Quote:
Originally Posted by aaronblood
Frankly, I was trying to intitiate a Fast-90 attack in a US fleetboat,
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There you go, right there! And that was the conversation that resulted in what we teach as the Dick O'Kane Targeting Method. It is named in honor od Dick O'Kane but has NOTHING to do with the mechanics of how O'Kane the person shot torpedoes. There is perfect evidence that he did constant bearing shooting. I think Nisgeis has gone as far as we can to determine what the mechanics were. Lacking the ability to "very carefully turn the target ship bearing input crank backwards so that the relative target bearing shown on the TDC does not move." as Nisgeis explains, we have to find historically plausible but not historically used methods of achieving most of the same result.
We achieved the booms. We did not preserve the use of the position keeper to validate our solution. Since our initial aim was to use the US TDC to replicate the U-Boat fast-90 attack as much as possible, we didn't feel we needed to go any further.
Yes, the Dick O'Kane technique could be extended to include other angles of attack than submarine 90º to target track with the introduction of complexity. However Nisgeis covered that perfectly with his Vector Analysis Technique.
That's where my personal goal of making successful captains out of newbie captains came in and I eliminated all steps that did not directly contribute to the boom. Aaronblood is right that using my rules of thumb can obscure understanding of the general concepts behind torpedo targeting.
But I figured that your next step is to wrap your brain around normal US targeting techniques, and you would understand it then anyway. My goal was to produce reliable manual targeting booms as quickly as possible for a newer player.
Limited goals plus ruthlessly simplified procedure plus application equals success. It's simple addition!
