Hey chaps,been trying a placebo real navigation gamestyle and wonder how you guys are doing it.I have added in a mod that makes all contacts invisible....even your own sub.Sadly its not completely invisible and I can see it moving if I know the area I am near.I just try not to look at it.Its really kool to play like this and getting lost is real when the weather goes bad.I hit foul weather for 3 days and was stranded off the coast of some small island:).

The way I am playing is I only take readings at 0600 and 1800.Go on deck and if sun is visible I then go to nav map and zoom in till the bearing overlay on sub appears and mark the spot.Then I use protractor and get a heading I want and point sub in that direction.Then I take the ruler and find out how many miles till my destination point....bring up the distance/kts chart on right(Magui mod)and calculate the time it will take till destination is reached and manually stop TC and take new reading or enter in new heading.

Now the problems.....first is I had to put TC down to 1 near land.Problem is that it goes to TC1 too close to land and I am wrecking subs left and right.

Second problem is now navigating the Kiel canal is a biotch at 1TC.

So I am asking will this mod cure my issues I am having?

This is a realism mod, too, dude.

I've been "trying" it just from having magui/NYGM and not plotting courses.
It won't solve your Kiel canal blues, unfortunately...
I use the "Kiel Canal Out" button because the captain shouldn't oversee every minute of an outbound transit, especially so close to land. :D

You should have seen my plot for getting into ideal position around this merchant last night... *ugh*

I'm trying to learn lines of position to get my position even more accurate...
Ooh! we should ask if they're going to include the sextant in HAHD!

I agree about the captain not doing everything.I doubt he Kiel canal is even navigated by the NO but instead the WO.Most likely they leave port in morning and the WO guides the boat thru visually.Same with going around islands or hugging the coastlines.Once out at sea the NO probably goes to deck various times of the day and takes his readings and plots new courses.

The way I am playing it is I leave port visually and then go to map and zoom in enough so bearing tool shows.This allows me to then hug the coasts till I am out at sea.When at sea I zoom in at various times to get a plot point,only if weather permits.Would love to see something more automated where the player asks the NO for location(I wonder how accurate sextant navigation really is,can it pinpoint the location or is it more vague like sub is in AF56)?

I tried loading this mod, and it appears to be pretty generic, mostly what box you're in, maybe giving you a head's up on which part of the box you're in if you're very careful in your measurement... real life sextants can give you "almost GPS accuracy" according to some studying I did.
though it does require a very good, calibrated sextant, a watch set to GMT to the second, and some very careful usage practices... none of which you can get in the game.... :(

GPS precision is amazing if true.If a modder could get this functioning perfectly It would be pretty awesome since getting rid of watching the nav line and your sub move on map detracts from immersion IMO.

It is true. Using a good sextant and a good timepiece navigators have been travelling the seas with great accuracy for hundreds of years. There's nothing wrong with autonav and waypoints, until it gets cloudy or you submerge. Then you use dead reckoning, estimating your position by your speed and compass heading alone. When that happens you have no way of telling how fast the current is moving or in what direction, and the next time you can take a sighting you find out just how far of course you've gotten, which can be pretty far if you don't see the sun for a week.

I was just thinking...
would it be possible to make a wide or "normal" angle-of-sight camera with the "stadimeter" from the attack scope rangefinder in vanilla sh3 to find a precise angle to a given celestial object?
tossing that out there for more experienced modders... not sure how the stadimeter works... any takers?

I think the bigger problem is that the "given celestial object"(s) are going to be in the wrong place and not move as they should. Quite a bit of work was done to create a more realistic navigation for SH4. It required using an outside program to provide a proper sky, sets of tables, and a lot of work to reduce the sights to obtain a position fix. In order to keep oneself in the dark about your actual position, the boats marker had to be elimitated and you couldn't use the waypoints (or else you would see where you really are). IMO, it was way too much work for the gain.

AFAIK, the obstacles to achieving this in SH3 are the same.

this mod has taken care of the map problems, and i know that the stars are all in the right place, the only problem i remember hearing about is the gmt is a little "off" somehow...
i guess i could try to reduce a sight from the in-game sextant, see how horrible it is :D

Gonna try this mod out.I think a few things would need to be done to further the headache of not being able to use the nav map to find location.One is a removal of the bearing tool from nav map,leaving it only for the attack map....if possible.Another would be removal of the ability to press Lmouse and ctrl key to find your location.

One question.....where is sextant in MaguiF???

it's hidden behind the time, etc. controls on the left.
go to the captain's log ( "k" ) and you can see the top of it peeking beneath the stopwatch.
move the stopwatch to get a better grab :D

I'm working out a way to test the night sky in sh3, made a mission, and am making some quick starcharts, learning how to do an actual sight reduction, so a few days from now i might be able to do it :P

Thanks Postal,I found it.Having a hard time downloading the real nav files though.Gets to 90% and then stops.:o Either way I think I will have problems with it since I have altered my FOV while on deck.What sucks is the babysitting of the heading when in high seas.I have tried upping the drag stats on the sub.sim files with no such luck of lowering the severity of the deviation off course.And if you put the L/R drag very high then the uboat slows down so much in turns it feels like an ocean liner.:nope:Anyone know what file would adjust the amount that heading changes due to the wind speeds?

I just used the obs. scope (running Magui and NYGM) to shoot some stars, and checked them against an electronic almanac of stars at that position at that time on that night (midnight, 31 Dec 1939 passing into 1 Jan 1940)
(haven't fixed my sextant (topside view) in my game yet :P)
and found values within 1 degree (pretty good for the time errors I introduced by finding then shooting the stars)

update:
fixed sextant, repositioned 43 degrees to the west.
stars in same position.
so!
the stars are fixed at what they would be at/near the prime meridian...

damn.
guess i'll have to check the sun next...

A sextant-error during a polaris-shot of 1 degree is a distance-error of 111.2 km (60 nm).