
(BTW, the grey wolves no longer rewards you for remaining in your patrol grid for 24 hours. So now only sunk ships bring rewards. For this, a deck 8.8 is crucial, only torpedoes won't cut it. But you already know that, don't you?)

According to GW manual the renown you originally were supposed to get for patrolling wasn't being given in the first place due to a bug. They just removed it, since it wasn't working.
I read about Sub Commander, and I'll try it out for the next career. Thanks all.

Here's what the GWX features say:
# Renown Points for Reaching Patrol Areas — GWX will award renown only for sinking enemy ships and shooting down enemy aircraft, with penalties for sinking friendly or neutral ships and shooting down friendly or neutral aircraft. This means GWX will no longer award renown for reaching and patrolling your patrol area.
# Renown Points for Returning to Base — GWX removes the renown awarded for returning to base since a stock game bug prevented players from earning this renown.
You got full renown in vanilla if you completed a patrol, but you didn't get additional points if you returned within 30km range (or something) of a base and then ended the patrol, as was stated in the original game.

You haven't quoted the entire first paragraph. If you read the whole thing as stated in the PDF manual (Page 102), we see that I misread it in my haste. The stock engine wasn't giving you renown outside the standard areas. That is why they removed it.
Renown Points for Reaching Patrol Areas
The Silent Hunter III game engine does not award renown to players who reach and remain in their assigned patrol areas if those areas are outside the stock Silent Hunter III grid system. This meant that players in Black Sea or Indian / Pacific Ocean patrol areas received no renown for meeting those objectives although renown would have been awarded in the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea, After long consideration, the GWX Team decided that GWX will award renown only for sinking enemy ships and shooting down enemy aircraft, with penalties for sinking friendly or neutral ships and shooting down friendly or neutral aircraft. This means GWX will no longer award renown for reaching and patrolling your patrol area in fairness to players in the Black Sea and Indian Ocean, since some areas received this award and some did not.

Well, vanilla SH3 wasn't perfect by far. I remember the first time I dived to one hundred meters, all in the command room, and then went to the map of the sub. I saw my watch crew on the bridge, still looking for contacts. All heavily fatigued (of course, lack of H2O :), probably confused as hell. So much fun for a realistic submarine simulator :)

I've had that happen in Silent Hunter 4 on a few occasions. While I adore the graphics in that title, and it has some good gameplay, it is far too unstable for me to run, even with version 1.5 (U-Boat missions). The game would get so bogged down by glitches that I couldn't enable much in the way of time compression, and it would get to the point where it would crash no matter what. Only happened when playing the United States though.
Then there was the time that I started a patrol, the crew informed me that I was somehow passing a thermal layer (on the surface), and the destroyer parked next to me exploded and sunk. I can only guess that he was "magically" taken below water for a split second, which brought about his end.
This is why I've finally turned my attention to Silent Hunter III, which I must admit, is far superior in most areas of atmosphere and gameplay. If the widescreen and rez tweaks worked for me, it would be perfect. Windowed mode is fine though. (I run 1920x1080 usually.)