I agree. But, at least for now, we are stuck with the way it is, so just take my advice.

Geosub1978, the point was not how to obtain a general bearing, but final targetting during the shooting observation. Aiming for specific parts of the ship via the crosshairs, or aim in front / aft if you figure your solution is poor but don't have time to go through the whole process again, etc.
To just have a "Mark" Button as iRL, actually, using it for the same purposes - to transmit bearing. And how best to work around the lack of one. Running to the sonar station and sending bearing from there would be the worst workaround I could think of. ;)

Thats true when you approach and attack against one target.

BUT!Dived in rough seas in the middle of a carrier/battleship task force or in the middle of a convoy were you have to attack simultaniously against 2 targets and immediately shift to other 2, then to my way of manual targeting there is no time to open the recognition manual-click on the target obtain good ranges etc. So far I didn't have delay problems with the procedure I described.

[quote=geosub1978]Thats following the same outdated american SOPs that kept the initial skippers from taking the fight to the enemy. Believe me you can pull that off with scope bearings even better if all you want are hits. And with the appropriate bearing mark function you could aim precisely and quickly still.

From Submarine - Torpedo Firecontrol Manual

"

203. BEARING - MARK:
A phrase used by the Approach Officer or by one of the Radar or Sonar Operators indicating to all members of the Fire Control Party that the target bearing as read on the various repeaters is correct. This is usually paralleled by a buzzer and mark light."

220. GYROS FORWARD (AFT) MATCHED IN AUTOMATIC (HAND):
A report from the Gyro Angle Setter to the Assistant TDC Operator, informing him that the gyro setting indicator regulator is matching the indicated value of gyro angle order.

221. GYROS FORWARD (AFT) STANDBY FOR GYRO CHECK - MARK:
An order from the Assistant TDC Operator to the Gyro Angle Setter to note the indicated gyro angle and report its value on the work "MARK".

222. GYROS FORWARD (AFT) SET GYROS _____:
An order from the Assistant TDC Operator to the Gyro Angle Setter to set the torpedo tube gyro spindles at some specific value. This is used only in an emergency caused by TDC failure and is given as a value between 000 and 360.

223. GYROS FORWARD (AFT) MATCH GYROS BY HAND:
An order from the Assistant TDC Operator to the Gyro Angle Setter to operate the gyro setting indicator regulator by hand and match gyros by the "follow the pointer method".

Bearings
 

I want to say it once more to the DEVs team and to anyone capable to mod this because I served in a Balao class submarine...

We could set manually any given bearing to the TDC.

We could set manually any desired gyro angle to the torpedo (for this you can use the spread anlge in the game).

There was no connection of the periscope to the TDC.

Thank you.

Wait a minute, in the game the periscope is not connected to the TDC. :confused:

I understand you served on a WWII US sub in the Greek Navy post war, and I salute you for that and the input you can give is *very* valuable for all of us, but the points you brought up seem to be partly besides the point of this thread, and partly already implemented. Let me elaborate:

This is in fact the point of this thread. Actually, you can send any given bearing to the TDC in SHIV, but only *indirectly* by submitting range to the target, which makes the process more complicated than it should be. There should be a seperate bearing transmitter button. It should be a one click, split second thing. Why this would be of importance - aside from historical accuracy - I layed out above and in numerous other threads.

This I would call a "manual override", and it is indeed not there in SHIV, while it was in SHI. At the same time, however, I think the usage of it would be very limited in the game. As you pointed out in an earlier post, it was mostly meant for the case the TDC would fail, as a backup. Something which is never going to happen in SHIV though. Hell, judging from how little people understand a pretty much automatic TDC, position keeper and gyro angle update system (and I don't mean the in-game Auto-TDC, but the "manual" one), I very much doubt anyone could really make use of a totally manual gyro angle setting option to achieve any results. So, taking these things into account, the game is fine here and no "correction" is really necessary for that.

There isn't in the game either. The only "connection", if you would like to call it that way, is when you send range to the TDC while looking through the periscope, and bearing will also be updated with that. Other than that, the scope is totally independent of the TDC, just like iRL. The whole point of "sending" the data while in scope / TBT view of the game is to simulate the skipper calling out "BEARING 40°, ANGLE ON THE BOW PORT 30" or something while looking through the scope, and the Fire Control party would enter it in the TDC. In fact, iRL the TBT on the bridge was indeed connected to the TDC, with a bearing transmitter button (hence Target Bearing Transmitter, TBT), as was the sonar set, as you yourself pointed out, SJ radar, and what not.


