Driving at full speed across water and the HV just drops under and then starts moving in a skipping cycle vertically. No way to recover it found so far. Devs, let me know what you may need to recreate this.
If your HV is close to the surface, you might be able to relocate or add extra hover engines above the water.
I think this may be related to being overweight. when just overweight an HV will say it is hovering at 3 meters but in fact, it will be at less than that. When travelling over water in that condition the behaviour of the craft is strange. Like described in OP. The only cure is to reduce weight. For now, you can put items on the connected hot bar or your personal inventory, I assume that will be fixed eventually. It would be nice if HV's reported their actual hover height, not the hover height requested.
Under normal conditions yes, but this is odd and it starts at the bottom and slowly raises then blinks back to the bottom. I tried it a few time to try to time it at the top of the cycle but it did not help, still blinks back to the bottom. Thanks just the same it was worth a try.
I agree with you on the height indicator. I had almost no load, so little it all fit in my pack for the bike ride home to build a basic HV to use as a diving platform to try to recover it.
Provide a copy of your game save with your character left standing nearby this sunk HV. That isn't normal behavior and they would need the save to look at it.
Sometimes this happens to my HV, it glitches underwater. I tend to leave it, it eventually surfaces. EDIT: my save (I think). https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WwvV22WhwjW6g423HqEsmh-2hLm3Spgp?usp=sharing
Please supply a save game with the HV it happens with & in a location it happens in. To note if you are using 'Ground repulsor engine' they aren't intended to work over water.
Thanks for this I can reproduce what you show in the video from 1:06 onwards. The issue will be looked into. @Steel Rat is what @Sunshaker shows the same issue you are reporting ?
Why do we have a hover engine that doesn't work over the perfect medium for a HV? Or is this just because the HV sinks more often with the lower tech engines??
It's just because of the lower hover height they are more likely that your craft will touch the water and fall in. They DO work perfectly fine over water, just more likely to take a swim. I have quite a few early game HV designs that use them and they all perform perfectly fine over the water (as long as I don't let the nose dip down and touch the water).
There is now a fix in the latest exp branch for this please retest if you can https://empyriononline.com/threads/alpha-experimental-10-3-0.57759/
Retested a couple of HV'S in exp 10.3, My Hv(1st) shown, that kept glitching under water, at the moment seems fine, cannot get it to stay underwater, I also tried the hv speederbike, very stable over water, but @3.30, I managed to submerge it, then it did glitch underwater, resurfaced after about 20mins. BUT ON THE WHOLE, MY HV'S SEEM MORE STABLE OVER THE WATER, THAN BEFORE.