By Javier Rollon · 2025-10-15
I spend my days building airplanes. Propellers, wings, cockpit gauges — that's my world. But every few months, I disappear into a completely different kind of simulation. One where the sky is replaced by ocean, where your instruments are hydrophones and periscopes, and where patience isn't optional — it's survival.
Submarine simulation is the flight sim community's best-kept secret.
The physics are completely different, and that's exactly the point. When I model the SeaMax M-22 amphibious aircraft for X-Plane, I deal with the boundary between air and water. Submarine sims live entirely below that boundary. Buoyancy. Water pressure. Sound propagation through varying thermal layers. Torpedo ballistics that account for current and depth. These are simulation challenges that most developers never even think about.
And yet the core principle is identical to flight simulation: model the physics accurately, give the player authentic tools, and let them figure out the rest.
Silent Hunter III launched in 2005, and nothing has truly surpassed it. That's not nostalgia talking — I played it for the first time in 2019 and was genuinely shocked by the simulation depth. You command a Type VII U-boat in the Battle of the Atlantic, and the game doesn't hold your hand.
Navigation is manual. You plot intercept courses on a physical chart using time, speed, and bearing calculations. Torpedo attacks require you to solve the targeting triangle yourself — estimate target speed, angle on the bow, range, and running depth. Get any of those wrong and your torpedo misses by a hundred meters. Get them right and there's a satisfaction that no modern game can match.
The dynamic campaign is what makes it special. Convoy routes shift based on your success rate. Escort tactics evolve as the war progresses. Radar becomes a threat. Aircraft patrols intensify. The game models the actual historical progression of the Battle of the Atlantic, and your actions influence the outcome. Twenty years later, the Silent Hunter III community is still active, still modding, still running patrols.
If Silent Hunter III is the study-level simulation, Cold Waters is the accessible entry point. Set during a hypothetical Cold War conflict, you command nuclear submarines like the Los Angeles class against Soviet opponents. The gameplay loop is tight — detect, classify, track, engage. Each engagement is a chess match where sound is everything.
It lacks SH3's campaign depth, but the tactical gameplay is genuinely addictive. I've lost entire weekends to Cold Waters. Not proud. Not sorry either.
The biggest lesson? Patience as a game mechanic. In flight sims, even a long-haul flight has constant systems management — monitoring fuel burn, checking weather, adjusting altitude. In a submarine sim, you might spend thirty real-time minutes just running silent at periscope depth, listening for contacts on hydrophone, waiting for a convoy to appear on the horizon.
That sounds boring on paper. In practice, it creates tension that no action game can replicate. When you finally hear propeller sounds growing louder on the hydrophone, your pulse actually increases. I build cockpits for a living, and I can tell you — the periscope view in SH3 gives me the same adrenaline spike as a botched ILS approach in my Jetstream 32.
The simulation genre is broader than people think. Whether you're modeling blade-element theory for a Space Shuttle re-entry or torpedo ballistics for a U-boat attack, the craft is the same: respect the physics, trust the player, and don't oversimplify. That's what makes both flight sims and submarine sims worth playing — and worth building.
Javier Rollon is the developer behind JRollon Planes, creating aircraft add-ons for X-Plane since 2010. Follow on Twitter.