buoyancy in NYGM

[Weisia]

I am playing almost for a month the NYGM expansion and one thing I really had to get used to was that my boat would sink when I turned my engines off (while being submerged).

Doing silent running on the lowest speed is of course the solution. But for several patrols I encountered now the problem that my sub will only keep the ordered depth when doing 'halbe fahrt'. As soon as I turn my speed down the sub starts do dive again. Attacking convoys and evading DD's is quite difficult when my screws are screaming for attention.

At first I was thinking this must have been the result of some damage taken prior to the dive, but in my last patrol (DiD) I had no damage at all.

It is somewhere in 1941 by the way. I have the malfunction and sabotage option active, but I don't suspect the French Resistance to be responsible for my problem.

[Otto Heinzmeir]

I haven't played that mod yet. Perhaps giving a quick tap on the E key for ballast will level you off. Usually you can get 3 or 4 bursts of before you use up your compressed air. So if one is enough you'll still be alright.

[Sailor Steve]

That was done partly because it was considered realistic and partly because it was a much-loved feature in Aces Of The Deep. No boat or ship is perfectly sealed, and they all leak. This is taken care of by pumping the water out, something you don't dare do while Silent Running. So in AOD if you were silent running, sooner or later the boat would start to sink and you'd get a message from your LI: "Cannot maintain depth without running pumps, Herr Kaleun!"

Since SH3 doesn't do that for silent running, NYGM's answer was to do it whenever you were at silent running speed, i.e. very slow. There is a mod that changes it. I'm looking but haven't found it yet.

[AVGWarhawk]

That is an interesting concept Steve. :hmmm: I like that idea modeled into the game.

[Threesixtyci]

Heh... I would have thought that Ubi would have stoled a lot more stuff from Dynamix, but they didn't.

[Hitman]

Heh... I would have thought that Ubi would have stoled a lot more stuff from Dynamix, but they didn't.

They needn't either....SH1 (SSI 1996) was already a very good conceptual foundation upon which to build a great sim. True some features remembered Aces of the Deep a lot (Stations and even tool bar and hot keys) but SH1 had its own very defined personality and choices, clearly independent and different from AOD. Despite their shortcomings when compared against modern sims, for me they still are the best two submarine simulations that ever existed. By that I mean that in their age, they were even better than SH3 or SH4 have been for today's standards (Not that I don't like SH3/4 but when the era of gameplay over graphics started to decline, simulations were of course the most damaged genere)

[Stiebler]

@Weisia:

I am playing almost for a month the NYGM expansion and one thing I really had to get used to was that my boat would sink when I turned my engines off (while being submerged).
No sane submarine commander would have his boat trimmed up when making a periscope attack on a defended target. Suppose the boat broaches (rises from) the water suddenly? The boat will be spotted at once and attacked. Also the firing of torpedoes will make the boat suddenly lighter, so it is more likely to broach. Of course you must be trimmed down, tending to sink, when you make a torpedo attack.

Doing silent running on the lowest speed is of course the solution. But for several patrols I encountered now the problem that my sub will only keep the ordered depth when doing 'halbe fahrt'. As soon as I turn my speed down the sub starts do dive again. Attacking convoys and evading DD's is quite difficult when my screws are screaming for attention. This is an example of the famous, or infamous, 'crash-dive blues'. In SH3, owing to a bug, a crash-dive causes the U-boat to sink stern-first until it levels out at its pre-set crash-dive depth (usually 80 metres in NYGM). If you *interrupt* the crash-dive before it is complete, for example by setting a deeper depth before the crash-dive is complete, the boat will never level out. Then you will have trouble controlling the boat at its new depth, except by moving at half-speed.

These are the solutions:
1. Do not crash-dive, unless it is essential for the fastest possible dive. Instead, dive at flank speed on the dive planes (key 'D').
2. If you must crash-dive, allow the crash-dive to level out at 80 metres (20 metres for type II boats) before using the 'D' key to go deeper.
3. If you crash-dive, then accidentally set a new depth, causing the 'crash-dive blues', return as soon as you can to a depth *above* the crash depth (for example, to 70 metres), then crash-dive again and allow the boat to level out at 80 metres. Then the problem ends.

The 'crash-dive blues' affects all versions of SH3, with all mods, but it is especially a problem with NYGM because the boat is always trimmed down.

Stiebler.