[Sailor Steve]

Wait wait wait hold on just a second!!!

1 meter every 20 seconds is too slow? When crash diving 1 meter per second should be right?

17 knots = 31,852 meters per hour. That's 524.7 meters per minute. That's 8.7455 meters per second. That's the sub's forward motion. That would be it's dive speed if it was going straight down at flank speed. I'm not real good with math, but it looks to me like 15-degrees on the planes would give you 17% of that, which is about 1.46 meters per second.

What's the maximum angle available on the planes? If it's 30 you're only going to get about 3 m/s. And that's at 17 knots!

These aren't airplanes, they're 800-ton ships.

Also, as to the running complaint about not being able to man the dive planes yourself, it wasn't like a modern sub where one guy has an aircraft-style yoke and can both steer and control dive angles. Two guys manned the fore and aft planes, and they could only move them as much as they were told to, and that wasn't much. Eight hundred tons carries a lot of momentum. The game crash dives you to 70 meters because once they started down in an emergency it took them that long just to pull out again. You want to go down faster? Not me, thanks.