A dirty trick to have more useful contact reports (SH3 BdU reports style)

[Abd_von_Mumit]

In SH3 BdU didn't care to give us patrol orders, but after he sent us to open seas he actually cared to provide us with some useful information about enemy shipping spotted by other U-Boots, Luftwaffe and so on. When playing SH3 I used to chase these contacts very often - plotting intercept course, speeding to a meeting point, then searching for the verdammt convoy in the fog... SH5 has no BdU and this simply sucks.

However you can still get these reports by a dirty trick. Here is how:

Use TheDarkWraith's mod named Multiple UIs for SH5 with TDC (it's marvellous). Then go to your user settings for this mod (C:\your_SH5_installation\data\Scripts\Menu\TheDar kWraithUserOptions.py), edit it and find the line that says: "# for radio contact reports, at what range from the sub can the watchstanders see the contact well enough to update it's course (in kms)?" and change the value from default 8 [km] to whatever you want. I set it up to 350 [km].

It is very possible that this can be done without this particular mod, but I don't know and I'm too illiterate to learn how.

How this works and why it is a dirty trick: the reports that you receive do not come from BdU - they are just radio transmissions sent by careless enemy radio operators then intercepted by your radio operator. Then he gives you position of the target, without target's speed nor bearing [quite obviously]. In real life however there was no way for a radio operator to know the range to radio transmission source, he could only roughly estimate the bearing to the source (triangulation would then be needed to estimate range, which in turn would need at least 2 U-Boots that intercept the radio transmission and then exchange info about it, which was very unlikely and - if happened - unprecise). So in effect we receive a bunch of completely useless reports of unknown targets of unknown speed and of unknown bearing. By doing our dirty trick we allow our watchmen to "see" the targets at enormous distances so that the reports given by radio operator (BdU) will include also the target's course, thus turning the report from useless to useful state - from now on we will be able to at least try to intercept these contacts. Many tries will end in failure, as the information will still be very imprecise, but this is exactly how it worked in real life.

Too many words to explain a simple trick. But forgive me, I won't rephrase my whole post. I hope someone finds this useful. Have fun, Kaleuns.