Compressed Air Usage

[Subnuts]

Just a quick observation.

Changing depth uses compressed air now, and a blast to blow all ballast can use 15-25%.

This is something that's always bothered me in the SH series. In SH2, it was easy to run out of compressed air and sink simply by changing depth 10 or 15 times while submerged. It seems like they removed compressed air consumption in SH3 and SH4, and reduced the amount of air used to blow ballast tanks. What SH2 got right is that you'd need more compressed air to blow your tanks empty at 200 meters than at say, 50 meters, due to the greater water pressure.

IRL, once a WWII-era submarine was properly trimmed it could change depth dynamically through forward momentum and proper control of the diving planes. Compressed air would be used for blowing the negative tank after crash diving, or for surfacing the boat, but I can't think of any other examples where large amounts of compressed air would be used to change depth. If compressed air is being used *every* time the boat changes depth, your LI is either micromanaging the hell out of your boat's trim, or your crew doesn't understand proper depth control.

Rant mode off.

[Ducimus]

Compressed air usage is probably tied to specific commands. Periscope depth, surface, etc.

I don't recall compressed air being used when manually specifying a depth and not using those commands.

Frankly, i think something is better then nothing. In SH3/4 they may as well have removed compressed air from the game. All the water was just magically pumped out by the ocean fairy.

[Frederf]

Changing overall buoyancy takes compressed air. You might be able plane up or down to a degree but you'd certainly retrim when going from 150m to 20m. I would think only adding air would take compressed, wouldn't increasing your float depth just use sea pressure?

Hopefully it's all in the scripting language so we can mod it correctly. It'd also be nice to set our plane depth and our float depth independently ^.^

[Captain von Keldunk]

To surface, one method is to blow out the tanks with compressed air.
This might make the boat come up unnecessarily quickly,
using up a lot of compressed air, and hence electrical energy, in the process.
The other way is to proceed dynamically and steer the boat to the surface
with the hydroplanes; here the diesel engines take over the work expelling
the water from the tanks with their exhaust gases.

[krupp_88mm]

heres a question i have no idea just thinking.. did they ever use the compressed air to recycle the air in the sub and blow some co2 outside?