What scope mod do you use

[Xrundel]

As an amateur astronomer, I'm sure you know telescopes are designed to gather as much light as possible. This is simply not the case for WWII submarine periscopes.

" As much light as possible" with given objective lens/primary mirror aperture

Majority of amateur refractors (lens design, not mirror) are in range of 60-80mm aperture. I had one with 175mm - just the objective assembly cost $10,000 US. Most people just can't afford it for hobby.

Think about that sentence of yours - just does not make much sense, Germans are the best in the world when it comes to engineering and they are very detail-oriented people. Putting anti-reflection coating on optics when no one in the world even consider that says everything to me. I don't know why I even need to explain myself in such a detail.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Xrundel

Periscopes was not useless at night, trust me on that. Ghunter Prien would not be able to sneak in Scapa Flow at night without using one.

As I said before, you should check your facts before saying things like "trust me". The entire Scapa Flow attack was conducted on the surface.
http://uboat.net/ops/scapa_flow.htm

You mention earlier about your considerable experience with telescopes. What you may have forgotten is that you are looking at light sources, or reflected light sources. In a night submarine attack you are looking at a source that is deliberately kept as dark as possible. On a moonlit night I'm sure the attack periscope would be effective, especially given the need to stay submerged in those conditions. On a starry night with no moon the observation periscope would become the method of choice. On overcast nights the surface attack was preferred. Why? Because the periscopes were indeed close to useless.

Here is an actual report on the strengths, and failings, of WW2 German periscopes.
http://www.uboatarchive.net/U-570BritishReport.htm

The relevant information is in Chapter VI, page 30.

[Xrundel]

As my grandfather told me when I was a little - better once see on your own eyes that 100 times hear from others.
Dude - it's not the first time that you read my post and then bombarding me with bunch of web links.
No one was talking about actual attack and how it was conducted.
No one argues with the fact that total darkness makes any optical device but night vision goggles useless.
If you like to post just for sake of arguing with anybody and anything (what is it - 31 000+ posts??! ) - find yourself somebody else, please. I would really value your personal opinion if you would be a real military high-ranking Navy officer (that means real professional) with this amount of posts here. If you are not - I am sorry. I am little bit higher ranked real sailor in real life than you. And I've seen more than you in this matter, I would dare to say.
Forgive me my ignorance, just would like to see you getting in torpedo tube with breathing apparatus and hope to survive in training excersice when they closing hatch behind you and start filling it with water on 60ft depth like I did in my life. That would definitively make me respect you opinion much more than thousands of posts that you have here.
I never took any crap from "theorists" that never experience real deal.
I am not about to change my rules now as well.

[stoianm]

Originally Posted by Xrundel

As my grandfather told me when I was a little - better once see on your own eyes that 100 times hear from others.
Dude - it's not the first time that you read my post and then bombarding me with bunch of web links.
No one was talking about actual attack and how it was conducted.
No one argues with the fact that total darkness makes any optical device but night vision goggles useless.
If you like to post just for sake of arguing with anybody and anything (what is it - 31 000+ posts??! ) - find yourself somebody else, please. I would really value your personal opinion if you would be a real military high-ranking Navy officer (that means real professional) with this amount of posts here. If you are not - I am sorry. I am little bit higher ranked real sailor in real life than you. And I've seen more than you in this matter, I would dare to say.
Forgive me my ignorance, just would like to see you getting in torpedo tube with breading apparatus and hope to survive in training excersice when they closing hatch behind you and start filling it with water on 60ft depth like I did in my life. That would definitively make me respect you opinion much more than thousands of posts that you have here.
I never took any crap from "theorists" that never experience real deal.
I am not about to change my rules now as well.

the training that you speak about is KGB training... i caught you my friend ... so you are a russian that live in USA... had this training... i am from other side of spionage... stay calm... soon FBI will knok on your door... do not panic

[Xrundel]

the training that you speak about is KGB training...

It's routing training exercise that you have to pass in Soviet Navy college on 3rd year of study. They submerged for 20m (60ft) and cadets entering greasy torpedo tube with "scuba diving gear" that I would not ever trust ( and I never did!) and have to escape from " damaged" sub. They put rope that attached to the floating piece on the surface. Rope have knot at every 50 cm. When you got out of tube you have slowly go up the rope counting knots and make sure that you do about no faster than 2 knots every 30 seconds or something like that I don't remember exactly.
My favorite though - was a machine shop at training vessel. You got everything there - welding equipment, steel table with wise saw and hummer. The only thing - it was 4 meters below the water surface.

