Newcomers, if you don't know CapnScurvy he's spent more time with the stadimeter/periscope system than you've spent playing the game. Matter of fact, probably more than I have spent playing the game. He's by far the authority on this area of Silent Hunter 4 and y'all need to pay attention to his posts. Even including the supermodders, there's nobody who has contributed more to the community and more to the great state of SH4. Scurvy isn't a prima donna and he shoots from the hip. Accurately I might add.:salute:

Capn, I still bet the reason for the "errors" was rounding error coming from the use of slide rules to perform all the calculations. Try it yourself and what you read off the slide rule is what they use for an answer. Real geeks at the time would never perform an arithmetic calculation unless a gun were pointed at their head!

you know i was under the impression that SH4, as opposed to SH3, did in fact allow any reference point to be used, simply by manually setting the stadimeter to whatever "mastheight" you desired. I understand that by clicking the checkbox in the recog manual it always chose the masthead height, but by not checking the box, and instead manually setting the masthead height, you could in fact set it to whatever height you fancied.

is this not your experience?

I think in RFB you can use any point you want, but once you click on the rec manual icon, the stadimeter keeps using the default value. Normally, I like to use the rec manual, since I don't have a ready listing of all the possible reference points and it seems simpler.

there is a diagram and a scale in the recog manual, both of which can be used to determine the height of funnels or top of bridge, or indeed anything

- and this is a stock feature, not rfb

Yes, I know there are the horizontal lines, but isn't the scale different for every ship? Without a known scale it isn't very useful.