[Pisces]

Originally Posted by A-Ganger

Example:
I'll have contacts at say 345 and I'm going course 230 or so on Sphere and/or TA. All seems good right? Well I turn on Truths (after I had shot a torpedo that never hit anything lmao) and all the contacts are down around the 170 - 210 or so.

Well no, that first line makes no sense at all. "Contacts at bearing 345..." Ok, you got signals at true bearing 345.
"I'm going course 230 or so on Sphere and/or TA." What the hell does that mean? You don't command your course in a sonar sensor, you do it at the helm. To take this supposed bug report serious you need to describe your situation a bit more clearer.

Take for instance the mission on RA called Barren Seas Loiter.
I know all the targets come in down at 180 ish, and you start off going 000.

When I start getting Sonar contacts they are all coming from around 230-270 while I'm going 180, so their on my right. Then after a long time they start showing up where they actually are.

That is a clear indication that you have marked the ambiguous mirror contact (instead of the real one) on the towed array. And perhaps you made a left turn through the mirror contacts shifting to the other side of your bow. There are no other (false, civilian or biologic) contacts in that scenario. Unless the surface ships lobbed some torpedo missiles in your vicinity you must have been fooled by mirror contacts and their drift during your course change. I've never seen (in stock or modded) the towed sonar tracker mixing up the real with the mirror contact when both are near the tail of the towed array, or crossing through it to the other side. (Which makes you wonder why not if the bearing rate is really slow. But that is a different discussion)

As I'm typing this I just had a thought. When you turn and go 180, do you have to flip the switch that makes North - South?

Maybe that's why I'm messing up?

You don't need to flip north an south when you change course to the other side. It is just a visual thing. I guess a help for those lacking spatial reasoning. I mean, I don't see why north-south is special. Why is there not a east or west setting? A bow-stern display setting would make more sense to me. Either way the bearing scale is correctly displayed to read the right bearing the cursor is reading to at that time.

Maybe that north or south setting confused you with reading the scale in broadband of older data. When you flick that switch you'll notice the waterfall of the previous setting is still displaying the old data but lower. But during pause it obviously doesn't drop and might fool you reading the bearing. Narrowband does not have this problem. As the bearing-amplitude curse is redrawn every instant.

As Outeniqua said, it is better to make a less drastic course change to determine what the mirror contacts are. It takes a lot less time also. In fact, a 180 turn just makes the real and mirror contacts flip places. Telling you nothing exactly.

With the contacts being SSE (say 160) at the start, the mirror contacts would be found at 200-ish. After turn to the right by 30 degrees would make the true contacts stay at 160-ish (maybe drifting to 165), but the mirror contacts shift to 260-270.

Mirror contacts shift twice the angle of your course change, in the same direction. So the course change should be more or less (meaning "not equal to", not meaning "about the same as") to the distance a contact is to the bow/TA line direction. Or else they are flipping sides again.