
When building a large submarine that is enterable, there should be empty compartments. You should be able to customize the number of these compartments that it has.
For example, a player who mainly wants to use the submarine for exploration and a little storage could have 0 extra editable compartments, while someone who wants to make the submarine a mobile base could have up to around 4.
This would not be able to change after initial construction of the vehicle, and there would be very limited variations, making it far easier to model these 5 individual submarines while still holding up to the artistic integrity of the game while still allowing for a lot of personalization and customization of a “single” vehicle (with multiple variants).