Special abilities question

[Sailor Steve]

Good points. My final answer is "I don't know". Reducing weight would obviously help a little, but hydrodynamic drag is the real limiting factor, and the fineness (length-beam) ratio isn't going to change, and that's the real cause of limitations to top speed. Your points about the engines and the batteries make sense. I have no idea how much actual increase you would get that way, but the engines are rated at 6500 hp and the electric motors rated at 2740 hp, which is 42%, which would not get a 42% increase in speed but might account for an extra two knots. But if that was really possible you probably wouldn't need a 'special ability' to do it, just a competent engineer. Game-wise, increased chance of a breakdown plus having your batteries drain at the same time might be a fair trade-off. One set of worries in exchange for another. Too bad these games don't take things like that into acccount.

[Rockin Robbins]

The diesels were rated at a certain horsepower at a certain RPM limit. By ignoring the limit and bypassing the governors it was possible to run the engines faster than they were safely rated and so produce more than 100% rated power. For an unknown length of time at the expense of an unknown amount of serviceable or possibly non-serviceable damage.

That is the source of the extra power. The diesels did not connect to the drive shafts at all. They strictly supplied power to the batteries and/or electric motors, which were all that powered the sub.

Cutting down the fairwaters was for visibility on the surface. There was very little difference in displacement because the fairwater filled with water when the sub submerged. If anything, the irregular shape of the resulting conning tower would have added more drag to compensate for the missing weight of the steel for very little change in boat handling.

When you reduce cavitation you generally increase thrust. That may have had a little effect. But the fact that the stated advantage was to cut down on noise kind of implies that speed gains were minimal.