[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by RPS69

Not so true. On the Bismarck attempt at crossing between Iceland and Britain, when it was spotted by a PBY, (if I remember well), the registry relates that the Arado on board was launched on an attempt to give chase

There were some situations where catapult-launched recon planes were used for purposes other than recon and artillery spotting, but those missions were their primary duty.

Mind you, I'm not against catapult-launched aircraft, but it would take a lot of development work required to provide the necessary planes and ships, as well as catapult take-off capacity.

Also, not that many sim pilots are into flying slow, vulnerable planes, calling out fire missions while dodging flak and fighters, even if your primary weapons system is a battery of 16 inch guns.

Originally Posted by RPS69

Well, it depends on the waters you are flying over. On clear waters they don't look like a shadow. They clearly looks like a distorted ship, at least at periscope depth. Planes used to straffe this shapes underwater, and they were very vulnerable even to heavy machine gun fire.

True, but IL2's ability to model water clarity and texture is extremely primitive. In IL2, you've got a choice of shallow water texture and deep water texture "painted on" to the water's surface, rather than the sea bottom being textured and water opacity being modeled as a function of ambient light conditions, water turbidity, bottom depth and so forth. So, realistic modeling of light on sub-surface objects isn't an option.

That means that the only option for a periscope depth submarine is a "shadow" - which could be a suitably distorted texture of the submarine's hull. My ignorant guess is that the simplest fix would be to tweak the submarines' shadow models so that the periscope makes a submarine-shaped shadow on the water's surface.

But, that means you just get a dark, hazy submarine-shaped thing that doesn't alter its size or visibility with depth. Also, it's exactly the sort of short-cut that modders love and TD seems to hate, so it might not be good enough to ever be an official fix.

Originally Posted by RPS69

A nice attempt unto this was made in CLOD. Just with ships I must say. I didn't played enough with it to judge how well was it implemented. But this is a thing asked once and again from IL2, way before TD took the flame.

1c completely rewrote their graphics engine for CloD, and took their sweet time doing it. In terms of graphics capacity and appearance, CloD is several generations more advanced than IL2. Say what you will about game play, but CloD is a gorgeous to look at.

To get all the pretty effects you see in CloD or BoS, you'd need to entirely rewrite IL2. That means an entire development team working full time for years to create a brand new simulation. That's way beyond the limits of a couple of dedicated hobbyists.

Originally Posted by RPS69

Your other suggestions are excellent, but just the possibility of attacking a periscope depth submarine is a huge change.

You can attack submarines at periscope depth, but remember that it's actually almost impossible to get a kill against a sub using guns. The angle of bullets striking the water and water resistance means that even a 20mm cannon shell isn't going to have the force required to penetrate a sub's pressure hull when it's more than about a meter deep. At best you get a periscope hit, which forces the sub to surface.

Originally Posted by RPS69

BTW, you must add that depth charges clocked to higher depths, don't make a big water flush as seen on films.

Good point. So, a quick and dirty fix might be to make depth charges more powerful with depth (like the next larger size of bomb) but with a proportionately smaller bomb splash effect. For example, a depth charge fuzed for 30 meters might have the damaging power of a 250 kg bomb, but produces the "medium bomb splash" effect when it goes off. One fuzed for 200 meters would have the damaging power of a 1,000 kg bomb, but just the "small bomb" splash effect.

Realistically, though, new splash effects for mines and depth charges would need to be created. For simplicity, you'd need large, medium and small depth charge/mine effects at shallow, medium and deep depths. That would give the "mound of water" effect, followed a few seconds later by a fountain of water.