@Radio: yeah, when we jump off the deep end, we take the risk of overwhelming people a bit!
I hope you know I wasn't attacking you in any way in the other thread, just wondering how to explain it to people and despairing.
It keeps coming up that the sky in SH4 is very accurate and people can use celestial navigation to calculate positions within x hundred yards. Well, in real life that ain't possible, and I hope it's clear by watching the moon and sun fly across the sky at 3 in the afternoon, February 2, 1943, that SH4 didn't exactly take that into account.
And I hope it's clear by seeing the differences between the sizes, phase and positions at sunset, within one minute of the SH4 screenshot, that SH4 is seriously wrong. No celestial navigation involving Sun and Moon will be possible there. Forget it. It would be a waste of time. SH4 is no planetarium simulator. It has a sky with some stars in roughly the right place and two solar system objects in very wrong places.
I thought Kim Ronhoff's question was very interesting and I knew that college graduates today do not know what any uneducated farmer who couldn't spell his own name knew a hundred years ago: that the phase of the moon is tied to its position in the sky and its rise and set time. The new moon always sets at sunset. The full moon cannot rise at 9:00 pm.
And, rather than pull out the nasty equations, I happen to be an amateur astronomer with Patrick Chevalley's incredible Cartes du Ciel, a free astronomy program that can toss the math out the window and just show what I'm talking about. I can put you on the deck of a submarine in Dutch Harbor at 3 pm of February 2, 1943 to let you see for yourself that the sun really did fly across the sky without visibly rising or falling all afternoon! Would you have believed it had you not seen it? Math be damned, it isn't very good at communicating! Your garden variety physicist would argue that point.
As Isaac Assimov said, we live in a universe not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we CAN imagine. Who'da thought that a cheap computer game would be so sophisticated that it brought us face to face with one of the strangenesses?
And Dutch Harbor is a pretty cool place!