Sunk my FIRST Destroyer!!!!!

[Abd_von_Mumit]

Originally Posted by ddiplock

Yeah yeah, i know what you fellow Kaleuns are going to be saying "you sunk a destroyer, so what? Its hardly the HMS Nelson now is it??"

Well you'd be right, its not the mighty battleship Nelson, or any form of large British warship.

No no no, Kapitaen! Sinking a DD is an achievement you can be safely very proud of.

I'd say sinking a battleship is a matter of luck, while sinking DD's is a skill. Well, to be honest, I consider myself a... hmm... seasoned skipper :rotfl:, but I know DD's are too hard to try for me. I just don't do them. I prefer to live through the damn war, let the bulls sink warships, I don't have too. In my last two careers I only sunk 2 DD's that were crippled by a storm and were quite defendless.

So I have a large respect to those who dare. Keep up the good work and don't let them sink you, so that I can focus on the freighters.

Originally Posted by ddiplock

1. Mark the 2 points on the map, wait the usual 3 minutes and measure the distance between them which in this case is only 0.4km.

2. I then look at the nomograph, start at the top of the knot scale, and drag a slant line down to 0.4 on the distance scale. The resulting reading gives a rough speed of about 3.5 knots or so, least that's how I interpret it. Notice I haven't done anything at all with the minutes scale on the nomograph.

Now, please tell me is this method right, close to being right, or totally wrong? I can't imagine it being totally wrong as i've been hitting targets successfully with this method thus far in this career. I'd appreciate feedback from the more experience Kaleuns in using the nomograph to see if I am right. Cheers guys

No, your method is not right.

First, you don't need a nomoograph at all, as you've allready got the speed. A distance in metres between two points in 3 minutes 15 seconds divided by 100 is the speed of a target in knots. In this case distance travelled is 0.4 km (400 metres), so the speed is 4 knots.

Second, the way to use nomograph is different. You always use all the 3 scales. You always need two pieces of information to gather the third needed piece:
- if you got speed and time, you can get distance travelled with that speed in this time,
- if you got speed and distance, you can get time needed to travel that distance given the speed,
- if you got distance and time, you can find the speed needed to travel the distance in the given time.

You do this by drawing a line connecting the two known variables and checkig, where the line intersects on the third scale - the point of intersection is the info you need. The line has to intersect all the scales, so if it's too short, you have to make it longer to reach the third scale.

I know my Ponglish is hard to understand, but If that's too misty, someone will explain it using better words for sure.