Testing of planner against other software

[Willem Ferguson]

I have compared the Subsurface planner against quite a few deco dives on 
V-Planner Mobile. In general, results are not too different. V-Planner 
starts with deco at deeper depths (e.g. 18-20 meters for 45m dives) and 
then has deco stops at 3-meter intervals with a somewhat shorter total 
runtime than for the Subsurface planner. But these effects are not 
unexpected because of the well-understood differences between the 
Bühlmann model and the bubble-based approach (VPM in the case of V-Planner).

I have also compared Subsuyrface against MV-Plan 1.5.2 which also uses a 
Bühlmann-like algorithm and there is pretty good correspondence between 
Subsurface planner and VM-Plan in the deco dives I modelled. Subsurface 
planner, on average, gives slightly more optimistic times and gas usage 
compared to VM-Plan.

Two points on Subsurface planner:
1) When dragging waypoints deeper (e.g. 35-50m), the rescaling on the 
Y-axis (depth) happens so fast and proactively that it becomes quite 
difficult to position the waypoint where one wants to put it.

2) Subsurface planner often gives long, slow ascents, different from 
many other planners that do ascents in a more stepwise way. Very slow 
controlled ascents (shallower than 10m and especially shallower than 6m) 
are mostly not possible in the sea where swells of several meters are 
encountered. In this respect the plans from Subsurface are problematic.

Kind regards,
Willemf