DSV Little Whale - Starter Dock Submarine
A small sub with a a bit of style. The paint job has a pretty sweet fade from dark blue up top to light gray underneath. The shape is reminiscent of big military submarine, but superdeformed chibified.
Powered by an infinite steam generator, but started by diesel, you need to give it 2-3 minutes to warm up. Once the generator hits 4500kw you're good to go. At first I made a nuclear powered sub, but getting uranium in classic was tedious enough that I changed plans. So, I just pretend it's nuclear to sleep better at night... I might still upload the nuke variant later, though.
Tower features an airlock with diving gear and a helm with a nice panoramic view, very nice for traversing the sea surface. The upper deck of the main cylinder contains the control room up front, a bathroom, a medical room, a couple of bunks, a captains room, and a kitchen/living area in the back. The bottom deck has the steam generator and serves as the ballast as well, so if you fill the ballast you'll get wet feet in there. Everything down there is in welding reach, but I've yet to survive a single one of my crashes long enough, nor crashed mildly enough, to succeed in repairing anything.
The autopilot is pretty well tuned for rapid travel, but it's still a bit terrible at "hover" mode. If the throttle is above 0%, it runs in fast mode, at 0% it switches to hover, and attempts to hold position in the water. It sometimes works great, sometimes terrible. I think it has something to do with depth. I'll get back to tinkering with it at some point, but for now I've fried my brain on it quite enough. Fortunately, you can use the axis trims to help correct the autopilot a bit, I've had good results getting decent stability that way, and it made the sub feel quirky rather than uncontrollable- meaning it's a feature not a bug.
Top speed on the surface is around 25 m/s and under water around 30 m/s.
Has a bunch of magalls underneath which can be used to pick up treasure off the seafloor so you don't have to go diving.
Has a welding arm that rotates down right next to the down-facing camera.
There is a docking hatch directly under the ladder down from the upper deck hallway, it will only open if it's locked to another docking hatch. It is right behind the down-facing camera, so is relatively easy to get to line up to another docking hatch using the camera.
The periscope is quite tall for such a small sub, and your character's x view angle makes the camera turn.
