Plotting Exploit or Not?
 

I'm playing with GWX and OLC (not sure if this makes a difference to my question) and notice plotting on the surface is very simple. I ask the office on deck to give nearest visual target. He gives bearing AND range. If I do this again ten minutes later, I can now plot heading, and calculate speed.

When I'm submerged, I have more or less the same view through the scope. Yet there's no way to get range information, as on the surface.

2 Questions...

a) Is there an error margin built into the officer on decks range estimation?

b) Should it be possible to get range information from an officer when looking through the scope or should we disable his ability to range when surfaced?

There is no error in his estimate. It is absolutely spot on.
There is a way of disabling his range estimate so that he only calls out the bearing to the nearest contact. A lot of the GUI mods do this.
It involves editing a line in Data/Menu/en_menu.txt, but I can't find the entry to be edited at the moment.
I'll keep looking.
Hopefully someone will be along in a minute to enlighten us :DL

Found it!
Entry 4616

Change from:
4616=Nearest visual contact at bearing %03.0f, range %.0f meters!

To:
4616=Nearest visual contact at bearing %03.0f!

That way your WO will only give you the bearing.

You're a gentleman. Thank you.

The only 'error' in his reporting is that it is rounded to 100 meters. But other than that it's spot on. Too spot on to be realistic. Exploit? Perhaps, depends on personal limmitations.

But why is it 'wrong' for him to give range when on the surface?

There's nothing 'wrong' with it. Apart from, you get the information too quickly and too accurately.

Dunno, but assume you are the captain, laying in your bed and some comes in telling 'ship sighted' then you ask what ship? they answer it with for example a merchant.
Now next question you as is perhaps how far away ? the spotter gives your a value, lets say 'about 5 km' in front of us.
So, you always have a value to start with. If it is 5104 meters or about 5 km, your desicison making is the same.

It's not so much the decsion making, but the fact that with a click of a button I get exact bearing and range. Which in turn allows me to calculate exact target heading and exact target speed. I just think there must have been more 'fudge-factor' and more work involved to get the information in the first place, in particular the range.

I agree that the developers neglected to add such randomness to his report. But totally removing such a value from his report is like "throwing the kid out with the bathwater". You can allways round it off to the nearest 500m or 1km mark, yourself. And with OLCs implementation of the Range and AOB finder you can do it yourself and get the reasonable amount of randomness/measurement error.

[EDIT] Bearing isn't that exact. How wide do you think it (1 degree) is at 16 km range? And that is only before plotting it on the map. Placing the line adds another bit of directional error. That's why I do not rely much on the 3m15 interval. The uncertainty of position plots is then well beyond 100 meters. I average over longer periods.

With practise it isn't that hard to make visual range estamates that would be accurate enuf to target or plot course from. My two borothers and dad both bow hunt and that involves a lot of guessing at range so they can figure out how high up they have to aim to compisate for gravity and the three of them can come close enuf to hit most of the time, so long as there isn't elivation changes I guess.

So it is not imposible to look at some thing and know about how far way it is, at sea I guess it would be a little harder without any other referance points to work with, but I would bet an experianced watch hand would be able to come with in 150 meters of the actual distance.

hmm my problem is that you're working with rather large pixels

i cant use OLCs tools unless a target is within 3km, which is no use when trying to work out his course and speed for an interception during daylight.

the watch officer giving exact values is fine for me, i'll draw the lines and the inaccuracy will happen automatically. so that results in a perfect gameplay thing, even if it starts with unrealistically accurate range values.

convoys are the real pain, because the WO will give a report on some escort, i really never learned to properly work out a convoy plot, that's my only real problem with OLCs work. Other than that, it's magnicifent!

ps how do i enable a bearing ring again?

Less than 3km for smaller ships. Have you tried the hi-res mod to see if this makes the scope easier to use? -a zoom would be great but I know this causes problems with the waves in OLC.

By the way, does anyone know how range from the deck was normally estimated? Did they go down and use the scope or can it be done with the UZOs?

It was estimated with the MKI eyeball, with reticles in the binoculars, and sometimes (rarely, not a standard item in a U-Boat, but sometimes issued to them) with a hand-held rangefinder device.

I have a transcription of an interview with Ace Georg Lassen, where he explains that the estimates were practiced a lot. In the naval academy they went to sea several times per day for the sole purpose of practicing estimates of range, AOB and speed.

Then, they also had some aids which we don't. For example, they had a realistically ;) curved earth, with a distance to horizon known (8.5 km from the Uboat bridge). So, any ship with a fully visible hull was closer than 8.5 km, for starters, and coming close in the estimate also was aided with the binocular. Knowing the linear field of view at 1000 metres, you knew that if a ship of such length covers the full FOV it is at 1000 metres, if only one half at 2000, if only 1/4 at 4000 and so on.

Reinhard Suhren (Who had a specially abled eye for that) in his memoirs describes how he once made a "master shot" in U-48, while surfaced. He estimated the range by naked eye as 5000 metres, and according to the measured torpedo run he was off just by some tenths of metres.

But in any case, the plot made by german Uboat crews was quite different to what their US counterparts did. They relied on a direct comparison of uboat and target course and exact bearings, with only rough estimates of distance. Target course and speed were estimated more by comparison with own uboat (Which the Kaleun tried to put on paralell course to the target and overtake it at constant distance), and the plot served more to determine the zig-zagging patter than anything else. By noting the uboat zigzags as ordered by the Kaptain (Who in turn just mirrored what the target did), and seeing how the bearing changed as the uboat overtook the target, the navigator was able to made an accurate estimate of target speed and course.

Hope that explanation helps :up: sorry to write such a wall of text :oops:

far from it! :03:

it's very interesting (and helpful as well) to read about the approach the "real" Kaleuns had when plotting or attacking. thx for this short historical digression.

fascinating stuff!
thanks for being educational :salute: