WOW, that last image looks simply amazing. Focus on the planking on the right of the image... superb.
Now back to the minimap.
- the white cone is your field of view through the periscope
- the track of the torpedo is clearly shown, as is the track of the enemy ship.
- those numbers are not torpedo numbers, you can see the torpedoes as small orange lines. They've hinted on a new targeting system where numbered lines extend from both the ship and the torpedoes. To hit a target, you must overlap matching numbers. This implies a vector triangle, but in that case the numbers for the ship should be equally spaced. 0,1 and 2 are equally spaced but 3 is much further away. No idea what this means. It might mean that you're visually estimating the AOB and speed of the target. Thus the numbers might also indicate a level of accuracy, the smaller the better, or the more linear the better.
- the numbers on the torpedo tubes don't show the torpedo type, they show in Roman Numerals the number of the loaded tubes, while the arabic numerals show the percentage of loading on unloaded tubes.
- in all screenshots where the engines are stopped, we can't see yellow circels on the minimap. Thus, this must be the Hydrophone range of the enemy.
- the orange arcs represent ASDIC. one can clearly see that ships with bigger arcs of ASDIC have smaller circles of hydrophone.
- the course of the sub is shown as a thick dark line. While the compass controls haven't yet been shown, observe that there is a "closed" panel next to the engine controls. I bet that's where the rudder controls are. The reason it's closed is that the Compass might be quite big and would obstruct the minimap.
Observe that locking onto a ship opens the Weapon's officer panel. To unlock you say "never mind". Since the target hasn't been identified, he can't do any calculations... Automatic solutions are thus unavailable and the player has manual control ("shoot on my bearing"). But even so, he clearly has a way to shoot (the numbered lines).
Since this is clearly done on low difficulty levels (the ASDIC range is laughably short), I'm amazed at how complex the game can be at this level. It seems I was right in my "Dumbing down versus transparency" post.
