Knew there was something missing
 

I, just couldn't put my finger on it ,, till running with no map updates,, radar man doesn't report bearing or range. Something to think about.

SD or SJ Radar?

of course my roll adex is hung up after a longer sroll than I intended this morning,, air search couldn't give direction,,, would have to go with surface search,, the man at the station should report distance and bearing,,,I hadn't been sub simming in a while,, thought I was a fighter pilot,,,fixed some bomber stuff for the Strike Fighter Progect 1 series over at Combatace, so it's more palletable. At the moment I'm cruising in a Salmon class in the Luzon Straights at the begining of the war with no map updates and manual targeting scored one cargo ship at 2500 yards 3 fish 3 hits

Moved to proper forum.

SD reports contact but no bearing or range, which is how the original radar worked - detected the presence of an aircraft but nothing else. British "boffin" (scientist) Robert Watson-Watt refined it so the spike on the oscilloscope grew taller or shorter according to range, further refinement made it directional, but the early SD radar gave approximate range only based on signal strength.

In the stock game both SJ radar and sonar report bearing (in the message window) and range is given only as "short, medium, long" and only on initial contact. You can order the sonar operator to follow nearest contact giving continuous reports, aside from that the AI (Artificial Idiots) will report every contact as a new contact if they lose it for a minute then reacquire it. So if you're doing an end-around and they momentarily lose sight or contact (radar, sonar, visual works the same way) you get a new report every time they "see" it again. If the destroyer they reported 15 minutes ago suddenly turns toward you and goes to 35 knots there's no warning, it's not a "new" contact and the programmers apparently didn't think it was important to have the crew AI warn you about sudden threats from previously reported contacts.

If you're trying to make sense out of the crew AI, you'd have better luck getting milk from a male ostrich.