You have to be online the very first time you run the game. After that you can tell UPlay to go to offline mode. It's all documented in the SH5/SH5 mods forum. If you have questions just ask there :up:

"...what would be that vital aspect in your opinion?"

Elementary, my dear bubblehead, Buoyancy! The earliest flight simulators had fine control and carefully modded physics for slow flight, turbulence, dead engine, stall - spin and recovery, along with trim controls for pitch roll and yaw, altitude loss in a turn if you didn't add power and raise the nose, you name it they modeled it carefully. Sub simulators have NOTHING for ballast control, no pumping flooding blowing internal tanks to trim and balance the boat at all. Perfect neutral buoyancy at all times unless damaged and flooding, then there's no way to compensate for flooding by trimming the ballast. Undamaged hull and "bulkheads" (which are internal and would have nothing to do with water coming in from outside) means you stop motors and go to zero speed, set depth anywhere and it hovers there indefinitely without slowly rising/sinking and pitching. While waiting for a target to reach the firing point I try to keep some way on and time it to arrive at the firing point close to the perfect position anyway, but it irritates me that you CAN just go to the firing point, stop dead and never have to move. Heavy flooding in the after torpedo room you're down by the stern, no way to compensate with trim tanks?! Flight physics are always considered the most vital aspect of any flight simulator, if that's not realistically modeled it's considered lame whatever else it has. So why all these years since the 1983 Spectrum Holobyte GATO have we accepted sub simulators that don't accurately model the physics and controls for submersible vessels? :down:

"Curious is all."
Good thing you ain't a cat, hey? :salute:

For everyone who says you can't move thru the boat on SH5 check out this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY0lBjrlfT0
This should have been part of SH4.

...................... :sign_yeah::D

An excellent response! However, unlike a flight sim, trimming the boat is much more complex and is as much an art as it is science. Specifically when some of us have decided to form a trim party to screw with the diving officer. :har: Having driven the boat there are many aspects to handling a submarine that I think would be lost and ultimately cause confusion, frustration, and finally loss of all hope of understanding. But that's not all to say a simplified solution couldn't be implemented.

Looking back to SH2 a mod was created that allowed control over the dive planes; and from my experience it proved quite accurate in how the boat would handle. But alas that seems to be the way of not just subsims, but many a video game. Substance gives way to prettiness to appease the ignorant, lazy, masses.

I would love to be able to put her nose down in a crash dive using the bow planes.

In a flight simulator, the player is put into the role of the aircraft's pilot. The pilot controls the aircraft's attitude and trim (particularly in a single- or two-seat aircraft). In a submarine simulator, the player is put in the role of - what? The boat commander? The dive officer? the planesman? Identification party? Torpedoman? All oif the above? I might like a subsim where the trim of the boat was not perfect (function of the expertise of the diving officer and crewmen), just as I would like an identification party that made mistakes. But to have to do all that myself? Historically, which skippers ever did that? Perhaps, unusually, in an emergency caused by an incompetent diving officer, but that would require that the diving officer be less than 100% competent and reliable. When the diving officer has occasional trim problems or porpoises the boat (possible in modded SH3 and SH5), when the navigator miscalculates a noon sun (possible in modded SH5), then I as a player will have to learn to deal with the uncertainty of relying on other humans, which is part of the job of a sub skipper. AFAIK, a WW2 sub officer did not have to qualify as planesman. Should I?

Not being a submariner (IRL) if the boat needing trimming because of taking on water in the aft compartment or some other reason wouldn't that be a command the captain would give?

Before this gets to crazy (to late.:har:) all I wanted to do was be able to move thru the boat. Once you got to those rooms such as the captains quarters complete with desk and pinup girls you could see the captain's log on the desk and go thru it. Or when visiting the engine room you could see the damage report or manipulate the crew board from there, etc...
I don't want to control every valve and feature that a sub has. It would be unrealistic in a sub. I want to be able to go to the torpedo room and see them reloading torpedos or go to the engine room and see the mechanic keeping watch over the engines, etc....

By the way if you can't go into the the captain's quarters in SH4 then why do we have a pinup girl mod in the mod section??:confused:

I'm not a submariner, either. My knowledge is based purely on reading - first-person accounts and contemporary training manuals. So what I have to say is fair game for anyone with first-hand experience. But, no, AFAIK, that is not an order the skipper would give.

To quote from NavPers 16160, The Fleet Type Submarine, dated June, 1946, Section 18A3: "The control room is the station of the diving officer who issues the necessary orders during a dive and directs the men at the manifolds, pumps, and diving gear in maintaining the submarine at the desired depth." 18B3: "The diving officer now observes the angle of the submarine." 18B4: "If an excessive angle on the diving planes is necessary to hold a zero bubble, the diving officer orders a readjustment of the ballast in the trim tanks until the planesmen can hold a zero bubble with a minimum use of the planes." 18B5: "The experienced diving officer will, however, recognize both conditions simultaneously, and combine the operations as dictated by his judgment. Thus he may, in a minimum time, return speed control to the commanding officer by his report, 'Final trim.' meaning 'All right over-all and all right fore and aft.'" NavPers 16160 is available online here: http://maritime.org/doc/fleetsub/index.htm

Gene Fluckey in "Thunder Below" describes his experience as diving officer in USSBonita , commanded by "Shorty" Nichols. In this incident, Fluckey displays his ability to trim the boat after transiting from the Panama Canal into the saltier, denser Pacific, under the eyes of the squadron commander.

