[TorpX]

Originally Posted by Sniper297

Personally I ignore AOB and set it to 80.
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You really wanna use the TDC to keep track you can measure the angle between your sub's heading and the target's course from his current position, that will give you the most accurate AOB.

Originally Posted by Armistead

Easiest and perfect way to get AOB is to get the course and set it on the AOB wheel if you use the TDC.

OK, at the risk of making myself unpopular, I have to address this misconception.

If we are talking about realistic methods here, then you can't get Aob from course, period. No matter how many books you read, or how many patrol reports you go through, you will not find a single skipper who said he obtained the Aob from plotting the course. If RL captains could have simply drawn a line through the first two points of a plot and thereby disposed of the Aob matter, don't you think they would have done so? Look in the training manuals. You won't find this method there, either.

Why do I say this? The reason they needed to estimate the Aob is to determine the course. Simply put, they obtained course from Aob, not Aob from course. Apart from estimates of Aob, they really had no good way of determining the course. Even if they were making a RADAR plot, all they could rely upon knowing is the base course. To get torpedoes to the target, they would still need to estimate the Aob to know what the course of the present leg was. Knowing the base course only, would not be sufficient.

The only reason why we can obtain the Aob from drawing a couple lines in the game plot, is that the whole map-contacts/plot aspect of this sim is poorly designed. It is very unrealistic. You can only obtain the Aob from course, if the plotted points are precise and accurate. In real-life, this was not the case. Furthermore, game ships don't zig-zag. Targets in RL usually did. Some of the tactics that work well in SHIV, would be useless to real-life sub captains.

This is one reason why gamers can easily obtain near 100% success in their attacks, but in WWII, many attacks failed. Skippers had to rely on imprecise data, and this made torpedo attacks an uncertain business.