What can we change and what can we not? DAMAGE/Repair/Death

[Beery]

On a bit of a tangent here, but I'm not at all sure that the Das Boot scenes of the crew being thrown around by depth charges were at all realistic. As I understand it, when a depth charge goes off in proximity to a submerged U-boat it has a compressive effect on the boat, but the boat wouldn't move all that much spatially. It's not at all like air turbulence, where a person could easily find himself thrown to the ceiling by a low pressure air pocket. As I understand the physics of it, in a U-boat the water around you is not compressible like air is - water carries a pressure wave but it's not distorted much by it. This is why U-boats are so affected by sudden variations in pressure whereas aircraft, which are structurally much weaker, tend to be able to withstand pressure variations better.

Although the boat is being seriously compressed by the effect of the depth charges, I don't see how such a force could throw people around very much because the boat cannot easily be moved through the water by the pressure.