Hi
I was wondering just how accurate uboat diving could have been. I know the pressure gauges would have been calibrated as the valves where etc, but I wonder if that is the problem, maybe uboat diving was achieved more by the seat of your pants stuff.
How accurate would the +/- uboat depth itself been beyond the 90 meter mark. Say to reach 150 meters quickly from the surface, how long would it have taken to trim the boat to that depth, would the boat have over dived the required 150 meter depth and then power on to get upto 150 meters, Im thinking about the initial water intake to submerge a boat and how they attained the correct quantites of water to achieve a depth of 150 meters quickly. It seems to me that a boat had to power through the water at any depth else it sank, the deeper it went the hander the balance between displacement and silent speed
Today with digital flow meters that can accurately measure water quanties and valves that are instant air controlled devices, I can understand how a boat can hover or get to a particular depth very very quickly, even at critical depths. The Uboat would not have enjoyed this technology and accurate diving depth would have still been critical hense to 90 meter limit on the depth gauge. When designing the VII/41 they had trouble with the boats displacement of extra weight due to hull thickness, this forced the designers to find ways of reducing the boats weight with internal savings, something critical here.
I wonder if the programmers where trying to reflect a more realistic diving experiance rather than the spot on diving of SH3/4. Ok I know it's note right as is and I hope you get it right, but spot on, mmmmm.
thanks for your effort
sid