The sea was inside the ship
The bug report was the good kind: specific feelings, wrong theories. The turret periscope is “often obscured by the ship's structure.” The orders “don't map to the teleport locations — CIC isn't listed anywhere.” Night actions are pitch black below decks. The powder room “doesn't look at all like a real powder room.” Every one of those was real. And under the first one, wearing a periscope complaint as a disguise, was the strangest thing this ship has ever shown a player: at a level view, the ocean was drawing itself across the inside of the ship.
Four honest complaints
The teleport mismatch was the cheapest fix and probably the most important. The orders say “designate a target (CIC radar, 02 level).” The T menu said “SG RADAR — PPI SCOPE” and, because the CIC compartment contains a station, the compartment list didn't show a CIC at all. If you already know a Mk 8 rangekeeper from a Mk 38 director you can translate; if you don't, the game is contradicting itself in its own orders. Stations now lead with the compartment the orders call them by (“CIC — SG RADAR SCOPE”, “PLOT — MK 8 RANGEKEEPER”), every menu row names its compartment and deck, and the one order that said “02 level” about a room every other display calls the 01 level now agrees with the ship it's printed on.
The periscope complaint reproduced the moment the battery had a real long-range solution: at 45° elevation and 8× magnification, the turret's own gun tubes — and turret I's, superfiring thirty meters ahead — are walls of gray filling the frame. Real optics focused on a horizon can't resolve steel a hand's breadth from the objective; it would be defocused haze. So the own battery's tubes now drop out of the scoped frame while you're on the periscope, and come back the moment you climb down or ride the salvo cam. When plot orders the turret past its ±150° stops, the booth now says MASKED — OUT OF ARC instead of silently reading TRAINING while you stare into the pilot house.
Night below decks was simply too dark. When the sun went down the darkness fell on everything at once, weather deck and interior alike, so the crew's mess at midnight was a black void you couldn't work in. Now the compartments keep their lamps lit while the topside decks go properly dark, and the sailors carry a soft self-light so they read as people under battle lanterns instead of shadows — a night action below decks finally looks like one.
The powder magazine was fair criticism of set dressing: a 16-inch powder flat that was an empty box with six pipes in it. It's now racked the way the real flats were packed — brass tank ends stacked deck-to-overhead in stanchion bays down both sides, a handling aisle to the hoist trunk, flash scuttles flanking it, and the sprinkler risers that the magazine-flood key has always notionally opened.
The bug wearing a periscope costume
The strangest one hid behind the periscope complaint. Below decks, the mess floor kept vanishing under a flat navy wedge — but only from certain angles. Look at the floor a little off-level and it was perfect; stare straight ahead and the sea bled through it. The ocean was drawing itself across the inside of the ship.
And the periscope's view sits dead level — right in the worst of it. Players weren't wrong that the sight was “often obscured”; they were seeing open ocean smeared across their own gunsight and reasonably calling it ship structure. Now the sea stays put and stays outside the hull at any angle, so the periscope picture is clean and the mess deck is a mess deck again. And because the lowest compartments sit below the waterline, the sea used to slice straight through the magazine and plot; it now quietly douses itself whenever you're deep below decks, where you'd never see open water anyway.