The reason that this technique is rarely discussed is that it's useless once you turn off the "God's eye view" on the nav-map, hence eliminating the sonar lines. This means that by the time your smart enough (game wise) to figure out stuff like this you immediatly feel the need to go "hardcore" and play without the map auto-update feature, thus making this irrelevant.
Now, as to true "target motion analysis", it can be done, specially if you take advantage of the "short", "medium" and "long" descriptions that the sonar man gives you for the target's range... weather or not it's ok to do it, that's up to you, since TMA is a modern technique that wasn't really used much back in WWII.
Observe the next picture:
The "X" marks represent my boat's position at different times as I was outflanking the sound contact. For each of those there is also a "sound contact line" that I drew, namely, the four 2km long lines and the 1km long line at the end. Each of them is drawn following the contact's bearing that was given to me by the sonar guy at the moment it was made. The first four don't start at my boat's position (the X marks) because at the moment the contact was called out as being in "medium" range, hence they start 1km away from me (shor range) and end 3kms away from me (long range). The last one does start at the X mark and ends only 1km away from it because at the moment the target was called out as being in "short" range. After that, it was just a matter of drawing a big line that represented the target's track, that would cut through all the lines that I had drawn and that would make sense as a probable target's track.
To sum it up:
Short range: from 0 to 1km
Medium range: from 1km to 3kms
Long range: from 3kms to .... probably 15 kms, depending on how good your sonar man is.
Here's another example:
In both cases I was forced to use this technique because of bad weather and nill visibility, here's the result of both:
One last thing, be warned that this method needs to be changed a bit if your using GWX, since they decided to alter the definition of "short", "medium" and "long" range. Here's the updated values courtesy of Steppenwolf
Quote:
Yes, GWX changed the definitions for Short, Medium or Long:
Sonar contacts in Original: Short - 1000, Medium - 3000, Long -20000
Sonar contacts in GWX: Short - 1000, Medium - 8000, Long - 16000
Cannon in Original: Short - 1000, Medium - 3000, Long - 5000
Cannon in GWX: Short - 1000, Medium - 5000, Long - 10000
AA Gun in Original: Short - 500, Medium - 1000, Long - 1500
AA Gun in GWX: Short - 1000, Medium - 3000, Long - 4000
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