Sun comes up too soon?

[scott10301]

Hello,

I've noticed lately that the sunrise/sunset gets out of sync with the current time in my game. I started a campaign yesterday at 11:30 local time in St. Nazarene and the sun seemed in the right location in the sky. The first 2 days of the voyage were fine and I used TC from time to time. The last time I'd used TC it was early morning of the third day, 03:30 local time, and the sun had already begun to rise over the horizon. I'm about 200km east of St. Naz and it's May 1st.

I'd had this problem with my last campaign as well. It seemed to get progressively worse as I was coming up on sunrise at 02:30 near the Canary Is. in early March. Sunset was at least 2-3 hours early as well.

I'm using GWX 3.0 and the flags and pennants mods.

Thanks,
Scott

[vanjast]

I'm about 200km east of St. Naz and it's May 1st.

Do you mean Saint-Nazaire. ?

On the same latitude :o ?
I'm not sure if you're aware of the stuff below. :03:

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110428235321AAwJA3Z

http://www.skwirk.com/p-c_s-16_u-182_t-483_c-1765/longitude-time-zones-and-navigation/nsw/longitude-time-zones-and-navigation/-investigating-the-world/our-world

http://oceannavigation.blogspot.com/2009/03/time-zones-and-longitude.html

[captgeo]

welcome :salute:

[RConch]

Welcome and good hunting!:salute:

[HW3]

Your in game clock stays on the time of your home base.

Welcome Aboard!

[scott10301]

Hi vanjast, yes I was aware of content in those articles. I'm currently in BF44, which is a little over 1000km east of St. Nazaire and just slightly south. I'm aware that the ship time is GMT, but if you hover your mouse over the clock, it also shows local time. I'm currently -1 GMT. It's May 2nd, 1941 and the sun came up this morning around 4:30 GMT. Seems too early for this latitude/time of year. As I mentioned before, I was experiencing this problem in the last campaign. Early March, pulling out of Las Palmas, 2:30am local time and the sun is almost over the horizon.

Gala Kav- I had this problem when I first installed GWX about 6 months ago. It was weird in that I loaded a save that had me at 4:15am, but the sky looked like high noon. Even if I reloaded it would stay that way. The odd thing was that it slowly self-corrected. The sun was going backward for about an hour before it settled into the right position. It's like it's doing the same thing, but this time its not correcting.

It seems to encounter this problem whenever I leave the GMT time zone. I'll have to play around with it a bit more this weekend to see if i can get more detailed info.

[vanjast]

I'm currently in BF44, which is a little over 1000km east of St. Nazaire and just slightly south.
:o :D

Never had/noticed this problem.. I'll keep an eye out for it.
It might have something to do with the clocks Local-vs-Base when loading a saved game - Here I do notice the clock changes, where both have the same time... nothing in the sky though.

[scott10301]

Oops.... Yes, WEST of St. Naz...

[UKönig]

The clock aboard your average u-boat is working on GST or German Summer Time. I guess it was too difficult or time consuming to keep adjusting the figures or values, so they just established a baseline, and made the CO and NA work out the differences in time zone in their heads...

[Sailor Steve]

Actually in SH3, and only in SH3, if you hover the cursor over the time you'll get a popup with the local time.

[Pisces]

The timezones in SH3 are not as in the real world. In the game they flip 1 hour over when you cross the 7.5 degrees east and west meridians. All other timezones are ofcourse offset from this by multiples of 15 degrees. In other words the timezones are centered on GMT and multiples of 15 degrees. Where as in the real world the beginning and ends of the timezone regions are more or less aligned with the multiples of 15 degrees.

Dig deep into the forum. It has been extensively researched to try to make celestial navigation work in the game. So far, trying to make a high enough resolution sextant/octant (for km/nm preciscion) has failed due to the game's limitations.

[Rammstein0991]

Also I am not sure about SH3, but in SH4 it seems like if you frequently run TC at high values (like 3500+) the times of sunset/rise seem to get wonky. :06:

[CaptBones]

SH3 is highly accurate in regard to time zone changes and as accurate as a virtual "flat" world can be regarding the changes in sunrise/sunset at high latitudes. As Sailor Steve pointed out, the clock keeps "Z" (Greenwich Mean Time) and displays local time when you roll the cursor over it. Since all Log entries are made in GMT, I keep my hand-written "Rough Log" in GMT also.

World time zones are centered on principal meridians at 15 degree multiples east and west of the Prime Meridian; they start and stop at 7.5 degrees east and west of their respective principal meridians.

Deviations from that scheme exist almost everywhere due to political boundaries and cultural differences, but to a real mariner/navigator, those deviations mean nothing until you enter or leave port. At sea, a real navigator (not the putz with only a GPS for a tool-set) goes strictly by the longitude difference from Greenwich. That's why accurate celestial navigation was not possible until good chronometers were available; you can easily determine how far E/W you are from the Prime Meridian by comparing Local Apparent Noon with a clock keeping Zulu time.

[vanjast]

Started tracking my nav with sunrise/sets, with that almanac I made.

I know that my times are approx. 4 minutes out at higher latitudes... and found my way to BE61 no problem.

I must do 'in-game' test mission almanac times, as i took the times from the US almanac.
:)

Here's a plan..
Need 12 people to record sunrise/set times (when the interior light changes colour).
Each person will do on a particular month, from equator to 80 degrees North at 5 degree latitude increments = 31 days x 17 positions
The year will be 1943 - mid war, hopefully to average out any shifts in the 'universe and time continuum.'

Who's game ?
:)

[Pisces]

No time for me. No pun intended.

