Strictly speaking, the dive planes are operable; just not by us. The 'crew' has exclusive charge of them, and when I say 'crew', I mean the boat really. The planesmen aren't required. Your sub will dive just the same and just as well, whether they are at their stations or not. However, if the planes were shot off, that would make a difference. In fact, most of our crews are little more than first class passengers, aboard for entertainment purposes.

If the hydrofoils may be varied at will, that would make a difference. In an emergency dive obviously not the same if the forward hydroplanes are 10 degrees if they are at 15 degrees.

Certainly true.

However, depending on the factors modded into your game subs, you should dive quite a bit faster in a crash dive. From what I remember in modding the dive physics, the 'crew' will generally push the planes to the max. angle so long as the depth difference is large. They ease off as they approach the target depth. Crash dives seemed to follow the same pattern, but with some additional hard-coded negative buoyancy factored in.

Suffice it to say, diving controls/procedures are not especially realistic. I kind of thought the 'crash' dives were maybe a little too fast, but they seemed to be hard to modify.

The big difference too is that you have to remember your role in the game. Even in flight sim (which as you might guess I play A LOT of), the complexity can be overwhelming, and in some regards some of the more "realistic" aircraft are actually "unrealistic" to operate, because unlike the real world, you do not usually have a co-pilot, dispatch, ground crew, intelligent ATC (unless you fly VATSIM, and even then...) to support you. At minimum, you end up having to do the job of 2+ people yourself, which can already get a bit taxing, when the real thing was designed explicitly to be operated by more than one person.

Now in a submarine, you have dozens of people. Making a simulator that makes you do the job of 50+ people in the same way as FSX sometimes makes you do the job of two would be stupid in the extreme! What's more, there's specialization - the captain would never, ever touch the hydroplanes or engine controls; that's just not his job. There was never a submarine captain who constantly went to the engine room and stood over the engineers telling how to do their job - and if there was, he probably lost his command very very quickly. A sub sim which lets you do that is really really unrealistic.

In that sense, SH4 is not a bad simulator of the captain's job at all - where it's a little bit of a letdown is that the way it models the virtual crew and the world around you is a little simplistic and unintelligent. A better subsim than SH4 is not one that will let you push more dials and do more different jobs, that would be a much worse sim, both in terms of immersion and technical fidelity. Not to mention it would probably be unplayable. A better subsim than SH4 is one that is populated by a more intelligent crew, a more intelligent enemy, and a more sophisticated environment in general. That's a sim still waiting to be made.


PS - And, as expected after many years of flight simming, when I took flying lessons in a real airplane, I was surprised just how much "easier" or at least more intuitive it felt than what I'd been doing on the computer! I'll always remember what U-boat captain Jurgen Oesten said about his experience playing a Silent Hunter 2 mission based on a real attack he made: "It was very difficult. They sunk me every time! In real life, it was much easier." There's a certain obsession simulation fans have with "realism", but often without realizing that "realism" and "reality" are not the same thing. Complexity of controls is not always the best measure of how good a sim is, and sometimes it's the opposite.