I've given celestial navigation here a try in game. Oddly with this mod my sun was still about 1° or larger which confused me. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to JGSME it? I was very excited to try and spent a couple days setting it up. I read more than my brain has taken in since graduation as well.
I did not try any LOP or sight reductions due to my unfamilliarity and my lack of reference material. I thought I'd learn to crawl before I could beat Jessie Owens. The following is my impressions and creative spark on the subject.
Latitude by Sun or Polaris:
Once I got an actual value for when to take the sun shot at noon (the time to the minute) the better I did. I knew my position and looked to see if the expected cel. bodies were where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there. My verdict on the sextant... brilliant idea, just plain not accurate enough. I had ambiguity of 1-2° with the big sun which I might be able to get down to 0.5° with a lot of practice, 30nm. Not the best. I also found it very hard to take most of my shots whci were very high overhead 60°+
During the day I was lucky to get partial cloud cover. This reduced the sun from a huge blinding glare ball to an actual circle to get a measurement. I don't know how good any of these shots were because I was running 1280x1024 (a very common but unsupported resolution by this mod) and 1280x960 to try and weed out the possibility of error.
Polaris is hard to find for me. Video game stars (Silent Hunter, OFP/ArmA) are harder than real life for some reason. Knowing it was directly north and between 1° and 5° above the horizon helped me find it (latitude 3°). Freezing the game with the sextant bottom on the horizon helped quite a bit as did finding a game station that was view stabilized like the flak or deck gun.
When I was 1° S lat. I had pretty much no idea how to take a measurement. I heard there's some method of using a Orion belt star at it's maximum altitude as a 90-L measure but didn't attempt it.
Longitude by SR/SS:
The SS times to the upper limb of the sun via this program I got were brilliantly right on. Plug in my known position (sent a patrol report), the date, and the SS time was right on. The SR time however was 2 minutes too late consistently. By the time the calculated SR time came around the sun was always exactly 1/2 way out of the water.
If I could find a source with SECONDS I could probably get very acurate longitudes, ironically much better than my sun latitudes. The chronometer is by far more accurate than the sextant in this regard. Of course I compared calculated times based on a known position (down to the minute) and not the usual finding position based on times. I figure I'd only be a minute of time off, so 4nm which is acceptable for me.
Conclusions:
1. Sun glare is killer. To create reasonable sun measurements a filter needs to happen or just to turn off the glare altogether.
2. Create a stable, dedicated sextant platform. A special clickable zone of the conning tower that had no-rocking-with-the-sea, any FOV you want (45°?) to have better readings.
3. Verify sun and moon size. This is probably just my failure to read install instructions or read angular size but I swore that the sun was not the proper 0.5°.
4. Look into a "deckgun" sextant. Try pointing the deckgun at a point above the horizon, then hit tab or zoom. Notice how the range number is based upon elevation and is very sensitive. If someone could do the same kind of coupled number-elevation for a "sextant gun" than sextant readings would go from +/-0.5° to +/-0.1° or better.
I'm still interested in this idea, just wary of how practical it is as the mod and game stand now.
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