Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptBones
Having been a Navigator and an XO and a CO starting back when we still relied on celestial navigation as the primary means of getting from Point A to Point Z and everywhere in between, I can vouch for the accuracy needed to keep your job. A 5-mile triangle for three Lines of Position meant you had to go back and start over; 3 miles was good enough (barely) and if you couldn't consistently hit 2 miles you were due for a refresher course in shooting the stars. Yes, we had LORAN and we had one of the first versions of SATNAV (yeah it was called that at the beginning, not NAVSAT, that came along later). But real navigators took pride in doing it the old fashioned way; if for no other reason, that everything else could and often did, fail. BTW, any "Navigator" who couldn't hit a harbor entrance on the nose was sure to lose his job as well...you can start your radar coastal nav plot well out to sea, especially if the coast is mountainous and/or there are offshore islands to get good returns off of. 
Back to the OP though, one of the more "realistic" ways of operating your boat in the game is to pay attention to what the Navigator needs in order to get good positions and maintain an accurate track. You have to be surfaced for morning and evening stars and a sun line at Local Apparent Noon...weather and enemy ASW assets willing. Depending on the weather and the season and latitude, morning stars should be taken from 30-60 minutes before sunrise and evening stars from 30-60 minutes after sunset; Local Apparent Noon should be obvious...as long as you know your approximate longitude and your chronometer is in good working order.  |
Actual expectations of accuracy on a small boat or submarine would have been magnitudes worse than what you quote. A five mile triangle on a ship unsteady as a submarine without enough reserve buoyancy to be stable enough, would be a random event. Plus your slight height over the water, making getting a real horizon just about impossible would add up to accuracy similar to that of a 40' sailboat. Taking observations from a cork is very different from taking observations on a ship or dry land. Sailing ships had the same accuracy problem and put into shore when they wanted an accurate fix. Nowdays even a destroyer is a 500' ship. They are islands compared to submarines and smaller vessels where the same navigational accuracy is just not attainable.
Great point about the role-playing aspect of being on the surface for sights just before sunrise, just after sunset and at local noon. But all attempts to integrate celestial navigation into the Silent Hunter series are frought with problems. They kill gameplay. The stars are nowhere near what they appear because we've forgotten what dark is. When it is dark like the inside of your closet your eyes can't separate the various brightnesses of stars. The dim ones look brighter than you can imagine and I defy you to pick out constellations as prominent as Ursa Major (the Big Dipper) or Orion, much less the lesser known constellations.
If you are an astronomer and go to a truly dark place you'll spend a night just learning what the real sky looks like and to find constellations you thought you knew all your life. And just the utter magnificence of it is totally distracting. Half a dozen galaxies are visible to the naked eye, thirty or more with binoculars. And through it all, over 3,000 naked eye stars, most of which you never saw before.