It's been fun. I was gratified that others came to lend their insight and also that nobody descended into a total food fight. We continued to talk about the issues and ideas in spite of extreme provocation at times. Actually these issues have driven the real submariners crazy for 100 years.
Just recently we have developed methods of passive sonar motion analysis that are consistently good enough to shoot by, but that is well beyond the ability of SH4. It is possible with a real World War II submarine to do some bearing rate analysis and get a relative course and speed for a target that is good enough to shoot with if you are willing to waste enough torpedoes. They weren't in real life. I've never read a report of a World War II patrol where they shot by passive sonar.
They were dealing with handicaps that we are not in the game, because the game gives us impossible information:
- Whether the target is approaching or going away
- Whether the target is slow, medium or high speed, with these speeds in precise ranges of knots.
- A sonar that is perfectly accurate to one degree with exactly 10 degrees each side of the bearing where you can hear the target.
All this makes it possible for us to game the system enough to develop cheats to narrow down the possible solutions. But they will not allow us to shoot, only to get close to the target. Shooting is by other methods, not related to passive sonar tracking techniques. These methods are well known and do not include point and shoot whatever that may be. No definition of that has been forthcoming either!
But be that as it may we have all learned that we can go home and quit posting as greyrider invented all possible ways of shooting torpedoes from submarines. Everyone else, presumably including the brave sub sailors of World War II, are merely copying him (badly by the way. Nobody is as good as greyrider even when we are just stealing from him) and trying to steal the credit. All credit belongs to greyrider for all techniques. We all hail!
I'll cut greyrider in for half the profits from Dick O'Kane, John P Cromwell, vector analysis. and my analysis of the criticality of entering information into the TDC in a certain order if you use the PK. He doubtless figured that out many years ago and just forgot to teach it.
It's all good!