Aces of the Deep
- The ability to abandon ship with the possibility of escaping capture and resuming a career interpted by the loss of your boat.
- An interactive BdU that during the wolf pack years would spawn AI U-Boats to converge on your convoy reports and attack. Sometimes BdU would order you to shadow a convoy and not attack for this reason.
- When short of fuel BdU would set up rendevous with U-Tankers at specific locations not known in advance. The amount of fuel recieved was random and often barely enough to get home.
- Your boat leaked - constantly like all real-world ships do. Silent running caused water to accumulate which affected bouyancy and created all manner of problems when evading escorts.
- Air dropped acoustic homing torpedoes.
- Local times for sunrise and sunset provided on the calendar.
- Escorts had FOXER/CAT Gear as applicable.
Silent Hunter
- Phases of the moon provided on the calendar.
- AI enemy submarines that actually submerged.
- Radars whose displays conformed to the period being simulated, either PPI or A-Scope and not both and that could be turned off at will.
- A bathythermograph gauge that required monitoring to determine where the thermal layer was - if there was one.
- Keyboard control of dive planes.
SH2
- The ability to use electric motors on the surface.
- The ability to write (limited) log enteries.
All of the above were nice immersive features (in my opinion) that created reasonable problems for the virtual sub captain and both SH3 and SH4 are poorer for their deletion, seemingly in preferance to nifty graphics. It's probably a safe bet that SH5 will have nothing similar to any of them. But it will have an annoying cook avatar offering insights into soup.
One guy's thoughts.