How do u obtain range with the TBT?

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by Hitman

BTW I forgot in all my previous messages to mention that the TBT didn't have any split prism rangefinder AFAIK :hmm:

It just had a graded reticle like the scopes, and when radar ranges where not available, the IWO called the marks to the assitant, who would use a wiz-wheel or a precomputed table to tell the distance.

I forgot about that. You're absolutely right. In fact the first TBTs were just a stand with a mount for standard binoculars and only sent bearing. Later ones had permanently mounted binoculars but no mechanism for stadimeter. Their ranges came from radar and were much better anyway. Unfortunately, there too, we have no range input from radar to TDC as the subs did after 1944.

Working with the German TDC is to realize that it was an entirely different proposition than the American piece of awesome complexity. Where we used incredibly complex machinery, the Germans used simpler ingenuity. Just check out the OLC GUI in SH3 and you have to just shake your head in wonder. What we did with brute force and a million pieces, the Germans seemed to do without a wasted part and by continually simplifying the process. It makes you wonder why they chose the opposite strategy with their Panzer tanks' over-complex designs.

My first attacks in the German U-Boat were Dick O'Kane attacks with the periscope unhitched from the TDC and they were deadly because they were indentical to those I make in the Kraken except that the measurements were metric. The metric explosions seemed just as satisfying as the imperial ones.

In practice, on a surface attack without radar, there would be a man on periscope watch below to take range measurements if he could. The effect would be the same as our TDC with stadimeter, so I don't think the game suffers too badly from having one of those cursed things where it doesn't belong.:rotfl:

Where's that diagram of the American TDC......


There's the target length input crank on the bottom. Notice the distance to track output near the top? All kinds of things in both American and German TDC's that aren't modeled!

Here's a neat one. I bet you figured out already that with prop torque the reach and turning radius of a torpedo could be different, depending on whether it was turning left or right. Oh? Didn't think of that one? The TDC designers did and the TDC was adjustable out of the box to account for any parameters of newly acquired torpedoes:



Freaky, eh? All you modders with compulsive tweaking disorder would have been in heaven aboard a submarine.


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A list of all hand inputs into the American TDC. When you consider that both German and American TDCs were nothing less than mechanical computers, you have to be amazed and wonder if such feats would even be conceivable today.