Kpt Lehmann, for the second time you find it in your heart to deal with my trifles. Thank you, and the rest of the team, for all your work.
Back to the topic, I understand your arguments, and they are reasonable, but i think I would have decided to leave the realism settings as they were because,
firstly, I'm not talking about removing the feature, just leaving the realism penalty
secondly, while I appreciate that without the map contact updates you are denied certain information that you ought to have available, the contact updates provides a situational awareness not really matched even by today's submarines.
The updates gives you immediate and accurate information of range, bearing and course (and hence AOB) for every object around you. A second observation 20 seconds later will also give you speed, for every object, in about 1 second, really obviating the need for any further work, unless you care to do it for its own sake, or are unable to calculate or whatever.
I find this unreasonable. Getting accurate data for AOB, range and speed was the major difficulty for a sub captain, and it was time consuming. Furthermore, when submerged, only one person was able to do that, that being the person looking through the periscope, which is normally the captain, which is played by you. So really, what the other submariners can do to help you with that data is negligable beyond processing the information you hand down to them. A far cry from being able to ascertain all knowledge perfectly in 1 second.
Even when on the surface, there's only 4 of you, and they should be paying attention to destroyers, not frantically calculating AOB and range for every ship in the convoy.
Also for sonar, multiple bearings should be possible, but not every ship in a convoy plus escorts. There was no computerised display, just one man with a pair of headphones telling you what he could hear. I believe that the designers could and should have permitted more options with this fellow than they did, but i still believe that map contacts off is by far the more realistic of the two options.
Hence I'd keep the realism penalty on.
joe