The sunrise/sunset indicator/redlight is also different from real-life procedures. In the game the sun disk is midway on the horizon when this happens. Sunset and sun rise in reallife is considered when the sun's disk is touching the horizon from below (most of the sun is covered by the horizon).

Something to keep in mind when comparing with real almanacs.

[vanjast]

Sunset and sun rise in reallife is considered when the sun's disk is touching the horizon from below (most of the sun is covered by the horizon).

Something to keep in mind when comparing with real almanacs.
Yeah I know.. in game sunrise seems to be when the whole sun is visible.
I've yet to do the sunset...

Been a long time since i did that real nav stuff, cannot remember :arrgh!:

[Pisces]

Yeah I know.. in game sunrise seems to be when the whole sun is visible.
I've yet to do the sunset...

Been a long time since i did that real nav stuff, cannot remember :arrgh!:Not when I watched it. Halve of it.

[UKönig]

Ha! Sun...

By 1943 you never saw the sun, except maybe through the periscope lens.
The only real clock on board was with dark of night and 'light bulb'.
This was why routine aboard a u-boat (or any sub really) was so important, because it gave the crew some kind of 'time anchor' to stay grounded with.
There is one thing the game (and so far I have never heard anyone mention this as a mod, or included in a mod) does not model, and that is the effects of 'caneurosis' (ger: blechkrankheit or blechkoller -lit. 'tin disease'). A wartime expression for the state of violent hysteria, induced, in the case of u-boat crews, by extended nervous strain/stress combined with the unnatural conditions in which they lived.

[scott10301]

Ukonig, you actually bring up point that I've been wondering about lately. I'm in late 1941, and I usually am on the surface during the day and spend a good amount of time underwater at night. The reason I do so is because I assume that the ability to spot ships by the watch crew is diminished at night. Do you know if this is the case in SHIII? Or is the ability of the watch crew the same, no matter day or night? I figured that since they can't see that well at night, having your sonar man at hydrophone station would fill the gap, so to speak.

I dunno, looks like I'm doing this wrong too! lol...

[UKönig]

I meant that historically, U-boats lost a lot, if not all of their surface attack ability by 1943. At that point in the war, the allies had enough of the tools and the talent to send u-boats to the bottom in record numbers. The u-boat was obsolete. And yet it was all the Germans had to offer. The type 21 was still years away. And when they did finally get them on stream only 4 of the 140 boats built ever made it to operational status. The 21 was built straight from the drawing board with no time for prototypes or testing. Anything that went wrong was going to have to be corrected as they went.
Which meant the rest of the U-fleet was working with outdated equipment. The snorkel solved some of their problems, but without one your chances of survival were not great.
Historically, if you play with high realism, this is what your campaign might look like.
1939 - you can attack on the surface, night time preferred but daylight is an option, under certain conditions. Aircraft cover is scant. Not a lot of destroyers available for anti submarine duties so convoys will be lightly guarded. And the guards are inexperienced so they make more mistakes, like, charging off in the wrong direction from where the attack came from, thus leaving the flank of the convoy wide open for your torpedos. Or missing their chance to drop a load of charges on you because their sound guy lost contact. Remember, the u-boat is not so much a submarine as it is a torpedo attack boat that can dive. In 1939, 1940 it is still very much a surface ship.
1940 - much as 1939, except now there are a few more escorts on convoy duty. The merchant skippers don't always do stupid things like scatter, or cut across each other causing a 'traffic jam'. You can still attack on the surface night or day (depending).
early 1941, getting tougher. The tommies have radar on most of their ships now. Night time is no guaranty of stealth. Use surface action carefully. Be more watchful of aircraft.
late 1941-1942 America is in the war. Now it just got real. Depth charges lost their 152m depth maximum and can now go to any depth needed to hit a submerged boat. More air cover. More radar. A few new improvements on the U-boat front as well, but not nearly as much or as well as the allied equipment. Keep in mind that the allies know the strength limits of the uboats they are fighting. They know how long your batteries will last. They know how long your air will last. They know they can outlast you.
1943, summer. Your surface action days are pretty much over. HK units travel with convoys, sometimes they have MACs or merchant aircraft carriers sailing with the convoy, they are aware of your uboat signals and are even reading Donitz's mail. The odds are stacked very heavily against you. You spend most of your time underwater (during the day so ships/planes won't see you) draining your batteries, using up your O2. Then your chief engineer tells you that you must surface to recharge. You surface. You're upside for maybe 5 - 15 minutes when your radar warning starts going into high gear. Crash dive to avoid aircraft. Wait a bit, try it again. Crash dive again after 4 more minutes. How much charge did we get? Not enough to make a difference. Surface. Aircraft. Don't dive, fight. A few passes. Hit by aircraft, bombed, sinking, U-123, never heard from again.
So you do your battery charging runs at night. Always on the lookout for coastal command to drop bombs on you. Even though that with radar small enough to fit on aircraft, night is just as clear as day. Its also why they removed the deck gun off most uboats after 1943, as you rarely spent time on the surface anymore, it was now dead weight. Engaging surface ships in the face of such air assault was an act of suicide.
1944 - the allies sunk 237 uboats last year. Mostly by aircraft. It will be a repeat in 1944. There is nowhere in the atlantic that a plane cannot get to. The allies can direct their convoys away from the uboats, and marshall enough HKs to where the uboats will be, to make easy work of them.
If you've made it this far you are either really skilled or really, really lucky.
I don't know if the game makes much distinction between watch detection ability from night to day. I do know there is a difference when fog rolls in, but I just assume they will see what they need to see night or day.