Periscopes are still important.
Check out the documentary called "Submarine School", there is an example of some periscope drills they use in there, as well as photo recon. The documentary gives some insight as to when you should and should not use the scope.
Of course, unlike in that documentary, you don't want to be getting within 1500 yards of warships equipped with passive and active sonar, it's highly likely they'll detect you even if you're at 2 knots with everything turned off.
But for example, if you are tracking a merchant ship, the periscope is very useful for getting exact ranging (Stadimeter or just old fashioned math if you are hardcore and know the formula for your particular scope and zoom level) FWIW the formula for 1.5x zoom is 19.1*mast height / number of periscope ticks from waterline to top of ship's mast. Resulting range is in yards. Formula can be modified for any zoom level. Note, this works in real life but I don't know about in this game. I know some games have FOV problems or the periscope ticks are not properly spaced, etc. Only a few games I have played such as Steel Beasts and ARMA have accurate optical tick mark systems.
When facing off with a merchant the risk of detection is minimal and the accuracy of a firing solution is greatly improved.
Besides that, the periscope is used to monitor before and after dives and surfacing, and the scope can also even be used to check out the bottom of a ship's hull. In games this has not been used to very good effect yet, but sensitive information has been acquired in the past by getting under a ship and photographing its screws and rudder.
The correct PD for 688i's is 65 feet, 56 feet or so for venting. This seems to be the standard from all the dives I have seen in the public domain. I suppose it's possible you could run with the decks awash and only the sail sticking out, if you wanted to. That would likely be about 50 feet.
to the game designers, for what it's worth, if your game world is truly round and the periscope "camera" is not at the mathematically correct height, it will mean that you cannot do trigonometry to correctly determine a contact's range based on mast height. If the boat is at 65 feet and the periscope is sticking out of the water 12 inches, the camera must also be placed 12 inches above the water in the game world. I realize that I'm probably the only active person in the entire sim community who still does this, but yeah.. !
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