So to sum it up, the game got the TDC data transmission and Position Keeper simulation down pretty well, EXCEPT for a seperate "target bearing transmitter button", which would allow you to transmit target bearing WITHOUT taking range at the same time. Target Bearing should be a seperate data gathering just like range, AOB and speed are. You should not be required to go through the range gathering process again just to send a bearing to the TDC. That is the whole point of this thread and the only thing which is amiss in the game as far as the TDC is concerned.

I must agree, having to range just to send a bearing is a SOB! The only way I have been able to rapidly fire on differing bearings requires a target lock first. If there is no lock, the bearing alone will not update. I tried this last night. was sitting dead still with a dead still target. set up a solution with speed set to zero, locked the target, shot and it went as it should. Then tried aiming the scope about 35 degrees to the right at no target, hit the stadmeter update button, and there was no change. The torp went the same direction as the first. .....Then locked a different target, hit the udate and THEN went on the desired bearing. This seems kinda screwy to me. As was earlier stated, there needs to be a simpler way to point and shoot. At first, I thought it was just me not understanding something. Or maybe I still don't understand something lol!

Joea, I told this because there were some complains in the forum about the absence of this kind of connection between periscope and TDC.

Just for historical reasons I want to breafly point what used to happen during tha approach and attack fase.

a. The aim of the captain was to bring the submarine to a coarse vertical to target's coarse so as the gyro angle was=0. This is easily calculated. As a rule of thumb the start of submarines turn to reach the vertical coarse started when the target's AOB was 30-40 degrees.

b. Meanwhile the X.O. calculated the fire bearing through the Bearing Rate Computer.

c. The most difficult part was to match the time when the turn to the vertical coarse would be the time when the target would be on the fire bearing. For this reason the above mentioned rule of AOB=30 helped very much.

d. If at the moment of the turn completion the fire bearing was not matched, we set the gyro angle=the diffrence between the bearing of the target to the fire bearing to the direction of the diffrence. This normally worked for gyro angles up to 20 degrees but not more, because then the original fire bearing changed considerably.

e. If the captain desided that the firing coarse would not be the vertical, then we used special tables (firring coarse-targte speed) which provided us the fire bearing.

I made it as simple as possible. This is more or less a kind of an art!The game nomatter any weakness is fantastic!

Anyway...back to the Pacific!

You can enter just the bearing if you map a key to [cmd334] in Cfg/commands.
I use all the time for single ships,I have not used it in convoys yet. It's great for getting a good spread along the lenght of a single ship.

I use the PK to continually update Range,Seed and AOB until the torp track is straight off the bow.I then move the cross hairs to the bow of the target send a bearing to the TDC (I use the "B" key) then disengage the TDC and fire the torps with a few seconds delay between each. Although the torps all track on the same bearing the movement of the target through the cross hairs in effect creates the spread. With practice with a three torpedo spread I can usually get one on the bow,one amidship and one towards the stern.

I hope this is of some help.

It is good for close targets (<1000 yds), fast moving. I always used this in SH3 where carriers and battleships were moving fast. So I closed (<800yds) taking bearings from the bow and shoot. This way I obtained hits all along the target. If the target moves slower you can choose the moment when the aimming point passes the fire bearing and shoot just before.

But in longer distances the target can easily evade the entire salvo with one manuever. Another method is to shoot while turning the submarine so moving the bearing to the desired point or all along the target.

Thats perfectly fine if you in a S-boat or some other pre-war sub or PT-boat. But damn that, we got TDCs for a reason :) i want my bells and whistles!

hmmm...Really!?!?!?!??!

Thats beautiful. Its a must have work around. The best part is that it fress up the mouse for other actions.

"Some help"?? Dude, you just hit the jackpot with that! This is excellent and like nattydread said, a must have mod / fix. This should be stickied in fact. It is exactly what a lot of threads were going on about, a bearing mark button independent from range measurement!

Thank you so much Buteobuteo!