Sergei and Gutted - thanks, this is getting rather suspicious. I'm using RFB 1.5, not 1.52, because I had some CTD issues with 1.52 while 1.5 was quite solid. I wonder if there's a difference there. I've never installed TMO or anything besides those two mods (RFB+RSRDC), and I only installed it several days ago.
This info that Sergei found is particularly interesting:
In order to reduce confusion while remaining true to the dat apresented in the ONI manuals, the following reference points are used for each class of ship....
Because if that's how RFB 1.5 is behaving (no matter what red bars I see), then it would totally explain my misses in front on merchant ships. I'll investigate that this weekend and report back.
TexanInSoFL: The way I've been setting AoB is as follows: I plot the target position and track. Then on the map, I use the angle measuring tool to measure the angle between two vectors: (a) my boat to the target and (2) target along his track. At long ranges it's often a small angle, like 5 or 10 degrees, so I refine it as the target passes inside 2K yards or so. I manually input this number to the TDC. So far it seems to produce reasonable results, but then again, I do miss a lot for *some* reason...
