Submarine

[Guy Fawkes]

Any up to date guide on how to build a submarine?
i just want that damn thing to stay at -50m but i cant get it to work.
ingame tutorials are bad

[fleatoad]

Ignore ingame tutorials they are really bad. Youtube and discord are your best bet but here is a quick guide. Make a ship, make it heavy so it sinks. Place propellers (set to push) on the bottom and set it to hover mode. limit its max and min depth to -50.
I will help more if you get stuck, I just wanted to keep the post short.

[Javelin99]

Originally posted by Guy Fawkes:

Any up to date guide on how to build a submarine?
i just want that damn thing to stay at -50m but i cant get it to work.
ingame tutorials are bad

I used to make submarines before the updates made the water appear far deeper.

There are various ways to achieve this, most use hydrofoils.
The first is to have ACBs, have the rear foils reversed to the front in whichever way you want to perform crash diving, make sure your submarine is always metal. 5 rows of 5 out on the rear, and however many front you want. Make sure they are either deep in water by default, or touch it most of the time when angled extremely. You could also still hide them internally if interiors you do not care about. Then a reset ACB, so when you hit a certain altitude/depth setting, it evens out. This usually causes bounce riding. It keeps going up and down. You can adjust it and PIDs for AI movement to limit the bounciness.

The second way is to let it sink with all hydrofoils down, and when it reaches depth, levels out. If it keeps sinking it is too heavy. You can use hatches and pumps to flood ballast sections to hasten the submerging and surfacing process, have it at the lowest possible settings. These also require ACBs.

You can make a sinking submarine, where just by using weight, speed, and ballasts by pumps you can adjust depth and stabilization. There is also a lower budget bargain bin solution to this that when you spawn in on designer that you can load up on the machine the testing example submarine.

You can also use stabilization thrusters/propellers to alter your depth as well as stabilization. This requires one top, bottom, and sides with proper settings, or let alone any spinners on ACBs. Then you can cover up the props by using the airducts/vent pieces and using the decoration option to conceal it instead of wasting interior space if you like roaming around in there. All of mine including replicas had one.

You can also rely on AI with hydrofoils. You go fast enough and have the water touching the hydros. Do not have it do the extremes or you'll stick your posterior in a vertical fashion. Only in emergencies should it be considered but that would require ACBs to overwrite the AI commands.

There are also hybrid designs that involve multiple aspects of this, and thats how you get submersible Falkenheims, and submarine spacecraft.

I made these things back when after cataclysm was the default, and you had to use ACBs to steer with its rudder pieces before being officially implemented. Also got a few people on the threads which despite actively stating I used it or not being the core of the issue in the threads, continually displayed ineptitudes and reading comprehension that rivals worker castes in 400 BCE. You can trust this information since nothing fundamental has changed ultimately to require much adjustment. Happy hunting.

[CEPHY]

The easiest way is to basically build a hovercraft, only that you use propellers instead of jets and set the fake set point of the General Purpose PID to a negative value.

[Quazy]

yeah setup your pid to control your lift and dive functions. (can be air controlled or thruster or both)
setup a acb. make it set your pid hover fake set point.
provided your manuver isnt telling it to surface. you can make it dive when the acb sees a enemy. or when u manually activate it. or use acb chains to make complex logix to dive to your desired fake set point