"Driftdown problem" (neg. buoyancy when submerged) addressed?
 

Hi Guys,
just a quick question, since I can´t find anything about it here in the forum:

Has the problem of the negative buoyancy (sub tends to sink deeper and deeper when submerged) already been addressed in any way? I can´t see anything so far.

Good hunting,
Stefan.

im not sure about this SH5...

but in SH3/4 this was an issue when crash diving while already submerged.

i have not noticed this bug nearly as much in SH5 as i did in SH3

I think he´s having problem after a normal dive
same problem here

sometimes I have to set speed higher than 2-3 knots to keep the same depth at 100 meters

still, I don´t know how to help or if there´s a mod to fix that (if I remember right, in real life the extra speed is indeed needed to keep depth at 100m or below, but I may be wrong)

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...6&postcount=25

Problem was worse in SH4, you had to go to flank.

Silent running at 100 feet depth gives me a very slow decent. Maybe 1 foot per minute. Not a big drop if you're sitting and watching it, but at time compression it could build up pretty quick.

Yes, when you go deeper than 80 m the sub keeps on sinking deeper unless you command a new depth of around 60 m or less. Even at around 80 m you can see that the dive planes are in the "up" position.

I thought that it might be connectet to the "silent running" status, as water would not be pumped out of the sub to prevent any noise, but it is not.

OK, I am not a submariner in real live, but I think a well trimmed sub should be able to stay at any depth, even at low speed. Of course there is always some water leaking in, the deeper the more, as the outside water pressure rises. But it´s the Chief´s duty to pump it out at times.

It's a complex issue but, no I don't think it's been fixed in any patches. Someone would have mentioned it.

Standard procedure, at least near the surface, is to set the buoyancy purposefully negative so the boat has to be moving to plane up to periscope viewing depth. This way if anything goes wrong you simply sink a little deeper instead of broach, get spotted, and die.

Keeping exact trim is rather difficult. The overall buoyancy that keeps the boat at 60m and 65m are rather close. With time and effort one can "dial it in" more or less. With surface swells near the surface it's like trying to make a house of cards with the fan on.

Sinkikng down and then hovering at 0 kts to exactly 100m would take a lot of fiddling with the trim tanks and you might wobble up and down 10s of meters as trim was changed. Speed and planes help you get to a precise depth quickly. However there's no chance that at 0 kts and 100m the boat would inexorably sink out of control as the buoyancy can be changed.

There is a point of no return for submarines known as the critical depth where maximum available buoyancy authority is insufficient to achieve positive net buoyancy but that would be well below 100m in a Type VII.

Way back in Aces Of The Deep you couldn't run silent forever, because the pumps had to run ocassionally to get rid of the water that always leaks into the boat. NYGM for SH3 replicated this with the 'Anti-Hummingbird' mod, so the boat would start to sink if you ran at two knots or less.

Is it possible that this behaviour was placed into SH5 intentionally?

I was going to say the same thing, i always hated being able to hover perfectly at any depth, and always concidered it a sh3/4 bug, so i was quite pleased to see it had been addressed in shv.. so you can imagine my surprise that people now think of it as a bug!!

Well it is a bug. Slowly sinking to the Earth's center is not normal real-life behavior. Sure, at periscope and you hit all stop and you sink a little. Either you'd drop down to a neutral buoyancy depth some small amount or you'd drop far enough that the engineer in charge or trim would do something about it.

Better behavior is settling a random (5-20m) depth below commanded when not under speed and some fluctuation over time as the engineer tries to fine tune the trim being very worried about breaking the surface.

I AGREE. All stop at any survivable depth should not result in free fall.

Silent running should slowly degrade your trim, and a certain amount of "slop" should be allowed in setting trim to the desired depth. But having to go over ahead slow to prevent sinking should only happen with flooding given the depths this game is played at.

That´s exactly what I mean.

L.G. Buchheim describes in "Das Boot" how the Chief is actually waiting for some DC explosions to break the silence and pump out some water.

I was going to ask if anyone knew at what depth point a Type VII would start to feel the limits of buoyancy. Is it 100m? 300m? 1000m? Maybe modern subs have sealed main ballast tanks but the WWII variety had permanently open bottoms like an upside down drinking glass so the volume of air contracts as the ambient sea pressure increases.

I hear now with SH5 we have a scripting system so depending on how powerful that is we can run a very sophisticated arrangement of depthkeeping. Perhaps we can even get to the point that we can tell our engineer how conservative to make his trim and torpedoes upset the balance when fired.

Very nice explanation, thx ;)

It is possible it is an intentional feature that is not working properly.
If it was tied into silent running that would be a very cool feature.
Or it is possible it is simply a bouancy model for the subs that does not work properly below 100 meters.
We do not know yet.
I have been fiddling about with the submerged displacement figure in the sim file for the Type VIIA.
By shaving some numbers off the figure I can make my sub just about hold level at 150 meters, with full up on the planes, but this tweak leads to a boat that is unresonably quick at rising from 100 meters to periscope depth. She goes up real quick! Not an ideal solution. And not something I would want to release as a mod. I was just trying to figure out how the numbers in the sim file affect the game.
I'm hoping this issue will be addressed in a future patch.