The "ownship" symbol
 

Hi,

maybe someone can help me out on this one:

In SH3 the ownship symbol is a circle, with a tail.

In Dangerous Waters the ownship symbol is a circle with a line in the dirction of the course. The line's length shows the current speed of the ship/boat.


Now I am wondering: Did the navigation map's symbols change after World War 2 or is Silent Hunter just wrong? Or did the germans use a different symbol?


Any help appreciated!

In real life there were no symbols. People drew what they wanted on the charts, probably a dot or a circle. If they wanted to show direction they likely used an arrow showing direction of travel, not a tail, but mostly they probably didn't bother.

Especially considering what real time was in WWII, a few minutes, hours, days?

Mmhh, I thought there were conventions for stuff like that given by the navy / training. Stuff like square=ship, half square = sub etc. I assume they had standards, like when plotting a convoy and especially its course.

I would have imagined a dot or an X with a brief description such as "Unknown merchant" or "small destroyer." Before playing SH3 I never had any ideas of specific shapes for specific types of contacts...

The best mod for SH3 charts, in my opinion, is this one:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/down...o=file&id=1328

After searching around I finally found a chart. But its for the era 1950+

If I could only find something like that for WW2... :-/



http://s7.directupload.net/images/120425/a8yclbvv.jpg

Those are standardized NATO map marking symbols. They have boxes with those in them to place on the chart; they didn't draw those themselves. In a tactical situation you'd be wasting time fishing for those things. If you were the commander of a large operation with many assets involved you'd need something like that. A submarine plotting crew in attack mode would need to draw things as quickly as possible. They didn't plot airplanes, they either shot at them or hid from them. The could only plot the specific ship the captain reported from the periscope; they had no idea what the other ships were doing or even where they were.

Symbols like those would more likely be used in a place like this:
http://www.uboatarchive.net/JtOpsCtrTour.htm

Which navy? German? Iranian? Roman?

I know "on the boat" (US Navy) our systems have built-in symbols, but nothing built in to notify you what they're for, each ship has freedom to assign them at will. For us it was squares for merchies (convenient) (yellow unknown, blue friendly, red enemy) diamonds for "surface combatants," bottom half circles for unidentified subs (not really used) bottom half diamonds for submerged contacts (every sub is an enemy sub lol) top half stuff for aircraft, circles for special case surface contacts.
That's all in the computer tracking software.
On the charts it's all lines and dots, x's, whatever they've got around for markings. Ownship is only a circle to indicate position of uncertainty: "we're in this circle (we hope)."