Realism Aspects

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Bathrone

I was interested, in large wave conditions surely the waves would go over the conning tower and the deck crew would have to hold their breath? What happened historically in this situation?

What gets left out of all these games is the wave period; the time it takes between the passing of one crest and the next. The game has big waves but they are not very far apart. In the open ocean wave crests might be hundreds of feet apart.

The larger the ship the more difficult time it has with heavy seas. Corvette sailors used to joke about how easily one would roll, but in heavy seas the corvette would ride the waves where a larger destroyer had a bigger tendence to "go green", or plow under each wave as it passed. The u-boat was somewhere in between. If the waves were far apart the boat would just ride over them. If they were very close there might be problems, but mostly the bow might dip under and spray the crew. Having the conning tower go under like it does in the game was rare. When it was that bad they would have to dive and hope by the time the batteries had drained the sea would have subsided somewhat. It almost always did. The three-week-long storm portrayed in Das Boot happened, but they were very rare.

Also, I see there is some mods like sobers underwater realism fx mod that basically makes seeing underwater impossible. Is this what the open ocean is like at say periscope depth underwater? I realise that light fades rapidly but at shallow depths cant a diver see underwater?

It varies a lot, depending on local conditions. I've seen water just outside Subic Bay in the Philippines where we could see the bottom from the signal bridge of our destroyer, probably more than 100 feet, and we could watch the porpoises swim under the ship. Most of the time we couldn't see the bottom of the ship, let alone the bottom of even a shallow bay. Yes there are pictures of divers underwater and you can see a long way, but there is also a video made with a u-boat and a camera mounted a few feet behind the conning tower. You can't even tell there's a boat there until it surfaces, then it's a surprise just how close the tower is.

I keep my underwater visibility set so from the bow I can see the conning tower, about half the length of the boat.