Lenght of ship

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by Pisces

It's not bogus, it's scientifically sound.

I looked up "bogus" in the Rockin Robbins unabridged dictionary and it said "historically unjustified procedure." My post wasn't to tell the OP not to use the technique, but that actual use of that technique was impossible during the war.

The Germans had the capability to use this technique. They were fighting open societies which did not restrict or falsify information about their merchant ships. A Liberty Ship, for instance, was a cookie cutter thing where each ship shared waterline length, overall length, masthead heights and cabin configurations. It wouldn't be difficult at all to determine the numbers by trial and terror and then apply those numbers to hundreds of available targets with devastating results. But I haven't seen evidence of much or any use of this technique, even by them.

Japan, however, was a closed society. Very little was known about their merchant fleet. We knew some things about their war fleet but much of that information was purposely misrepresented. The state of global communications just didn't allow us to use "timing by the wire" or to calculate target speed by prop turn count as we can today.

But don't confuse putting something in historical perspective with telling a new player not to learn the technique. I did not do that. In fact, I joked that now that I had rained on his parade he could continue collecting information.