ID problem with merchant fleet.

[Soviet Creeper]

I am using the merchant fleet mod, plus a ton of other stuff that (shouldnt) matter to the problem at hand.


The mod has added a very large amount of ships to my ID book, and my problem is there is so many (and a lot look almost the same) that by the time I click through and find the ship I need, hes gone to his port, dropped off his cargo, and is prepping to head back across the alantic.

The reason I want to ID them is because that gives you the length of the ship, and I saw a nifty trick Id like to use where youd do something with the length of the ship to find its speed (Ill find that fourmula later) I personally dont like having to measure the speed from the map, as I have to use contacts and it feels... cheap just magically knowing everything about the ships position.

Or, if someone could give me a better way to find speed without the map or ID book... that would work too :P

[Markus Witt]

I use the merchant fleet mod to. I actually like that it makes ID more difficult, feels more realistic to me. half the time I am unable to ID the ship properly. I think in RL this was a problem too. I actually think the MM mod is flawed in that although there are a lot of different vessels which are difficult to ID the mastheights are very simmilar. This means that when you are unable to ID a vessel you can still have a good guess at it's mastheight (because of the lack of varriance in mastheight) and therefor estimate range pretty accurate. And range is much more important then speed when finding a solution. Also the speed varriance is unfortuanately pretty poor in GWX. If you have no idea what the speed is, just guess 7 knots and you have the right speed 90% of the time. I wish there was more varriance to make things more interesting.

If you want to determine the speed of a vessel, this is easy. When a you receive a contact report, plot the position in the chart and note the time. Plot an intercept course and intercept the target. When you have intercepted the target plot it's position again and note the time. Now you have the distance travelled by the target in a certain timeframe, giving you the speed. With this method you won't need to ID the target.
If you come across a vessel by chance, just plot it's approximate position and note the time. Then shadow it for some time and plot it's position again while noting the time. Now you have the distance travelled by the target in a certain timeframe, giving you the speed. I guess this is what they did in RL. If you use the OLC Gold Mod (which I use) for maunnual targetting there is a very simple method to determine target speed, but this works only when you ID the target accurately, which van be difficult with the MM Mod (and RL).
If you're unable to determine target speed somehow, just guess 7 knots!