Pretty much the sextant can be used to find the azmouth (?) of stars, the Moon, or Sun. But I tend not to use it because you'd need star charts and other complicated documents to make use of it.
Dead Reckoning, is a bit too far off for what would really be done. I do a much better job of calculating my location via heading, time and speed. Using the Nav officer for a second opinion on celestial helps sometimes but most times I'm way more accurate than what's programmed into the game.
My guess is that the game knows your exact location but when asked, it puts a random figure into it to make it off some, instead of best guessing.
Especially, DR has too much course deviation. 90 degrees west is pretty damn close to 90 degrees west. 18 knots is pretty damn close to 18 knots, so travel for 10 hours west is not going to be off by 5 degrees and not away from target by more then a few kilometers. But DR can be off by way more than that. Like some first grade schooler done the figuring.
All in all, more ppl should try the real navigation mod by TW, because it's not near as scary as it might seem. I didn't try it for so long because I could just imagine what would be necessary to get back to port (or to even find it). But surprisingly, it's pretty easy to figure out how to know about where you are. And close enough is usually good enough. More importantly, it helps add depth to the problem of finding and tracking that convoy. Like, "Am I going in the right direction to intercept?, Do I need more speed or less? How far away is the convoy? Will they hear me? Is this damn fog gonna ever lift?"
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