We got everything - fire compartment, flooding compartment (that was lots of fun! And lots of salty navy course words from team then patching those holes in the hull trying to stop flooding).
I lived interesting life...
And by the way - I was selected as a candidate for KGB position (Soviet/Russian Coast Guard units are reporting to KGB instead of High Naval Command) because of my academic scored. It was very sweet deal - higher ranking Navy officer is actually same rank as you, because you belong to KGB, best benefits ever and other stuff.. Sometimes I wish that great power would never politically collapse...

[Arclight]

Originally Posted by Xrundel

Take it easy - you did just fine.

Periscopes was not useless at night, trust me on that. Ghunter Prien would not be able to sneak in Scapa Flow at night without using one.
I've look throgh Russiam periscope of old (1956 project) Russian diesel sub with periscopes of same (stolen/copied after German's of course) optical train. They not so dark that you can not see anything at night.
I prefer instead of googling things speak up my own life experience.
When certain amount light enters hole 50mm diameter and ends up in hole 5mm diameter (size of your pupil) it got INTENSIFIED. It's a flow of photons - think about it as an air flow. even if 50% of the total amount photons entered got reflected back or dispersed due optical imperfections - still you receive more light looking through scope than just looking using naked eye.
That's just the laws of physics and light is nothing more than another short-wave radiation.

You did good job with your mod. Just my personal experiense and education made me make some suggestions about that maybe it is better under-do some thing than over-do. It just a suggestion, not personal insult. So please take it easy.

I am taking it easy. I'm not calling you names and demanding an apology. I'd just appreciate something substantial, something factual.

We know pretty much everything needed to apply the proper formulae, make some calculations for the proper brightness of the final image. So if you know how to make the scopes more realistic, I'd gladly hear it.

Originally Posted by Xrundel

" As much light as possible" with given objective lens/primary mirror aperture

Majority of amateur refractors (lens design, not mirror) are in range of 60-80mm aperture. I had one with 175mm - just the objective assembly cost $10,000 US. Most people just can't afford it for hobby.

Think about that sentence of yours - just does not make much sense, Germans are the best in the world when it comes to engineering and they are very detail-oriented people. Putting anti-reflection coating on optics when no one in the world even consider that says everything to me. I don't know why I even need to explain myself in such a detail.

Think I got it close enough for someone who has no education in or experience with optics. You're avoiding the point I was trying to make: you can't compare a telescope to a WWII submarine periscope.

You keep claiming the Germans were the best in the world, but that really doesn't mean much. Even if their scopes had 0,001% better light transmission, it would make them the best. The report Steve linked to states German scopes were comparable in performance to US ones at the time, so the difference wasn't big enough to be remarkable.

Besides, I modeled them using what knowledge I could gather on German scopes. Didn't just yank some random values from somewhere.

I would kill for a picture taken with a modern camera through one of those scopes.



btw thanks Steve. That's the report I couldn't find previously.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Xrundel

As my grandfather told me when I was a little - better once see on your own eyes that 100 times hear from others.
Dude - it's not the first time that you read my post and then bombarding me with bunch of web links.

I only used that tactic because you started your first post with an attack.

Another thing that I don't get at all - why Arclight after all that titanic work desided to darken view in his scope enough to watch spots on the Sun in real life? I am amateur astronomer (at least used to be) and know thing or two about optics. It's so God damn dark that he even came up with "Light" version of the mod but still too dark to my taste.

That was rude and insulting, so I responded in what I thought was an appropriate fashion. You talk about your personal experience with optics, yet you dismiss the personal experiences of the people who actually used those periscopes. Is your word better than theirs?

Where those ideas about "periscope is hardly usable at night" come from? If you think about it - ALL THE TELESCOPES HAVE TO BE TROWN AWAY because it's a night time.
Germans had BEST OPTICS during 20th century period. They optics were anti-light reflection coated way before anyone would even consider it.

You say things like this, yet you ignore the evidence given by the people who were actually there.

No one was talking about actual attack and how it was conducted.

Not true. You did exactly that when you tried to use Gunther Prien's attack on Scapa Flow to prove your point about periscopes not being useless at night. Since you prefer your real experience over something from Google you got it wrong.

No one argues with the fact that total darkness makes any optical device but night vision goggles useless.

But wasn't your original argument that periscopes aren't useless at night - a point you were so insistent on that you started swearing in your post?

