Bad news for the Real Nav Mod
 

I had set up the docs and stuff, thought that I'd do a few 'fast' career runs (single mission), from all the bases. What I did, was start at each base and beam over to Longitude and Latitude points, avoiding any contacts. I'd then do a sextant reading then sunrise and sunset readings while sitting in one place. Take notes, then beam over to the next point, saving the game at each point.

Dissapointing results in that the Local clock is an abortion, the GMT clock jumps around between Greenwich and your starting point. For example.. if you start at Kiel, Wilhelmhaven, Flensburg or La Spezia, your GMT clock is actually set to 15 East, not GMT. This is ok and one could make allowances for it, BUT load your saved game while in the mid atlantic and the GMT clock is now set to GMT, and it's out by 2 degrees, and sunrise ans sunset times are all over the place. This is not acceptable for accurate Nav.

This is not all, If you're in the East you Longitude calculations have to be 'reversed' to obtain your exact position. as the clock does not tell the 'real time'

It was getting to be such a mess, I'm at the point of aborting this, except for one thing.
The Sextant is still consistently accurate, and if you think people would be prepared to log/measure their mileage instead of using a clock for Longitude this mod can still work - plus it'll reduce my workload. I think this would be the easiest.

Any suggestions

:oops:

Pretty cool stuff, sucks about the clock though, anyway to fix that?

A thought on this, trying to log mileage is difficult (shame there is no log on the boat) due to the inaccuracy of the knot meter (i.e. is that 4.5 or 4.25? i have dropped the scale on mine a bit to try to make it easier to read), the desire (for me at least) to use a reasonable bit of time compression, and variability in speeds - eg, you are trucking along at 8.5 knots, you dive for some reason - and come back up. You charge your battery, your speed drops, and, unless you wait on low compression until the battery is back up (or you don't charge it) you have a change in speed which is a bit difficult to account for.

But - would it not be possible to just keep track of your original time? If, when you saved the game, you made a note of the time (possibly by using it in the filename), you would know the difference between the two, and hence keep your own clock.

I have a bit of a problem with sextant - it works wonderfully, except if you are north of 60 degrees, at which point it is off the top of the screen, and hence you can't keep the bottom of the screen aligned with the horizon, and you can't see polaris.

workaround
 

A workaround for 'real navigation' that we ended up using was to still take 'sightings' if the weather was clear enough, but to take the sightings at the appropriate time of day by looking at the Nav map and marking the position of your boat on the Nav map.

If it was overcast, foggy, etc, then no 'sighting'... and rely on the gyroscope for position until the weather cleared up enough. Then when the weather cleared up enough at the appropriate time of day for a sighting, look at the Nav map and put a mark at your position.

Another reason why we had to do it this way was because some of the SH1 maps/charts were off, displaying incorrect Lat & Long by many degrees.

Sometimes you just have to resign yourself to SH4's limitations and change procedure. SH4 displays the sky on a cylinder, and SH4 is not a planetarium.

Happy Hunting!

Is the mod out yet? I would like to know how can i remove the sub icon from the nav map.

Replace the sub dds icon or 360 bearing tool dds graphic with a smaller sub sized blank dds file.

You could use a program like Paint.net to crop a corner from a blank section of a larger transparency.

There may be a mod out already, it would be so simple to make one.

In \Data \Submarine \ NSS_Gato --> this file: "NSS_Gato_shp.dds". All the *shp.dds files for each sub need to be replaced with a blank transparent dds file.

With the transparent blank file you can zoom the Nav map in to the max and put an X in the center of your screen simulating taking a sighting at the precise time.

Since you can't take a real sighting N or S of 60d you might want to consider using the clock and Nav map method that we used. SH4 is not a planetarium - ha!

Happy Hunting!