Hello everyone, first post here so before I get started I would like to say a big thank you to the FH dev team for FH2. I've been playing Forgottenhope since 0.65 and I was very happy when FH2 came out as it made such massive improvements to the original. So thank you FH devs! (salutes)
Now that I've buttered you up

I have a suggestion to make regarding the default tank view. I love tanking in FH2 and I'd say that and manning AT guns are my favourite things to do in FH. So I've spent a lot of time using them and I came up with an idea to improve the depth and immersion of tanking in FH. Please forgive me if this has been suggested before but I did have a quick look and couldn't find anything.
So, right now we have a default view and a gunsight view but what I would love to see is the ability to 'turn out' when in the default view. Right now I think the view you get is quite open with no penalties i.e. you're not exposed to enemy fire making it a bit unfair I feel, for any brave AT troops trying to sneak up on a tank. I've mulled this over and thought of a workaround to get the abilty to open the hatch to have the wide open view and then to close it leaving you with a restricted internal cupola view or a periscope view.
In vanilla BF2 one of the few improvements they made was if you were a manning a machine gun on a tank you could press control to duck inside to avoid being sniped. When you did it you would get this view

I thought it may be possible to use this feature in some way to make a commander postion that could close the hatch by pressing control. When you do, instead of seeing the view above you could be a given a view that has a render of the interior over a normal view outside like the gunsight in tanks at the moment. I think it would be much more realistic, tankers would have to weigh up the choice of taking a sneak peek in a nice wide open view or getting their head blown off by arty or a sniper and it would make tanking feel so much more immersive. I know this will require a lot of effort and work to get ingame and I certainly don't expect it in the next release but I think it would be well worth it. So what do you think? Is it possible? I'm no modder but is the basic idea sound?