If you like to post just for sake of arguing with anybody and anything (what is it - 31 000+ posts??! ) - find yourself somebody else, please. I would really value your personal opinion if you would be a real military high-ranking Navy officer (that means real professional) with this amount of posts here. If you are not - I am sorry. I am little bit higher ranked real sailor in real life than you. And I've seen more than you in this matter, I would dare to say.

So now you're saying we should trust you over the actual technical reports because you brag about your experience. My experience is that no on knows everything, and much can be learned from actual technical reports. They know more about their business than either you or I do.

Forgive me my ignorance, just would like to see you getting in torpedo tube with breathing apparatus and hope to survive in training excersice when they closing hatch behind you and start filling it with water on 60ft depth like I did in my life. That would definitively make me respect you opinion much more than thousands of posts that you have here.

So your experience inside a torpedo tube means you know more about periscopes than the people who wrote the reports on their actual investigation of U-570?

My time was spent as a radioman aboard a destroyer in the Vietnam war, yet I wouldn't pretend to be able to talk knowledgably about the radios I worked with after all these years. I'd have to look it up. As for post counts, I got mine by being here a long time and making a lot of posts, nothing more. When did I say you should listen to me and respect my opinion because of my post counts? I didn't, and I don't expect anyone to do that. You're the one who talked down to people and said we should listen to you because we're all wrong and you know more than those who were there at the time. All I did was read your posts claiming that your experience is more important than the actual reports, and point out the places where you were obviously wrong. I'll take their experiences and reports over anyone's word, including my own.

I never took any crap from "theorists" that never experience real deal.
I am not about to change my rules now as well.

I'm not a "theorist" at all. But when someone tells us we're all wrong, I tend to look at the known facts and compare the two. And when the person who flouted those reports only responds by claiming he knows more than I do, but doesn't actually address the places where he was wrong, then who should I trust?

I didn't pick a fight with you. You came in here insisting you know better, and I challenged that.

[Xrundel]

Arclight, buddy - I never had any intentions to upset you or feel bad. You did very good job transforming stock periscope into something much better and more historically accurate. You've made a mod and people are free to decide if they want to use it or not, correct? I installed your "regular" version of your mod first and I started historical mission that set up in clear day at 12 o'clock.
It looked to me like midnight with full moon. I even checked the clock on user interface. And this is all I was trying to say. I install your "light" version and naturally ask myself why you even needed to come up with "light" if everything is the way it suppose to be, but it does not matter. I found better solution and happy with it. It also have darker attack periscope compare to observation but it looks more natural to me. And it's only my opinion. And you have all rights to have yours. You like mathematical formulas and apply them to figure out outcome? That's very good, my friend. But if outcome is not exactly what it really is in practice - then maybe some input values are wrong or there is simple error in calculation. Such an errors cost NASA extra trip to Hubble on near-Earth orbit. If NASA can do it - I think every one else can .
If you still insist that you have absolutely correct brightness interpretation in your scope mod - fine with me - my life won't change a bit. Maybe later in you life you will have opportunity to look through real periscope and that will be much better than thousands words from me or anybody else.

Now to quotes:

Think I got it close enough for someone who has no education in or experience with optics.

You got it very close indeed, very good job! Especially darkening optics towards the edges.\, where light losses are greatest.

You're avoiding the point I was trying to make: you can't compare a telescope to a WWII submarine periscope.

I was not avoiding this point. Probably I was not clear enough with my bad English. You CAN and you HAVE compare periscope of any historical period with the telescope. Because as long as there is magnification (1.5x and 6x as you know) it is long focal distance refractor with added two mirrors/prisms on it's optical path to bend it 90 degrees twice. You can call it viewing pipe, periscope, telescope, half of binocular spotting scope - it is refractor and principal is absolutely the same with only difference that telescope refractor can change eyepieces for more powerful ones(with shorter focal length) boosting magnification to hundreds x but accordingly reducing brightness of the image. So - less magnification - brighter image.

So if you know how to make the scopes more realistic, I'd gladly hear it.

In my opinion (that you can just ignore if you want) rename "light" version into "regular" and make another slightly lighter - "light" and that would be more realistic. Just answering your question - I know you are not going to do anything.

And by the way - if TDW uses your version as default in his UI - it looks just fine. Maybe I've downloaded some original release that was much darker and all this talk here just as pointless as it could be.
With your permission I would leave this discussion - I really don't want wake up one morning and see that I have almost 32 thousands posts on some forum - I actually have a life.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Xrundel

With your permission I would leave this discussion - I really don't want wake up one morning and see that I have almost 32 thousands posts on some forum - I actually have a life.

