Celestial/primitive navigation

[DelphiUniverse]

A uboat captain cannot rely 100% in mechanics in navigation, so this tutorial will be about navigating with the help of the sun, it will not be very accurate but can be a life savior in the huge open sea.

If you are in the northern hemisphere (which is very likely if you are engaged in the atlantic uboat war) then the sun will be seen tilted towards the south. If you look straight up, then the sun will not be straight up, it will be tilted a little bit to either side, and the side it is tilted towards will be south.

Assuming we are doing this at noon when the sun is more or less straight up.

If you are in the southern hemisphere, then the sun will be more tilted towards north, so it would be opposite. But we are fighting in the north atlantic so the sun will always be located in the direction of the south.

The easy part is knowing what is north and south, what takes time is knowing what is east and west. The sun always rises in the east and sets in west.

Finding what is east and west works a little bit like plotting the marks of a ship on your map. You put a stick on your ship, mark the edge of the shadow, put a gadget, a rock or anything on the tip of the shadow, then wait 30 minutes, put another gadget where the new position of the tip of the shadow. Mentally, make a line between the two points you just got now, this line will be east - west line. Remember that the sun sets in west, so the shadow line will move eastwards, so if the direction the shadow line moves will be east.

Now that you have these two points, you make easily cut them into slices to find out what is North east, North west, South East and South west and make a good enough guess where to go in order to make it where you want to go.

You can also wait another 15-20 minutes to plot more marks to get an even more accurate result.

Happy primitive navigation, just in case your equipment is lost

[THE_MASK]

[DelphiUniverse]

If you don't have the sun and it is night time you can use the north star to find true north as it will not "rotate" along the earth rotation. You can find the north star by finding the big dipper of 7 stars, the bottom end of the dipper will point directly to the north star, it should point north as you can see on the heading I have, I rotated the view a little bit to the right, you can see that it is just about north.





I turned to 000 degrees, straight north, you can see the big dipper straight above. It is good for finding north.

[misha1967]

Originally Posted by DelphiUniverse

If you don't have the sun and it is night time you can use the north star to find true north as it will not "rotate" along the earth rotation. You can find the north star by finding the big dipper of 7 stars, the bottom end of the dipper will point directly to the north star, it should point north as you can see on the heading I have, I rotated the view a little bit to the right, you can see that it is just about north.

That, by the way, was one of the things that blew my mind about the Silent Hunter series: When it started using accurate constellations. Now that is attention to detail!