Convoy Interception Methods

[Frederf]

You know I had it with 2 sines the first time when I actually worked it out but Subsim.com went down right when I tried to press the reply button. The second time (a day later) I typed it from memory and got it wrong.

Certainly C and S don't have to be the contact and the submarine. They can be anything where "C" is the speed of the "interceptee" and "S" is the speed of the "interceptor." Torpedo shooting is assumed to not be a factor since this thread is all about intercepting which is done at ranges far exceeding torpedo range.

Eventually I did end up using the law of sines to solve it rather quickly. You should see the 8 pages of very pretty and probably correct trigonometry that was leading me into madness.

[Rockin Robbins]

Yes, the underlying trig is actually fun when you're doing something destructive with it!

Similar trig functions were the genesis the the Dick O'Kane and John P Cromwell attacks. You should see all Nisgeis' and my e-mails back and forth in the development of that one! It all started out with a deceptively simple (evil) drawing he sent me one day, asking if there could be a rule of thumb attack similar to Dick O'Kane for that situation.

Here came the proverbial five pages of trigonometry! And at the end of that, a short list of rules for that precise angle setup, so that the user of the method didn't need my five pages of trig!

It's funny that when I was in school I was intimidated by math and now it almost qualifies as a hobby. How far the "mighty" have fallen!