Night Skies

[Rockin Robbins]

If you want to see what's possible just fire up Patrick Chevelley's magnificent Cartes du Ciel, a free astronomy program for the PC that plots stars, planets and a selectable assortment of deep sky objects to your choice of limiting magnitude.

Unfortunately, supplying the real dark night sky to players who have never seen a truly dark sky in their lives would not be appreciated at all. I am just happy that the sky is represented to the fidelity that it is, with the stars in their accurate positions for date and time. The developers didn't have to do that. Nobody's noticed it anyway. The moon and sun are four times their actual diameters in the sky and the moon is at the wrong phase and in the wrong position. As a result celestial navigation with the stars in the game is really not possible.

As a side effect of attempted celestial navigation, all radar and visual targets, along with your sub's position on the attack and nav plot vanish. It's difficult for me to characterize a mod that kills the maneuvering board and TDC checks against the plot as a "reality mod." Celestial navigation was never envisioned when the game was designed and there is no way to make it work without making hunting and killing nearly impossible.

It would be great to have in-game celestial navigation. It would be great to have a sky that looked more real, with differences in the magnitudes of accurately colored stars. The colors would have to change with humidity and sky clarity, as all color vanishes with humid or hazy conditions. It would be great if they twinkled appropriately with changes in meteorological conditions. The Milky Way is astoundingly bright when you're offshore, hundreds of miles from any terrestrial lighting. In addition, there are dozens of naked eye deep space objects, the Andromeda Galaxy, M33, NGC 253, the Orion Nebula, North American Nebula, tons of stuff in the Sagittarius area, a dozen or so globular clusters, all easily visible in that kind of pristine sky. And then there are the planets all the way out to Neptune that can be seen through binoculars. Warning: all you city boys wouldn't be able to find Orion or the Big Dipper in a perfect night sky. You would be totally lost.

But how much would all this add to the game? If we navigated by celestial navigation, I could make the sale!