[Rockin Robbins]

Never in the war was there a single incidence of obtaining target speed by timing the ship's length by the wire. The majority of the time the target was misidentified and that technique would have resulted in bizarre numbers anyway.

We have had several very fanciful targeting techniques developed which are not historically justifiable. This is one of them. It is simply gaming the system by using god's eye information not available to real submarine crews.

Razark has it absolutely correct: plotting is the beginning and end of a successful attack. And TMO has nothing to do with it, except that it shows ship positions by a position dot, not a silhouette, has no explanitory text and the attack map is lacking some extraneous information also.

I believe that you are not using the TDC properly. It is crucial that you obtain and enter information in a certain order not specified in the game manual or any manual targeting instructions that I've seen outside of my own.

If you're interested, I could tell you about it, but it's a large post on its own! But when I'm done you will understand why you're doing it wrong, I will prove why order of operations is crucial and you'll be able to visualize the process in a way that will ensure your setup is right every time. It's not enough to memorize a list of things to do. You have to know why each step is in that particular order and understand what each step accomplishes. Without in depth understanding of the process you will miss and never know why.

Oh, mallet, quite the opposite of doing calculations in your head, every operation you can unload from your head and make the TDC or plot do will increase your accuracy. You will want all operations to be self-validating so mistakes are OBVIOUS. Numerical calculations are garbage in/garbage out with no obvious error trapping. They're very bad ways to run a war!

Vector analysis, for instance, beats trigonometry every time!