That's great except for the fact that Real skippers had ONI, not superdetail models researched by japanese guys.
In other words, they GUESSED.
Read Alden's book. COmpare US skipper CLAIMS of ships sunk to what they actually sunk. 8000 ton CA? No, Akizuki DD. ONI? 120' mast height for the claimed CA, 75' mast height for "Unknown" Class DD.
That's not 1 meter off, it's 13.7m off---none the less, the target ended up on the seabed.
For merchants, we have ~16 in SH4. With the exception of the late war "standard types" (not yet in game), it was rare for more than 10 to be in any given class. Instead of 16 targets, we should have HUNDREDS. This is in sharp contrast to the ATO where the US built so many standard types that they literally became the majority of shipping seen. Add to that that much of the data for these hundreds of slightly different targets is not rated "A," but a lower B or C in intel quality, and the mast hieght becomes a GUESS. You eyeball a deck height, then have the periscope assistant set the height at 100' or whatever.
Given this guess work, a few meters off in mast height would be EXCELLENT estimation in RL.
To sum up:
In RL, they set the stadimeter to a height in feet.
They got this figure from either ONI (41-42, 208J, etc), or by guestimating it based on features they could make out.
In the latter case, their guestimate had to do with how big they thought she was. I've gone through Alden putting stats in a spreadsheet, guess what, they almost universally overestimated target size. In many cases, considerably. That means they almost universally overestimated mast height.
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