Nobody knows nuthin about nuthin, hey?
Okay, trial and error stuff, it IS the \Library\cameras.dat file. Main trouble is there are 8 total possible stations (bridge, con interior, control interior, radar, sonar, deck gun, fore and aft AA guns) but 37 in the file, most of which are probably left over from SH3. There's a "Dummy cam interior fore" and a "Dummy cam interior aft", but the fore is the default control room interior, far as I can tell there is no alternate view. Worst trouble I had with this was the language problem - I'm looking at "CARMA" and thinking that's either a weird abbreviation or misspelling of "CAMERA", but then I ran the word CARMA through google translate and it turns out that's Romanian for "HELM".
Which of course is salty sailor talk for the steering wheel.
What I got so far;
24:Node - Dummy_Cam_InteriorFore - control room.
62:Node - Dummy_Cam_ConningDeck - bridge OOD station.
338:Node - Dummy_Cam_ConningTower
24 and 338 have sub nodes (if that's the right term);
34:Node - Dummy_Cam_InteriorFore1
and
346:Node - Dummy_Cam_ConningTower11.
Like the main node for each the sub nodes have "translation" XY and Z, for some reason the conning tower has Y= -0.05 and the subnode has Y= 0.05, near as I can tell they cancel each other out.
Okay, so once you find the one you want to change, translation and rotation have XY and Z datablocks;
translation (movement from actual position)
X= right/left (+right)
Y= height (+up)
Z= fore/aft (+forward)
So positive numbers move up, right, and forward, but in relation to the virtual camera itself - for the bridge it's normal, but the interiors are facing aft, so positive numbers would move the viewpoint port, up, and aft.
Rotation;
X= vertical
Y= horizontal
Z= nothing
I would have expected the Z to be head tilt side to side, but it doesn't do anything that I can see.
Unfortunately the values for rotation are in them evil heathen blasphemous radians instead of honest Christian compass degrees, so;
Degrees to radians
90=1.30796325
180=3.14159265
270=4.70688975
To rotate the camera 180 degrees and make him look up in the sky at 45 degrees, you would set X to 0.653981625 and Y to 3.14159265 and leave Z alone. For the most part the only one you would really need to mess with would be the X axis to set the default view direction. Some of them have RestrictedRotation datablocks, so if it won't let you look down at your invisible feet you'll have to change those numbers. Assuming you have an urge to look up or down more than allowed, of course.
For whatever reason if you don't want your changes to be ignored, THAT is where the camera positioner comes in - you have to open the virtual cameras, open the translation and rotation, check if XY and Z are toggled true or false, and toggle them to TRUE if you want the program to use your numbers.
"CameraPositioner allows one to specify the positition of a virtual camera when activated".
Keyword is "SPECIFY", it allows you to specify position (or denies you that privilege) but to actually DO the specifying you need to go to the main node where the translation and rotation numbers are. In other words it's just a weird way to lock or unlock changes, probably so they could laugh at amateur hackers like me trying to figure out why changes aren't taking effect.
That's all I got so far, why interior fore has two virtual cameras listed and which is the one actually used or what happens to the second one if both read the only translation numbers at the top, I dunno. How you activate other cameras or make new cameras and assign hotkeys to them is still a mystery.