Das Boot had aircraft, enemy and friendly submarines, interactive anti-aircraft gun and deck gun firing controls, fantastic ideas for radio (including the capability to decode enemy transmissions), and more. This simulator was one of the first subsims to use true three dimensional polygon filling graphics. The advantage of this technique was that you get a real three dimensional effect. However, you are unable to show object detail. With fast jet aircraft simulators, lack of detail was fine, since you only saw the enemy for a split second. But, for submarine simulators that operate at such slow speeds, lack of detail was annoying. In Das Boot, it was impossible to determine the identification of a vessel by sight. You must have the XO “ID” the vessel to know what type it is. Other features were the use of time compression, different external views, enemy use of HF/DF against you (“maintain radio silence to avoid detection”), Metox, and different torpedo types. With the ground-breaking graphics, Das Boot had a lot of promise, but the lack of career missions pretty much sank it. ssvideo
