Name: I had to throw out my script about this submarine simulator
Uploaded: 2026-01-16T16:59:24.000Z
Duration: 10 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Normally at this point, I am reading something that I've written well in advance.

When I get to a place to film, there should be no surprises.

But this was so far ahead of anything that I imagined before coming here that I've had to throw out every word I've written.

I'm gonna tell you the story of what may be the most impressive home project I've ever seen in my life.

So I put a call out last year asking for interesting things in the world that people were affiliated with that might show on this channel and got a lot of suggestions in.

And one of them was from a couple of folks in Italy who had built a submarine simulator.

Now, I've previously filmed in a tank simulator from the 1970s in Germany.

There's this big box that bounces along and this little model world that this tank goes through.

And it turns out they had something similar for submarines, only with a real tiny submarine in a little tank.

And I thought I knew what I was getting myself into because it's going to be this little remote operated vehicle, this little sub that goes around a pond and then they're going to sit, send video from that back to, like, a little controller on a screen in a room.

So I get here and I'm met by Marco and Danilo, who are the two main people behind it.

There's a whole team who've done all sorts of things on this, but

they take me in and my first clue that this is more than I thought it was is the startup sequence.

This is built like it's some sort of fancy escape room or maybe even a theme park attraction.

But, like, there is a whole unlocking sequence where they boot up the submarine that we're going to walk into and there's a big wheel clunk, unlocks.

You pull open the pressure door, you walk in and I'll show you my reaction.

So right away, this is not some little thing in the corner of a room.

This is what set designers would call a 360 experience.

As far as the people in there are concerned I sat in the wrong chair.

The one at the front is for the captain, which is normally one of the team here, and

So while I'm being blown away by the startup sequence that they're going through that they know off by heart because they designed it.

Turns out I should actually have been in the back there.

So we swap seats and we go through the startup sequence and it is this pre rendered computer graphic sequence where the submarine is miniaturised as if it were actually going to be put into the real pond.

We are simulating something very slow, so we don't need the shaking power of the modern platform you can, you can find.

So we built our own with that objective in mind.

So at this point I've just got this smile of joy on my face because I'm just overwhelmed at the scale of this, of something that feels like a theme park attraction.

Just sitting in an old 19th century mill in rural Islay.

It's not like there's a drop, there's like a clunk from hydraulics.

The camera feed turns on and there is the world in front of us.

So it starts out with Marco and Danilo on the controls, just kind of showing me what to do and kind of showing me a couple of interesting things in the pond.

I go from just doing the rudder to actually starting to control the depth a little bit and starting to control the tilt.

So it will do tilt, it will do yaw, it will go forwards, backwards, left, right, and

And all of these are controlled by separate things.

And yes, like the picture quality is not spectacular.

This is not a perfectly lit 4K HD camera on the front, but it's an actual camera.

For a moment I feel like I'm controlling a submarine.

Like it works because, because there's this gentle motion as we go.

When it gets put into full throttle, we get pushed back in our seats a little.

When we stop, we rock forward and it's, it's just, it's really clever.

So my plan is we'll Have a mosey round the pond.

And while that happens, I'll ask them the questions about how.

Why I completely forgot how to do that later.

Queen di potremo de cider divisitare lagi naturale pugrandi porcioni di stagni o adiritura anche alinterno di picoli.

You're saying this in completely wrong order, by the way.

I'm just telling the story as best I can.

We continue exploring the pond and we go hunting for life.

But before we can do that, there is an emergency on board.

And look, I didn't know this was going to happen.

What I should have done is hired a local production team.

I'd like to sent them into recce in advance so I could be surprised by this.

But the cameras would be in the right position.

I didn't know there was going to be an emergency in the submarine and there was going to be a whole other room that I would have to go into in order to try and fix the reactor core.

I mean, spoilers if you're ever going to do this.

But the scale of this, the little detailed touches, the things that lit up, just absolutely incredible.

So finally we go searching for life and there are a couple of newts at the bottom of the pond, because this is a natural pond.

And they were very clear that they did not introduce the newts.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

I had to throw out my script about this submarine simulator

overwhelmed

absolutely

incredible

concept