Herbert Werner in Iron Coffins describes his challenge as a skipper saddled with a diving officer who had no feel for trimming the boat. He tries to give the man opportunities to learn, but finally has to replace him with a junior officer with better skills. This was KM, of course, and not USN, but the operational assignments appear to have been very similar.

Again, I admit that this is all "book-learnin'" and if someone who has actually served in the boats could contribute, I'd certainly relish it.

This was a great thread in it's day:Here

In the game the player has to manually do a lot of things that others would be doing automatically by standing orders anyway, all I'm talking about is a simplified ballast control that you could manipulate when needed. And could be set to automatic just like map contact updates and automatic targeting on/off. That's another argument I always lose with the train simulator casual players who want eye candy and fluff - suggest more realistic options and they have a hissy fit even after you try to explain that it could be set up as an OPTION, just like flight simulator has sliders for more or less realism in flight physics and controls. For a sub simulator there could be a simple on/off and a manual override when you think the diving officer or DCA isn't doing enough or doing it fast enough.

Can't tell you how often I've had a leak and had to keep ordering depths just to keep from sinking too low or slowly rising too high...

You want a higher fidelity model of the boat.

I want a higher fidelity model of the boat commander's decision space.

We're not wrong. but we're not right, either. Neither are the people who want eye candy. There's a whole forum around here for people who get off on the beautiful pictures they make with SH4. They aren't wrong either.

But, if I get to choose, I'd rather have effort put into functional modeling of the crew rather than physical modeling of the boat. YMMV.

No argument here, different strokes for different folks. :salute:

I would love to have the option to walk like a first person shooter through a complete boat, and the damage control and crew screens include forward and after battery, both engine rooms and maneuvering (motor room), with the interior modeling all those compartments plus the pump room. My priorities however;
1. Ballast balance buoyancy
2. Do SOMETHING - ANYTHING - with the ADHD brain damaged crew AI (supposed to be Artificial Intelligence, in SH4 it stands for Always Incoherent) so they report important things like an escort of the convoy you're tracking suddenly turning toward you and bending on knots. The only thing those blithering idiots are programmed to report are new contacts, and they're not even smart enough to realize the "new" contact they keep reporting over and over is the same escort zigzagging in and out of visual range. It's almost not worth doing an end-around in SH4, if you're not already ahead of the convoy turn away and let them go by.
3. What you said, an SH5 style internal walk around.
4. An options screen to change default settings - radar defaults to 20 kyards and sweep instead of 8000 yards and focus (every time I go to look at the PPI scope the switch automatically changes to focus in the wrong direction), torpedoes can be set to high speed contact 20 foot depth by default so you don't have to tediously set them yourself every time (another crew job that the captain has to perform in SH4), stuff like that. "Put me on the bearing, up scope" the assistant approach officer doing the waltz with you will spin the scope to the bearing on the TDC, in game no option for that.

Lot of other wish lists after that, but your number 1 wish does come in my top 10 at number 3.

Thanks for reminding me about this for SH5. I just figured out how to take manual control of the fore/aft diveplanes in it :D It's not simple to do as requires some patches to the files. Think I located all the ballast tanks also :cool:

Just a quick thought here while I have time. Drills. I need the ability to conduct drills so the crew will become better. The ability of the crew is determined by its experience in handling certain situations. A higher rank does not always mean that that individual is better than any other.

Agreed. This is usually what skippers spent that big chunk of time between leaving and reaching their patrol area on. Having nothing to do besides keeping the time compression pumped up to it's highest level in the two weeks steaming from Pearl Harbor to Japan seems kind of a waste.

Missed one,

"Can't tell you how often I've had a leak and had to keep ordering depths just to keep from sinking too low or slowly rising too high..."

Too often. E to blow ballast, then P for periscope depth rising past 100 feet to avoid broaching in the middle of 6 destroyers, waiting for it to sink back down to 300 and blowing again, lather rinse repeat. :down: Until you run out of compressed air. Flooding in the after torpedo room so the stern is down, it WILL stay at periscope depth but with the periscope 30 feet underwater and the bow sticking up 40 feet above the surface. No way to trim by pumping from after trim to sea or putting a bubble in some of the after ballast tanks. This game gives the impression that there's one ballast tank that's either empty or full, and no such thing as trim tanks.

http://usscubera.org/images/sub_tanks.jpg

Just the ability to compensate for flooding to level the boat and/or keep it from sinking would be enough, having emergency blow as the only option is ridiculously simplified for simulating any submersible vessel.

"Just a quick thought here while I have time. Drills."

Second that, every WWII fleet sub article the pundits claim 30 seconds for Das Boot and 60 seconds for US fleet boat. Every account by an actual WWII submariner says 60 seconds for the first few days, but keelhauling for the entire crew if they couldn't get that down to 30 seconds after a couple weeks of drills.

"Having nothing to do besides keeping the time compression pumped up to it's highest level in the two weeks steaming from Pearl Harbor to Japan"

Primary reason I've "Gone Asiatic" and made the mod with the supply bases, that long tedious trek to and from the operating area was just too boring for what's supposed to be entertainment.

Sometimes we have enough going on to deal with (such as during dc runs by DD's)...now we have to keep track of the "gas bladders"? :D