Real navigation?

[Torplexed]

Whoa! Fun with a sextant. If you were on a simulated globe it could keep you occupied during some of those long hours.

[Rockin Robbins]

But not for THIS simulator. Problems now include wrong position and phase of the moon, both sun and moon are six times their actual size in the sky, star magnitudes are not properly rendered. I'll bet my paycheck I can check the sky for a date in SH4 against the same date, time, longitude and latitude in Cartes du Ciel and they are different. Someone posted that the sky is the exact same for every position of SH4 for any date and time. All this is a deal killer (a plethora of deal killers!) for celestial navigation.

To make that happen the best way on a total rewrite of submarine simulation would be for the devs to get in touch with a Frenchman named Patrick Chevalley who wrote a masterful program called Cartes du Ciel (Sky Charts for we who do not speak French). Hooking his sky to a sub simulator based on a globe instead of a flat Earth would give perfect positions for every single visible star in the sky (changing the visible magnitudes for increased light gathering ability of sextants and binoculars separately, and attenuation by differing sky transparency due to weather. In other words, the number of visible stars is very variable). Every planet, the moon and sun would be perfectly positioned at all times for the date and time.



This would make full celestial navigation possible. The chart could plot only positions you have measured through your sextant sightings. These positions would only be as accurate as your sightings. In real navigation, errors of 100 miles are considered acceptable (although accuracy to 10 miles is sought) and are planned for at transition between navigating and piloting. The attack map could then be rendered as an actual attack map aboard a submarine was, with own ship in the center and relative positions of targets plotted without regard to their positions on earth.Then it would be time to sign up arronblood to incorporate MoBo into the simulator because now the attack map could be much more sophisticated than just a subset of the nav map with a few additional wrinkles.

All this is not possible with our present generation of sub simulator. It would mean a complete paradigm shift in the rendering of everything. Although it would look similar to the player, everything under the hood would be radically different. So no mod can make this possible with SH4. This is something to look forward to when someone writes the next generation of simulators for the next generation of hardware.

[Sailor Steve]

There have been several attempts at this; unfortunately I could only find these three discussions:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...eal+navigation
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...eal+navigation
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...eal+navigation

There was a Real Navigation mod for SH3, but the problem there is that if you don't use waypoints the sub doesn't just drift off course, the helmsman doesn't even try to hold his course!

Don't know if SH4 is the same.

[Snuffy]

I find myself having to correct course heading when not using waypoints for navigation.

No biggie though.

[SteamWake]

Originally Posted by Snuffy

I find myself having to correct course heading when not using waypoints for navigation.

No biggie though.

Well 'real life' navigators have to contend with course correction. Niggling little things like error in calculations, wind, current etc.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by SteamWake

Well 'real life' navigators have to contend with course correction. Niggling little things like error in calculations, wind, current etc.

Yeah, but when your heading is 345 in real life, you might have to deal with all those problems, but you don't have to deal with the helmsman turning to 340, then 335, then who knows where?

Unless he's drunk, of course.

[SteamWake]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Yeah, but when your heading is 345 in real life, you might have to deal with all those problems, but you don't have to deal with the helmsman turning to 340, then 335, then who knows where?

Unless he's drunk, of course.

"Too fast Vascilli. If were out of the lane by as much as a boat length !" :p

[Slang]

Its for SH3, but works just as well in SH4.

Of course we don't have the GWX speed and distance charts, but you don't really need them if you play in imperial units.