I can’t speak to WWII German (Kriegsmarine) binoculars and/or periscope optics, but I do know a little bit about USN optics, having used them for 30 years on active duty and currently owning and still using a couple of pairs of surplus “standard issue” binoculars.
To begin with the OP does not seem to reflect a clear understanding of what binoculars are used for in the maritime environment. Once you’re out of sight of land, they are generally worthless for determining accurate distances, or for obtaining range to a target vessel, or for spotting the fall of shot. No, the Navy didn’t generally use the Type EE 6X30 field glasses. The Naval Gun Factory optical shop made Type EE, but they were mostly for the Marine Corps and the Army (the TM 9 is an Army Field Manual).
“Field glasses” are exactly that, optics that are used in the field…that’s where armies operate; navies operate at sea. With respect to the WWII era settings for the SH franchise games; the distances involved in visually detecting an enemy vessel are much much greater than the typical distances experienced in land warfare. On land, they would frequently get visual contact with the enemy a few hundred yards away and they might get lucky enough to be able to spot them a couple of miles away. At sea, you mostly have to deal with the horizon and are searching for ships that are beyond the horizon; hopefully you can see smoke or the upperworks (masts and funnels) of a distant vessel while the ship is still “hull down” beyond the horizon, ten, twelve, even 15 miles away. At that distance binocular reticles are nothing but an annoyance, a distraction.
The standard issue USN 7X50 binocular has no reticles; reticles are mostly worthless at sea. Sure, once you are close enough (2-4 nautical miles/4000-8000 yards) you can use them, but in wartime, that’s usually way too late to be of practical value. Except for encountering a lone, unarmed merchant vessel or making a night-time surface attack, if you're still on the surface only 4nm from another ship, you're either a damned fool or a very brave and soon to be posthumously rewarded damned fool. Of course, there were/are several types of “special issue” binoculars with reticles (including the Type EE), but a good source of information on the topic in general is at www’dot’company7’dot’com/library. I suspect the WWII KM was equally capable of using the “right” type of optical devises in each situation and no doubt there is a good online source of information about that too.
Except for visual searching or attacks on the surface, binoculars, with or without reticles, aren’t of much use in a submarine. The notion that binoculars with reticle are more accurate than a periscope stadimeter is absurd. Periscope optics are generally of much better quality and certainly much more useful as well.
Creating a MOD to add accurate “field glass” reticles to the game binoculars might be an interesting academic exercise…but a rather pointless one IMHO. The works that have been done to improve periscope and TBT/UZO optics are much more useful and bring a more practical level of improvement to the games.
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