Tell the Quartermaster to wake up if you're in danger on grounding.:haha:

But aren't the dive planes above the water and useless once your surfaced ?

Stern Planes are underwater still.

not so much in normal evolutions, but in emergencies, such as flooding casualties, or if the pumps are damaged it could be useful to quickly burp out some ballast without blowing the tanks completely dry.

I'm trying to think of more specific scenarios, They seem to do it all the time in the military submarine thrillers I read. IDK, maybe this game just isn't in-depth enough for such a tactic to be useful.

You control depth primarily with ANGLE. You use the stern planes to set the angle on the ship.

The fairwater planes are used for fine depth control.

Forth flight (BLK4) 688's (751+) do not have fair water planes, neither do SSN-21's or 774 class.

Well you learn something every day - Thx :Kaleun_Salute:

Well this is one that really pissed me off.Doing my usual skipjack campaigns having the best one yet,when I die I start over.Any way just doing great confident as hell.So command hits me with intercept order I roll my eyes
I have only 2 mk 37's left novembers and friends,well guess who his friend is...thats right a victor turns out I got perfect angle We are both at700feet
he's doing 20knots pinging away i am sitting still 0 knots head on at 2.1 yards he fires I do my now standard bop up to 30 knots an go right at the torpedo in this case him too! dude did not like that he fires another one and then one more and one more to boot.Now something weird happens i go to 3d map and we are head on well almost,now I thought collisions were not modeled then i heard that hull scraping sound when subs are on on the bottom trying to move.I digress....I got three set65's on my ass. He takes one them which does not sink him (amazed!) and then he blurts out another 180 (i am behind him now) any way to wrap this up he gets slammed by two more of his eel's but I got one on my ass and im done so i blow ballast,and i cannot out turn a set65 on the surface.This was another cool moment in this game...but it sucked because of this common refrain
...UNABLE TO TO DIVE BECAUSE OF RECHARGING EMERGENCY AIR BANKS


The End.

Why are you blowing emergency ballast?

+1

If the blowing ballast tactic comes from The Hunt for Red October movie, please take note that the Dallas was very much out of the fight once it did that :03:

I'm not about to call it a valid or realistic tactic but I have been able to use emergency blow to avoid torpedoes in the past by quickly changing depth (unsure if the large amount of air bubbles released helps decoy the torpedo or not) the big thing is you will need to keep your boat at either flank or all ahead full and a very unhealthy -20 on the planes just to maintain depth (even after this you'll be yo-yoing back and forth between rising and sinking) and she handles like a pig afterwords.

It also puts you at a severe disadvantage if there are surface assets around (when you finally do have to come up to recharge the system) and really only should be used when you have had a fish chasing you for some time, its nearly caught you and you think its probably running low on fuel / remaining charge.

What Julhelm said. EMBT Blow is there to emergency surface in the event of uncontrolled flooding. It's not the game that's the problem, it's you Bungo. It doesn't matter how many times you come back whining about it, it's the same in everyone of your situations. You use an EMBT Blow in the wrong manner and wonder why you get killed in the process. Honestly I can't tell if you're trolling or...

Good question from the dev: why using emergency blow?
I'm not a skipper, but my understanding is that it's a very last ressort to get the sub to a depth allowing the crew to abandon the sub alive.
I see no other good purpose, everything else can be done by normal operations.
Also when you are using this desperation move, then the enemy is the last thing you should care about.

In a few videos for the public you usually see such quick surfacings. It's done to make more 'action' for the public, else pictures of subs would be plain boring... But one scene from Red October is quite realistic: vertical evasion, thus getting the sub ''out of the water with big waves", is a consequence of changing depth and surfacing at max. speed to evade torpedos, you lose a significant amount of speed by doing so, so a good skipper would avoid that making the sub stabilize at 50 feet or so before releasing a noisemaker and going down again. In reality it's so that you cannot do that too often in a row for the sake of your crew... What are the effects of going from 800 feet to 50 feet in 2 minutes and this more times? I don't think this ends well...

A sub on the surface is as good as any warship stucked at 0 knots...Both are lost, just zombies...

It's not realistic at all really. Once you hit the chicken switches you're going to the surface, there's no stopping it short so you can remain submerged. Note that EMBT Blow stands for Emergency Main Ballast Tank Blow, not tactical but Emergency.

I would like to add that the time to recharge the air banks seems way to short anyway. Take a look at some videos on YouTube where they blow the tanks next to the pier, that is a lot of air to recharge.

But like ETR mentioned, once you've committed to throwing the switches knowing the tactical disadvantage you will have but weighing the survival of ship against that, you are going to the surface unless you've already taken on too much water. Going back under without repairs is just making the enemies job easier.

Right, wrong, or indifferent, an emergency blow shouldn't require having to run the HPACs to recharge the HP air system, unless the flasks were too low to begin with. . . And woe be unto the crew that goes around diving with minimum air for a single pull of the chicken switches anyway.

As coded into the game, it's unrealistic, but it is what it is. In a tactical environment, you're dead meat on the surface anyway. And a blow to abandon ship? In the cold waters of the North Atlantic, you'd choke to death as your nuts ricocheted off your uvula, and that's before your core temp pegged the popsicle indication. We carried (2) three-man life rafts. . . This was more to placate the wives and parents that little Johnnie would eventually be rescued. An implosion is far more humane - you're more likely to burst into flame before you ever get wet as the atmosphere in the compartment explosively compresses. --These are great scenarios to sow and let germinate in a new kid's head after their first dive. . .

Fairwater planes are of no use out of water unless the ballast tanks are filled with helium and the boat is flying. And stern planes are for leveling the boat in conjunction with the trim and drain system; they're used for depth-keeping in emergency situations (emergency deeps, etc.) Bow planes are preferable since being forward of the sail the boat "follows" and reacts to them faster at higher speeds - this is one reason the US has moved away from them (for SSNs.)

The Trident is a different animal in the way it behaves due to it's displacement/size, but they dive relatively fast once the plug is pulled, --for what they are, which can best be described as a big honkin, very quiet pig with the ability to conduct urban renewal on a massive scale. The SSGN re-purposing mod for the first four was one of the smartest ideas the Navy has come up with in recent memory, --especially since the boats have been maintained in such great condition over the years and have lots of life left.

I just downloaded the game today (and joined up here) and have to say it's the best subsim (AI-wise) since RSR. As a submarine sonarman for 21 years, I'm pretty critical of subsims too. As a CG artist these days, I like the graphics a lot!