Naval math: Post all your useful math tricks for naval combat.

[Wildcat]

Recently I have been really polishing my math skills for improving my combat effectiveness in a few naval sims. I mostly play Dangerous Waters, but also SH3.

I'll give an example of one technique I have really been trying to improve quickly (Mental math).

For periscope attacks in any submarine, you should be able to calculate range very quickly. After watching a VERY good documentary on a British attack boat, I felt more strongly about this than ever before. Most of us rely too much on gadgets and automatic rangefinders, we can't do this math in our heads. Being able to do this in your head will drastically reduce the amount of time you need to keep the periscope up, limiting your vulnerability to detection.

Here's the quick formula for a 1.5x zoom on an old US sub periscope:
(19.1*mast head height) / (tick marks from waterline to top of mast) = range in yards from ownship.

This should give you accurate range as long as the mil-dots in your sim's periscope are accurate in the game world. The formula can be modified to match any zoom, but you have to change 19.1 to match the correct zoom level (Multiply it to the correct figure) and the tick marks on many sim periscopes are not accurate, so you may have to fiddle with the tick mark number you plug in, or change your sim's periscope graphics to be accurate. You can also multiply or divide the given range figure to match the zoom instead. I have to admit I am still a bit rusty with this, and have been mostly working with the figures I have read in unclassified sub training documents - 1.5x zoom and 6.5x zoom.

There are some other issues, you need to know the mast height of the ship you're looking at, and due to lazy modeling and sometimes inaccurate sims, the height of the model is not always a perfect match with what the ship guidebook tells you. One way to verify this in a modern sim is with an active sonar ping. In a WW2 sim, you can use the rangefinder to get the real range, then compare it with your head-calculated formula.

Please post up your other useful math stuff - TMA, best convoy / ship intercept course math, sound / layer math, etc! Even if it's old, let's hear it all.

[Commander Wallace]

The Great thing about SH3 and 4 is how scale-able it is. Beginners can lock a target in and allow the targeting to be done for them. That's useful if novice users lock a target in and then look at the gyro angles and settings to see where the game computer set them and learn targeting that way. This makes the simulation fun for basic users as well as more advanced players. Once a basic user learns the Trigonometry / Algebra principals associated with manual settings, they are ready to step up.

More advanced users Prefer to perform their own calculations to approximate as closely as possible the actual conditions and circumstances that a real u-boat / submarine commander would face.

To that end.


In computing Gyro angle:


Target Torpedo

--------- equals ----------




Deflection Bow

------------- equals -------------



Deflection ( Track - Deflection )



This can be used to calculate deflection angles with computed course


Target torpedo

________ Equals ________

Deflection ( Track - Deflection )








the Target part of the equation is the angle or difference between the targets course and the course the torpedo takes to intersect lines or intercept the target.


It can be useful to use a stationary target and use these equations and then use the automatic features and see if the solutions you calculated are the same as that derived by the computer.



Happy hunting.



Edit: I found an example where what I'm writing Isn't being screwed up.

Figure 1.





Figure 2