Submarine Kinematics Sim

RC submarine · weed entanglement study

Submarine Controls

◀ ballast ▶ ▲ throttle ▼
◀ rudder ▶ ▲ dive planes ▼
0%
0°
0°
0%

The stick is the rate control: hold it left or right to fill or empty by hand, and stop anywhere. These two are end-stop switches — click once and the pump latches and runs to 0% or 100% on its own, then releases. Click again to cancel mid-stroke. BLOW is the failsafe.

Transmitter Setup

The same conventions as an RC aircraft transmitter, because it is the same gear. Expo softens the centre without losing full throw — worth having here, since dive-plane authority grows as speed squared.

Weed Parameters

 

Environment

The surface catches the sun and reflects the sky, so you can tell at a glance whether the boat is on it or under it. Wind transparency down to read the waterline, up to see the hull below.

Camera

Fixed on the bank: the camera stays put and only turns to follow the boat, which shrinks as it drives away. Drag, scroll and right-drag move where you stand.

Locked off by default: the camera neither moves nor turns, so the bank stays exactly where it is and the boat drives across the frame and out of it, as it would from the real bank. Tick track to have the camera turn and keep the boat centred — useful, but it swings the whole view. Set orbit pivot to boat re-aims at wherever the boat is now.

Drag to swing the angle and raise or lower the height; right-drag or scroll for distance. Distance is in sub lengths, so it holds its framing if you change LOA. 0° is dead ahead looking back, 180° dead astern.

A submarine floats 93% submerged, so surfaced and submerged differ by about 18 mm of hull — too little to see. The marker ring rides the waterline above the boat and the tether drops to it, so depth is readable as a length. Ring is green on the surface, amber submerged, red aground. The hull also cools toward the water colour with depth.

Submarine Model

The full boat carries its real CFD appendages, so this is unticked for it automatically. The bare hull has none — it is the geometry behind Cd_clean — so they are drawn procedurally from the beam instead. Tick or untick freely for models you load yourself.

A real boat heels, and the model is stable without this now that the righting moment is correct. Roll is suppressed because the accident is decided by a vertical force budget, and heel makes pitch hard to read. Untick it to let the boat roll.

 

Force Budget

The accident is this inequality. If restraint exceeds reserve buoyancy, blowing ballast will not surface the boat.

0.00 m
0.00 m/s
0.0°
000°
0.0 N
0.0 N
0
0.0 N
 

Hydrodynamic coefficients from the Virginia-72 OpenFOAM study. The weed model is a placeholder pending measured stem properties and the Cosserat-rod contact model — see README.

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Simulator guide help.html — opens on its own too