[WIP] [IDEA] authentic recognition manual

[sublynx]

I guess more and more players are using manual targeting, which means recognising a ship is no longer absolutely necessary. With MFM and USAM we have hundreds of ship types, which makes recognising a ship a task in itself. BdU likes you to try to id the ship, though.

LGN1's SH3Log got me thinking about the authentic reports from BdU's war diary. A sinking was often recorded like this:

"U 135: Sank freighter Type "Perseus", 10,000 BRT, course north CB 5156."

You can find Perseus and its siblings from the Merchant Recognition Manual the US Navy used:

http://www.maritime.org/doc/id/oni20...hant/index.htm

Here's the page modified into a roleplay Kriegsmarine recognition manual:


This is what C1 and C2 freighters would look like if the authentic page was copypasted into a Kriegsmarine SH3 form:

C2 freighter


I was thinking it might be cool to ditch the recognition manuals we now use and use an authentic recognition manual instead. Say we played SH4 and sank a Japanese merchant looking somewhat like Heiyo Maru, the first ship on this chart:



Then we would look for the tonnage from the authentic index:


Then we would report 9800 tonnes sunk to LGN1's SH3Log.

Some of the ships would work quite finely. C2, Liberty, Aquitania for example are quite close to their actual sizes in the game. Some of the ships modeled into SH3 would not work at all, as some are probably not copied from historical models.

It would take a lot of pages, though.

Who knows, maybe I'll print the pictures and the index from the website, and try using that recognition manual in a campaign, just to see if there's any sense in trying to match fiction and fact like this.

BTW, if someone wants to have a go at this, feel free. Just send me a PM to avoid any duplicate work - so that I'll know and won't start doing the manual myself. Making a picture like that is a matter of minutes, after you've done the first one as a base.