[Platapus]

As I understand it, the Kaluen got the bearings from removing his eye from the eye piece and looking up. He would then verbally call out the bearing to the Officer manning the TDC who was standing sideways to the Periscope. This officer is not in a good position to look over his left shoulder and read bearings. In fact, I don't think the stationary periscope had the capability of having the bearings read from the back end (I could be wrong).

This was different from Fleet Subs where the Captain had a dancing partner at the periscope.

I really like limiting the Kaluen's actions when looking through the periscope. He should only be able to manipulate the periscope and verbally communicate with the crew. If the Kaluen needed to look at something (bearing, TDC) he had to remove his eyes from the eye piece (losing visual contact with the target by the way) and look at what needed looking at. The game should be designed to make it easy and quick for the Kaluen to take a quick peek at the bearing indicator above his head and then go back to the periscope view.

The recognition manual is a bit more tricky. I imagine that if the Kaluen was not able to visually identify the target, he would verbally describe the ship to the IWO (as in the movie The Enemy Below). It would be the IWO who would flip through the recognition manual. This can bring up interesting results if the experience of the IWO can be factored (e.i., the IWO miss-identifies the target either due to his inexperience or due to errors in what the Kaluen told him.)

Unless this communication between the Kaluen and the IWO can be simulated in the game, I am afraid the the best compromise is to have the Kaluen look at the scope and the manual at the same time.

I also like the idea of the Kaluen verbally commanding the sub. This is realism.

But for game-playing ability, there needs to be a way to simulate a Kaluen talking to one of his crew. Voice recognition would be great and it worked pretty good with Enigma Rising. If we can't have VR then we are stuck with some version of either keyboard or mouse to somehow construct a spoken sentence. This can be awkward.

This is why in past SH it seemed like the Kaluen is doing everything -- mostly because there was no good simple way to simulate spoken orders. It is acceptable for the crew to do the job for the Kaluen, but unlike the god-like weapons officer, the crew can only do their job based on the observations (with errors) made by the Kaluen.

I think some of the ideas in this thread are excellent and clearly represented a lot of good critical thought.

And I am most appreciative of the respectful participation in this thread.