Great Sim but ....
 

As my name says, I was a submariner. I got Dangerous Waters for Christmas and have been playing it quite a lot.

Two things bug me and after reading all over this board I have not seen anyone bring it up.

1) First thing s bubblehead does when a Torpedo hits the water is stomp on the gas. We even had a procedure for it in the engineroom. It was called: All Ahead Flank Cavitate. It means GO and go NOW. Do not care about cavitation.. just get moving cause the angles are going to come on as you go deep. If you do not think a 688 class (or ANY nuclear powered submarine for that matter) can not move and MOVE QUICKLY when ordered then you have another thing coming. When a torp is in the water, Speed AND Depth are life.

2) As a qualified Throtlleman on a 688 class submarine I can tell you this: when an ordered speed is given the throttleman is not to cavitate unless orded to by the OOD. This is part of the training. That means if some OOD gives the order for ahead full and starts to come off of PD, the throttleman will only give those turns that do not cause cavitation. If he is unable to answer the bell immediatetly he just slowly ramps up the turns as you go deeper till you can answer the ordered bell. If I cavitated as much as this game does I would be up before the captain at the turn of the watch.

Cavitaion = noise = counterdetected = possible water in the people tank (sorry, inside joke) aka DEAD.

There needs to be an option about HOW to answer an ordered bell. Non-caviation would be the normal mode. When you want to accelerate FAST you order a caviating bell. Heck, The engine order telegraph has a bell on it. When the OOD wants a bell answered without regard to caviation they ring the bell three times. That tells the throttleman to answer the bell smartly without regard to cavitaion

I am sorry if these seem nit-picky, but anyone who is/was a nuclear submariner will tell you that these two things are very important. If they are outside the scope of the game, then I apologize now.

Oh, and from a relative who was a P-3 drivers, he HATES how slow the bombay doors open/close. He told me they were supposed to have a open cyle time of 3-5 seconds, they cycle closed just as fast. We got Dangerous Waters to have run with each other now that we are both out of the Navy.

Ahh.. the old days.

Great sim by the way. I know you can't make it true to life, but you can sure stir the memories

Thank you for your time.

Welcome to the community Bubblehead! :up:

Thank you for the welcome

One other thing, something I just noticed. Rudder orders for a 688 are either full left or right rudder. Um.. that is a bit excessive unless you REALLY want to toss the boat around.

I remember this being a problem in Submarine Commander initially but it was fixed in a later patch to something more.... limited. You could order a FULL rudder or move the rudder full manually, but a simple course change did not invoke more than 10 degree's or rudder.

That's not nitpicky at all, having cavitation based on screw speed at depth instead of ship speed at depth would add to realism and would be a welcome improvement, I think, to just about everyone here. (provided of course that the necessary controls are provided to differentiate between a normal and buster bell).

As for the rudder, you can actually order the rudder to different degrees from ship control, but you are still basically right. Evasive rudder orders are given from NAV, which means you're stuck with the hotkeys. :doh:

Also, with new 1.03 steering simulation, full rudder at full speed bleeds speed a lot (bug way too much on FFG, bit quite a lot in subs too). There should be some better rudder control in subs (there is on FFG).

From one bubblehead to another, glad to have you with us!

It is kinda annoying when manoeuvring sarcastically informs you that you're cavitating when it's actually their damn fault. Ah well, it's probably about time you snuck aft to scram the reactor. Keep everyone on their toes. ;)

Nick

Oh, I realize that I can give manual rudder orders from the ship control panel. I loaded up SC and sure enough the basic unpatched install you had full rudder swings in response to helm orders but after I put the 1.08 patch on the rudder responded at a MUCH more sane 10 degrees. You could override it to a full rudder order by hand or voice but it was not the default movement. It was also MUCH more in line with how things actually are. The real nice thing is that with voice commands you can still give a "RIGHT FULL RUDDER" order and it responded properly for evasion purposes

tell your P-3 friend that as soon as he has a location for the enemy sub to open his doors. In fact, I do that before I even go to set the torpedo. In real life it probably screws your airodynamics but here it doesn't do jack. That should make it much easier for him to kill subs.

The difference is that with SC, IIRC it is not that hard to change course manually - you set full rudder and the ship turns hard; you go to amidships and soon enough your ship steadies up. I remember changing course by setting the rudder myself rather than playing with the course functions because it is more responsive that way... and I tried to transfer this habit into DW, then I found out about the new physics model the hard way.

In DW, the automatic steering during hard turns is much more useful. Thus arguably for playability it should be retained. People that really like gentle turns could set it themselves because it would be easier to control manually than a hard turn would.

You don't actually have to wait for the doors to open completely before you can start dropping - though the graphics will show the torp drop through the door, it won't hurt you or the torpedo.

I believe you can do the open-drop-close cycle in less than a second, and the torpedo will drop successfully.

One thing I noticed that was new about DW as compared to SC is that you can actually loose control of the sub and implode. If your starting to make a bunch evasive manuvers at flank speed to evade a torp, you can loose her and go into an uncontrolled dive. I guess this is realistic, but it makes torps a bit harder to dodge :-?

It's not really uncontrolled, it's just that the physics model in DW is better, so it includes the downward force created by the rudder being on an angle during the turn, which, if you're close to crush depth can cause implosion.

I noticed that when I played. Nice touch to show something like that.

As for getting close to crush depth lets just say that in my experience, tossing a full rudder on with any real speed (say full bell or greater) WILL result in an EXTREME depth excursion. It happens MUCH faster and MUCH harder than the physics engine is portraying now. I know of an incident where we almost lost a 688 due to this happening. They all wore tee-shirts that said:

"60 down, Rods down, Still around"

Kinda gives you other bubbleheads a chill eh?

Anyway, we will all have to see what happens when this new patch comes out. Maybe they will address some of the little things I have seen that just glare out at me not as a "realism or real life issue" but from a perspective of "Hey, some of these things really DO matter to a bubblehead."

The thing with the bombay doors of a P-3 just made my relative screw his face up and mutter. You know, the little things like that bug you when you know what matters. The ability to snap the doors open and launch was important to getting the job done.

Oh, and thanks for the tip of dropping the torp while the doors are cycling. He never would have thought of that. Then again, niether would I.

Well any stuff you are allowed to say that can help improve the sim is good.

I guess with security stuff that won't be much.