Draw a line between the centers of the two dials, that will be your index.

The inner ring is not always fixed, its rotating in connection to the bearing. So if the bearing to target is 90, you'll see the submarine pointing to the left.

But, there's a bug when using the lock on target feature, which sometimes locks the inner ring in the "bearing 0 is up" position.

Dude you guys have made one of the most detailed analog FC computing device sims I've heard of yet it looks like. :cool: Congrats for this little triumph (no can't get SH4 yet). :-?

I'm a sucker for little machines that do clever things, and I always try to make the player use them "as in real life".

Not in my experience... Nothing I do can make that "ownship" picture change from a north/south orientation on that inner ring of the bottom dial, and zero is always at the 12 oclock position... I've tried setting up a complete solution in subschool without doing a periscope "lock". I get everything looking great then turn the sub 90 degrees... that inner dial never moves.

I'm no TDC expert but I can hit ships with it :)

I do use the bearing rate on the inner dial to check my firing solution, it works very well. Good scope management means taking quick looks, not prolonged exposure, and before I raise the scope clear of the water, I check the TDC target bearing and align the scope on the same bearing. When the scope breaks the water (btw, excellent water run off effects, why is it there aren't 50 posts in this forum raving about that?!) if my target if close to the crosshairs, I know I have a good solution. If the target is in front or behind, I recheck the range, adjust the speed setting in the TDC, and drop the scope for another couple minutes. By the time my target is 1200 yards or closer, I am getting a good feeling and ordering the quartermaster to make room in my medals chest.

If the target has zigged, I turn off the red position keeper light, reset, and start over.

Hope that helps,
Neal

Neil,

Please hook me up here, cause obviously it's me that is missing something... When you are about to check your solution after having let some time pass from setting it up, you said you get the relative bearing from the TDC off the inner dial (on the bottom dial I assume). Exactly how. What index mark to you use to read the bearing. Is the "ownship" picture always in a north/south orientation for you?

Edit: HANG ON! I just got it to move! Let me experiment some and try to figure out why it's getting locked... (i didn't hit periscope lock either)

It gets locked for port side targets... not for starboard side. Bug found....

OK! Progress...

I figured out exactly the sequence of events that is making this bottom dial break. Bear with me on this...

1) I setup the sub school torpedo attack scenario
2) My ship is north to south oriented, the target is crossing from the NW to the SE on a course of 135.
3) I enter the speed, range, and AoB. and Instantly that magic inner dial rotates to match the target bearing (YAY)
4) Here's where it goes horribly wrong... I click on the Position Keeper switch... INSTANTLY, the inner dial goes back to a North South heading again.... making it useless if I understand correctly.

Any ideas?

You're kidding! Testing...

Excellent job Elanaiba:up:

Confirmed!! Elan, you're brilliant!

As an additional piece of info, I setup a saved game so I could repeatedly test this, I moved my ship so that the target was at about 30 (starboard side), with the target passing right to left across my bow, and setup a solution, and sure enough the Position Tracker button didn't maul my bearing indicator...

So then I tracked the target and watched as the generated bearing contunued to move toward zero as the targed crossed my bow. All was well until it hit zero degrees generated bearing... then the inner dial locked!

So to put a finer point on it, the inner dial is not capable of showing a bearing less than zero degrees....

Neil, if you have some channel to the developers, could you please pass this info on to them? This is a really *REALLY* subtle problem that they may not be aware of, yet is extremely important to us manual monkies, as I'm sure you'd agree.

damn your right its buggy on one side and not the other :damn:
Ill agree with gmohr, Neal if you can plz pass it to the devs. With this neat little feature then we dont even need the chrono thingy do the timing for us since its much easier to check your solution, so you can calc guestemate it.
i love these US subs already :yep: to bad they dont come with salvos like the uboats :rotfl:

It would also be *wonderful* if they could put a small index marker between the inner and outer dials at exactly 12 o'clock, so we could use that to read a precise generated bearing. I can be a bit tough to get an exact reading on that without something to refer to.

Wasent there a similar bug with sh3 .... something about 180 bearing.

confirmed here too.. someone post this in to the bug thread