Who said anything about the stock system in SH? Who would play any SH game unmodded to remove stuff like that, anyway?

Bottom line is that contact reports should be on if the game was designed properly. The captain is the captain, and should never have to plot unless he prefers to interfere with someone else's job.

The whole point is that the contacts plotted on the chart should ONLY be a function of the observations of the captain (player).

You observe, and bearing gets plotted.

You take a bearing and range, and bearing and range (the range YOU got) gets plotted.

No, the sensors should not be on the map, the map should look like a chart with pencil marks on it, period. It should not update in real time, either. Only via observation—and the skipper (YOU) should have to set which contact you are observing if you have the men plot more than one. So if you observe one liberty ship on the first observation, then mistakenly observe another on the 2d, your plots will be entirely wrong.

The plotter can default to drawing a course line ahead X minutes at a time as a straight line pencil mark.

What is sad is that the player is required to play with contacts off to have any sort of realism, AND do the job of a crewman instead of fighting the boat.

So you miss the point, the stock plotting system is 100% unrealistic either way. It needed to be thrown away and redone with SH5, but instead it's the same as SH4 (entirely broken).

Yes, in Fig. 1 of the first Post, I made thethe surface vessel icon is black to represent this (Grey would be fine). Not identifying friend or foe automatically is essential. I have suggested this doesn't happen until you use (whatever optics you happen to be using) and click on the flag. For those rare occasions you spot an enemy sub, this woud be trickier (no flags!), but hey, that'd be more realistic too right?

I have noticed this. Horrible bug :nope:, something to do with the Sonar Operators 'Special' ability to 'show all contacts' maybe?

Yes, that is my point. It doesn't work properly either way. There are some very good ideas in each iteration of Silent Hunter. For example; in SH4 the Sonar suite works well, sending data to the T.D.C. Realistically the Captain would rarely use this equipment, but for gameplay sake it should be available. As should all other major systems.

Yes why should I as captain need to leave my station at the periscope to run to the map table to mark a ships position?
I agree that there needs to be an option for "observed" contacts report, without the movement on the nav map, plus those that are received by radio.

I don't think so, some are way out of range of the hydrophones. I wish they were gone.

I'm both. :) I prefer plotting ships with map contacts off. I do NOT want to see a real time, gods eye view of cartoony icons parading around on a map.
I think it would be nice if the TDC function wrote the results onto the map, to simulate the skipper calling out range, bearing, AOD (course), and speed.

But if that's not possible, make my map tabla rasa and I'll handle the rest.

I play Sh4 with contacts off because I have no choice. It's off—and I am forced to do the work of a few men—or magic.

I'd prefer neither. It's a CHOICE on the part of the devs, they have auto contacts on for the twitch crowd, which is fine, but they entirely misunderstand the way contacts were prosecuted, I guess, or don't care.

We can send contacts to the TDC. We can take two observations and get the speed with the TDC. There is no reason it could not draw the two dots on the map, then connect the dots. All the time wasted (yes, wasted) on interior nonsense could have been spent animating the plotter PLOTTING. Heck, you could watch him plot over his shoulder. THERE is an immersive animation, IMNSHO.

I never want the god's eye nonsense, that should have been clear, what I want is for the paradigm to be the player as skipper, nothing more, nothing less. It's odd, that in SH5 they went to that as an RPG-like notion to the extreme, but missed the most important part—that RPG element when fighting the boat.