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Incidentally, most of my problems intercepting reports is getting the initial reported angle right, if the reported heading is "ESE" it's pretty difficult to get an accurate idea of where they are actually heading, the one you estimate could be 10 or 20 degrees off.
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I know
... This a very unfortunate downside to modding the game with things like RUB... I vote to put the little tale on the ships back in, so that we can better judge the ships direction. In the movie Das Boot the radio report that they get (the one that they don't chase because it's too far away) states the ships heading in degrees (around 60 if I recall correctly), which is a whole lot better than a simple compass heading.
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Dantenoc, can you please explain to us math inhibited airbrains what exactly is wrong with Claren's method, when will it not work and why?
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As to why Claren's method doesn't really work... let me see if I can explain
I suspect we're actually talking about the same method except that Claren had a momentary lapse of dislexia when he posted and switched two things around. Unfortunately, this being war... and even more so: MATHEMATICS IN WAR, well... make a tiny mistake and your dead
The tiny detail is this: Your ship's speed shouldn't be measured from your position to the contact's current position as previously described by Claren... there's no point in it, since your sub will NEVER be heading directly at the target (if it did, the target would be long gone by the time you got there). Rather, your speed should be measured on a line that paralels the course that you WILL actually take to intercept the target (very much like when you measure the contact's speed following it's heading)
Having said that, then why does Claren's method seem to work sometimes (and even very well in some cases!)?... well... because most well behaved triangles have inner angles that aren't that different from one another, so if you switched them by mistake you can get away with it sometimes (specially if the contact isn't that far away to begin with, since errors in angles are exagerated with long distances only). The method presented here will allways work.
I would like to give a big thumbs up
to Claren nonetheless because he is one of few that took the time to post something TECHNICAL with images and all
