There is something more than that. I noticed that the few highly-voted submissions I have didn't add the whole amount to my karma.

I have the impression that submission votes only count half of what comment votes count, or something along those lines.

Earlier upvotes are more impactful in getting a post on the front page and in affecting its rank (because the rank algorithm uses time decay), but they don't count any differently towards karma.

Is there really no delay, or anything else going on? I'm sure I've seen my upvote count be out of sync with the changes I see on my scores for recent comments.

Does https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26868069 answer your question?