Hi!
That was a good question!
Jimbuna is correct; I will just add that another reason for making the scope a bit more powerful than in real life was that the 6X scope in
Silent Hunter III didn't give you anywhere near the capability to identify a ship's flag that a decent 6X set of binoculars had in real life (as tested by GWX Team members).
SH4 seems to have solved this by making using king-sized bedsheets for flags; GWX took the approach of boosting the apparent magnification to provide the same effect.
I'll add a mention of this in the manual.
Pablo
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"...far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
- Theodore Roosevelt,
speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April 10, 1899