Thank you magic. That was refreshing. Perfect reasoning for why I don't play with map contacts off. We have severe sensory deprivation in the game anyway. Estimating angles is nerfed because we can't turn our head to look at the target. Our body has a built-in protractor for that somewhere, you know.
We can't hear properly, natural sea noises above surface are non-existent, sonar is ridiculous. We live in a dead and quiet ocean. The subs didn't you know. Heck, how easy is it to surface and just forget you are on ahead emergency until you notice your fuel is running lower than it should. You actually think that is in any way possible in reality? What would be painfully loud and impossible to avoid in real life becomes very difficult to detect in a sim.
So now you want me to run my sub with a paper bag over my head? You're going to call that "full realism?" I'm not supposed to laugh? No thanks. A real sub had a crew. This one already doesn't.
No captain would go to the sonar station, take the headset from his sonar operator and listen for himself. We are forced to constantly. No captain would run the plot himself. That's what we do. No captain would push his radar operator out of the way to measure distances and bearings off his radar screen, walk over to the plotting table, push all of them out of the way and then do all of their jobs plotting that radar position. We call it realism and try not to snicker too much.
At some point you have to decide whether you think SH4 should be more a simulation of machinery or men.
Let's not give Capn Scurvy a hard time here. Here's his position, as best as I can present it. He would do better, but here goes. First, the Capn took various ships from the catalog and placed them an exact distance from a stationary sub. Using the stadimeter, he painstakingly and repeatedly took observations based on the game's ship ID manual. What he found was that he kept getting different distance measurements for different targets!
What can cause that?
- Inaccurate angle measurement in the stadimeter itself
- Incorrect masthead heights in the target ID database
- Other unidentified and stranger problems
So what did he find? All three! The magnification in the periscope didn't correspond to the real scope. That could be fixed. Computers being organized around pixels meant that a one pixel error in positioning the pseudo-target in the stadimeter would result in a measurable error. That can't be fixed.
He took apart the entire target database, including friendly vessels and found it riddled with errors in ship length, draft, heights of masthead, cabin, nothing was correct. Some targets were nearly unhittable based on in-game identification, even on auto-targeting.
Then the wild card: Different graphics cards have given us a dizzying array of screen resolutions not contemplated in 2007. SH4 only displays as intended in 1024x768. Anything else renders relative sizes wrongly. They grossly distorted our view, and we were taking measurements from the distortions. Capn Scurvy fixed that. We can now depend on those tic marks to estimate masthead heights because we know how many degrees apart they are. Well, YOU know, if you're using OTC, I don't because I know I can't depend on them.
He spent hundreds of hours fixing the mechanics of the simulator. When he was done SH4 was as mechanically perfect as he could make it. I'm going out on a limb and telling you that will be as mechanically perfect as SH4 will ever get.
Now you could use conventional stadimeter targeting, ID a target, shoot one torpedo and hit the target wherever you aim every time because the mechanics were right. You did your job and got a boom.
But some loudmouth (me) jumped in and yelled "But that isn't how it was!" The WWII captain didn't have a magic book that contained every single ship in the ocean, whether friend or foe. The magic book they didn't have didn't have the perfect length, masthead height and tonnage either!" The flawed book they really had contained (contained??? It was RIFE with) errors in every category. Some was wrong because of lack of info. Some was wrong because we relied on published Japanese info. Some was wrong because of alterations after hostilities began. For instance, how difficult is it to saw 10' off the top of a masthead?
"As a practical matter," the loudmouth screamed irritatingly, "it was impossible for the US Navy to rent every Japanese vessel, both merchant and warship long enough to take it to San Francisco to get a crew of ship surveyors to swarm all over it, take those perfect measurements and then somehow get the Japanese to sign papers giving up the rights to make any alterations to that vessel later in the war. Scurvy, that is what you've done and you want me to call that realistic!"
So what do you want? Simulation of mechanical perfection? Simulation of decision making processes? Simulation of result? Simulation of behavior? Welcome to simulation hell! For every "Yeah, but..." of mine, the Capn has another equally valid "Yeah, but..." of his own. And behind it all, making both sides' arguments a joke is that Magic ID Manual, containing every single ship on the ocean. Real subs could ID perhaps a third of the targets they saw, and were wrong 50% of the time even then. They frequently claimed double and occasionally claimed half the actual tonnage of the ship they sank. None of this is possible with our Magic Manual.
So there we are. OTC or not to OTC? Take your choice. I'll not give you a hard time about your choice, but I will tell you what the assumptions behind the mod are.
What I want to know is, if we rented every Japanese ship, why didn't the just meet with an unfortunate accident while in our custody and then we wouldn't have had to fight about it?
Rant over. It's hard to do both sides of a rant.
