[TEC] Green Sonar Light
 

Does anyone know what attaches the green sonar alert_light to the sound level the sonar is receieving? I mean the light on the sonar stack that lights up when you are trained on a contact. I can't find anything that links the light to a sonar sensor. Perhaps it's hard coded to a specific ID in the engine. But does anyone know for sure?

Still learning
 

I have found most of the info dealing with sonar station to be in the NSS_<boattype>_CT.dat file. I have gone thru it several time to try and find a ref to the light you are refering to. Unfortunately I have failed. This is probably an info question for skwas. I'm sorry I couldn't be more help. The only real reason I posted is because I am very interested in the answer. After all you did ask for a deffinitive answer and I don't have that. But I am trying to learn the structure of .sim .dat and .zon files. So I put my 2 cents in hoping that I can be included in the discussion. Hope you (we) can find an answer.

The sonar light is indeed a strange one. The only reference to it outside of the DAT files is the associated AlertLight entry in each respective SIM file, and that entry only covers whether it flickers and what color it is. My guess it that it's something hard-coded.

I wonder whether that light was even meant to pick up on a sound contact, since the picture in the Sonar Operator's manual describes the left-hand light on the stack as one that indicates whether the projector shaft was lowered, not to mention it was red in color:

http://www.maritime.org/fleetsub/sonar/img/fig32a.jpg

In-game we man the the port side projector, and I've never seen a diagram showing what the lights at the top on that side there indicated. My guess is that the controls for the port side were duplicated in whole from the starboard side, meaning the light that we see at the sonar display should be solid red and never change color.

I also doubt very much that there was a light shining when you picked up a contact :hmm: and anyway with WW2 technology regarding sonar it would almost never be able to highlight something that an average operator wouldn't hear himself.

The WCA stack didn't have anything like it, but the game sometimes sticks things together. If you have a look at chapter 4, there's the description of the JP controls and that includes a magic eye indicator. It's a vacuum tube with phosphur on the end. It was put on radios in the 1930s to allow the person tuning the radio to see the relative strength of the signal he was tuining into, rather than just relying on his ears. The eye closes up and the gap between the two lit sections gets smaller the higher the voltage put into it is. The device, when attached to a gain control, as in the sonar stack, can be calibrated so that it just closes when the sound you are sweeping over is the loudest and thus get the exact bearing of the sound.

I've never seen any on radios, but I have seen one shows in a documentary about U-Boats, so the Germans probably had them too, buit I don't know for sure. When they showed the sonar operator, they showed a close up of a magic eye and I remember it clearly, as it was so striking. The magic eye looks like this:

http://www005.upp.so-net.ne.jp/y_kondo/6CD7.JPG

That from a japanese website http://www005.upp.so-net.ne.jp/y_kondo/MAGICEYE2.HTM where it looks like the guy is a collector of them.

The gap at the top gets smaller, the more voltage is fed in.

The JT sonar also had two indicators, left and right to show when the sonar was on a target. It was used when the JT head was slaved to the TDC, to show whether the bearing of the target was drawing ahead or behind the generated bearing. I'd imagine those indicators were lights, but I haven't seen anything written about that - only 'indicators'.

But, it seems that there's no way to change it in game, so I'll have to put the DCDI, DCRE and other things in the big bin of things that I can't think of a way to do.

I may be misunderstanding what you said, but you can change the dial type to be linear or circular. Then changing the max and min values allows you to reverse the direction. You can also rotate the 3d object to change the way it moves - the dial always moves about the same axis when rotating, so rotate the object and the dial motion changes too. I think that also works for linear motion.