Yes, it is precisely 45 degrees at the steepest point.
It's not about the speed. Even slowed down to the correct speed, the
dive still looks utterly crazy.
I only have it going fast because no one wants to watch a .gif for 10 mins.
As soon as the boat reaches 45deg. it needs to pull up at an
impossible rate or it would go straight down to crush depth.



No, gravity does not give a uboat much speed at all because the u-boat
never has much weight.
Even with all tanks flooded it will only weigh about 10 tonnes.

It might get a knot or three of extra speed on the way up because the
VIIC can have a positive buoyancy of exactly 102 tonnes when the
basalt is all blown.
Come to think of it, that much positive buoyancy could really rocket it
upwards.

ed: going to do the math...
ed:2

Wow!

This is all just calculated guess work, so don't take it too seriously...

If we assume that the motors and dive planes can only give enough
thrust in the vertical to counteract vertical drag. (they can at low
speed, but this is very optimistic as the speed rises)...
And we assume that the VIIC can blow all it's basalt and get into a
climb angle instantly (Ha!)...

Blowing basalt from 220m gets us about 14knots of vertical speed
when the boat breaks the surface.
However, the dive planes and motors, even at a 45 degree climb,
can only counteract drag up to the speed of ~4.5 knots (half the
underwater top speed at 45 degrees).

I don't have enough info to work out the drag forces, but it's a safe
bet that it will take off a lot of the speed above 4.5 knots.

A top vertical speed of 8 knots seams to be in the ball park. This is in
addition to the ~4.5 knots of horizontal velocity. that gets the VIIC
from crush depth to the surface in just under one min.

Of course, the VIIC can't blow all 102 tonnes of basalt instantly and it
can't get to a 45 degree climb angle instantly, but even with the most
conservative figures, you can expect a good knot or two of vertical
climb if all the basalt is blown.


I ran the calculations for a sinking u-boat and the effect of the ~10
tonnes of basalt that the VIIC can take on top of the neutral
buoyancy load gives it less than 1 knot of extra sink as it passes
220m.

ed3: removed some mistakes.
ed4:

As a calculated guess it would take 18-24min to sink a VIIC to 220m
without dive planes.

This is 20 Degrees Blowing Ballast:
http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h2...-20Degrees.jpg
Can change this angle to what ever, if anyone wants to see, as well as external view, but this is about max before the view starts to look a little weird, would be nice if the crew positions reacted properly as in the photo in post #1, hopefully this will be the case in SHV.:yep:

Don't forget these guys were literally crash diving for their lives. So the dive angle might look crazy, but how it looks is irrelevant, whatever gets you to the bottom fastest!
Unless you meant crazy math wise, I'll admit I don't know the math behind all this, so I'll trust you (although I'm still pretty sure they can dive at 45 and pull up before crush depth, no?).
That SH3 picture from Reece at 20 degree looks alot like that photograph! Combine that and the report; "Thereafter the angle down is normally from 12-15°, though angles up to 45 have been reported, after complete submersion." My rough guess would be that about, oh, 15-25 degrees seems like the 'normal' crash dive angle. :hmmm:

Well, you can recover from 90 degrees if you want. It's just going to
take a lot of time because you will need to stop the motors and trim up
with basalt.
Whether or not you need to do this at 45 degrees depends on the
vertical turning circle. i.e. the rate at which you can change dive angle.


25 degrees looks much more feasible.
http://www.b3tards.com/u/57a418c694b...viicdive25.gif

Please show in downward angle please

Dig those gifs! :|\\

Hey I was just doing a little Das Boot reading now and came across this, looks like Buchheim has the boat crash diving at at least 30 degrees.

Page 194,
"The Chief slowly levels the boat out and orders, "Man diving stations!" The seamen who rushed forward now work their way back hand over hand up the slope. The sausages act like a scale: we're still a good thirty degrees bow heavy."

Because of the camera angle this is about the best view or you only see the valve operator::yep:
http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h2...H320ddown2.jpg

http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h2...H320ddown1.jpg

I hope the developer team can make the U-Boat dive properly in the SH5 game and fixed the almost horizontally dive bug problem of the subs in Silent Hunter 4 , in Silent Hunter 3 the developers team have made the subs dive more accurate and steeper in a tilted way ( bow dive first ) , in Silent Hunter 4 the brand new developers team forgot this and the sub dive almost horizontally


To be more exact ,actually the subs in SH4 after a while also become a bit tilted in the dive process , but in SH3 the sub become quick noticeable tilted and the stern remain much longer on the surface of the water while the bow dive deeper and deeper

http://i194.photobucket.com/albums/z...hk/previe7.jpg

30 Degrees up, the dive view is stuffed in SH3 so I wont post.
http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h2...k/SH330dUp.jpg

dive dive

it would be good if we can manual control the dive planes


eg:dc attacks

We could in the later versions of SH2.
It wasn't really a whole lot of use.

It also wasn't very realistic, as the captain never manned the planes himself, and the bow and stern planes were controlled by two separate men seated at two separate wheels, and WW2 subs didn't fly like underwater airplanes. This led to complaints from destroyer players about u-boats flying up from 200 meters, popping off a shot and diving right back down again.

Of course it also led to one incident of a sub skipper reporting himself dead. It seems he put his planes on full rise and then started thinking about something else. the boat kept pitching upwards until it reached 90 degrees, and then everything broke lose and he sank.:rotfl2:

deeper deeper

Letum, what about if a sub was surfaced at 12kts. or so, then crashed dived? As the sub reaches negative buoyancy wouldn't they have to change the planes to keep from passing crush depth?

Also wouldn't the bow be around crush depth with the stern up too far to level the dive at steeper angles past 30deg.? I have read alot on current subs and from the 60's but haven't seen any books with uboat dive operations. Surely they didn't maintain that angle past 75-80 meters?

"Survivors stated that a U-Boat could crash-dive to 15 metres (49 ft.) in 30 seconds and that the record crash-dive was 40 metres (131 ft.) in 38 seconds" From U379 VIIC on Uboat Archive