What is your most effective method to gathering ship nationality?
 

Dark night, heavy fog, heavy rain.
You know, to avoid international scandal if you sink wrong ship :06:.
Of course you couldn't use free camera.

Periscope and closer proximity tend to suffice as in real life.

Scrape the paint of the hull with your peri and send it in for analysis. ;)

Ok, periscope, but if is very dark and you see only black piece of flag even on very short distance (<900 m)?

There is a mod called flags_enlighten which enables you to see the flags better at night.I too agree that the flags are way too dark at night,after all at night in real life you can determine most colours even if they appear a darker hue than in daylight.
This mod will allow for more successful night attacks,which in my opinion are one of the highlights of this game :arrgh!:

Make sure the lighting in your playing environment is dark enough to allow your eyes to see the faint color contrast. (in other words, pretty dark aswell) Or adjust your monitor settings brightness/contrast/gamma. Or just wait for dawn, and be on the sunrise side of the flag.

Some days it rains, you can't have everything... all the time

Where can I find this mod. I'm interesting to use it.
Any chance to find it in Downloads section? Maybe you remember auotor's name of this mod?
I will try to find it here:
ftp://hartmuthaas.no-ip.org/Volume_2...3COMMUNITYMODS knowing autor name.

"Torpedo Los!"



"Oh crap!....XO, bring me the log book. I think we need to make some changes."

:)

You're right. I'm going tune my monitor.

Yes, I know and in this case, if I couldn't recognize ship nationality I resign and break of attack, however sometimes temptation of use F12 key is stronger than me...

Unless it's in convoy and your feeling brave, best let it go.

Are you sure of that? In real life at sea in the pitch black of night with no artificial lights whatsoever, you could make out the colours of a flag? I'm not sure either having never had to do it, but I don't think it would be that easy. During the war I think the rule of thumb was if the ship was blacked out it was a valid target no matter what the nationality, it was a risk the u-boat commander was willing to take.

Nemo

Actually, in the pitch blackness of the night, your color receptive cells in the center of your retina are much less sensitive than the cells on the outside of your retina (which isn't sensitive to any particular color). I don't quite remember exactly how these all are called, but I remember for sure, identifying colors in the night is extremely difficult. Most likely you'll identify it wrong. Be glad you see something at all.

I'm sure someone has links to pages/wikis on eye perception in the dark.

I don't think there's much you can do to (without cheating), so if it's a darkened ship I would just take a risk if it's in waters that are not that much used by friendlies. In the Mediterranean or the North Sea this risk might be too heavy, but in the Western approaches in 1943, for example, the risk is very limited.

I once read about someone playing this game in a dark room, another one playing with a red bulb light and another one with a shirt covering him and the monitor to see better in the dark. I guess gamma correction was not enough for those guys :)

One could always resort to the flags enlighten mod:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...47&postcount=9

This is also experienced with stargazers,if you look away slightly from a star/s they appear clearer and brighter,like you said,the rods and cones are more sensitive on the peripheral of the eye and not the centre.

You can still make out colours at night,however they appear more 'washed out' as I said,it all depends on available light in the immediate environment.

Here is a short article on what stargazers and astronomers call 'averted vision' technique.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averted_vision