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Frank D.
Well....... Yes but with your fins / dive planes attached as they are, you
have to trade off between, do I use the dive plane to slow me down or do I use
the thrust of the thruster to slow down. I bet the thrusters win!!!
Actually I doubt very much you'll see much difference in your subs
operation with the fins or without. Unless you have a really big thruster
somewhere else on your sub you won't be going that fast to give them much
effect. You'll see far more effect from the thrusters themselves.
I see your rigging your side thrusters with remote operators. I was
considering that when I was building also. I was thinking of doing it
electrically, with two gear motors. Now that I have it in operation with
simply two handles on the inside of the sub that manually rotate the motor pods,
I see that it's important to have better control then I would have had with what
I was going to do. I find that, sometimes I want to rotate the thrusters a
full 180 degrees from forward to stop fast. It's more effective then
reversing the props and it's quick. When I need to do this, I want to
do it fast!!!
When cruising the bottom, I sort of float the handles up and down slowly as
I want to go closer of lift up a bit. Slow speed on the props, slow speed
of the sub and subtle movements for rotating the thruster pods.
You will find it useful if you has a way to vary how fast your pods can be
flipped from one location to another. To tell you the truth, most of
the time I needed a quick reverse, I'm surfaced and maneuvering in and
around boats at the docks and not under water. I guess I usually error on
the side of caution under water and don't go very fast. With the limited
visibility in water, even relatively clear water, if you go too fast when
submerged you don't see much.
One thing I wish I did, and may still do, is mechanically connect both side
thruster pods together. Originally I thought I would need to work them
independently but I never do. If they were connected, it would free up one
hand more. I very often operate the thruster props separately, but very
rarely rotate the pods separately.
Dan H
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