So, unable to counter facts with facts, he turns to direct insults, again bringing up the post count for no good reason. I have that many posts because I've been here almost ten years, and I like the place. Never once have I used anyone's status here as an arguing point, and never once have I claimed that my opinion or my experience was a counter to actual facts. Anybody can claim anything, and it's all anonymous...at least for you.

I'm not afraid to say who I really am, where I really am or what I really do. A great many people here know my real name, where I live and the good and the bad of my life, and anyone who doesn't can find out by merely asking.

On the other hand we have someone who comes into a thread, doesn't politely disagree but rather arrogantly tells people what they got wrong, and when challenged with facts doesn't respond in kind but says we should trust him on his word, doesn't answer any of the things he was shown to be wrong about and then talks about post counts? Sounds like the average troll to me.

Sorry to be disruptive, but people who claim to know better than you do and expect you to believe them because they say so, but get their facts totally wrong and then make up for it with insults just set me off. My bad.

[Arclight]

Originally Posted by Xrundel

Arclight, buddy - I never had any intentions to upset you or feel bad. You did very good job transforming stock periscope into something much better and more historically accurate. You've made a mod and people are free to decide if they want to use it or not, correct? I installed your "regular" version of your mod first and I started historical mission that set up in clear day at 12 o'clock.

It looked to me like midnight with full moon. I even checked the clock on user interface. And this is all I was trying to say. I install your "light" version and naturally ask myself why you even needed to come up with "light" if everything is the way it suppose to be, but it does not matter. I found better solution and happy with it. It also have darker attack periscope compare to observation but it looks more natural to me. And it's only my opinion. And you have all rights to have yours. You like mathematical formulas and apply them to figure out outcome? That's very good, my friend. But if outcome is not exactly what it really is in practice - then maybe some input values are wrong or there is simple error in calculation. Such an errors cost NASA extra trip to Hubble on near-Earth orbit. If NASA can do it - I think every one else can .

If you still insist that you have absolutely correct brightness interpretation in your scope mod - fine with me - my life won't change a bit. Maybe later in you life you will have opportunity to look through real periscope and that will be much better than thousands words from me or anybody else.

Never insisted on anything. I've always stated I modeled them as accurate as I could get them, to the best of my knowledge. I never said they were 100% realistic. I mean, it's called "more realistic periscope". Picked that name rather carefully.

The problem we were having was because you introduced yourself a little rudely. You made quite a few asumptions, not nescesarily accurate ones at that, and the insults are just not nescesary... not here, anyway. Feel free to insult people at that /v/ or whatever it is.

Now to quotes:

Alright.

You got it very close indeed, very good job! Especially darkening optics towards the edges.\, where light losses are greatest.

Thanks.

I was not avoiding this point. Probably I was not clear enough with my bad English. You CAN and you HAVE compare periscope of any historical period with the telescope. Because as long as there is magnification (1.5x and 6x as you know) it is long focal distance refractor with added two mirrors/prisms on it's optical path to bend it 90 degrees twice. You can call it viewing pipe, periscope, telescope, half of binocular spotting scope - it is refractor and principal is absolutely the same with only difference that telescope refractor can change eyepieces for more powerful ones(with shorter focal length) boosting magnification to hundreds x but accordingly reducing brightness of the image. So - less magnification - brighter image.

I'm not arguing the principal isn't the same, the point is that on one of those periscopes there are severe restrictions regarding light coming in, since the head needs to be small to avoid detection.

It ties in to your remark on the scopes being impossible to use at night not being realistic. That's a statement I simply can't agree to. (at least, they would be useless unless you had a cloudless sky and the target within about a mile)

In my opinion (that you can just ignore if you want) rename "light" version into "regular" and make another slightly lighter - "light" and that would be more realistic. Just answering your question - I know you are not going to do anything.

And by the way - if TDW uses your version as default in his UI - it looks just fine. Maybe I've downloaded some original release that was much darker and all this talk here just as pointless as it could be.

Ah, see, you got me all wrong. You said yourself you don't just take someone's word for anything, neither do I. It's easy to come on a board and claim all sorts of things, so if some observations are a bit blunt, it gets greeted with some skepticism. Right?

But now you make a proposal. I'm open to those, and that one got me thinking: I've recently switched from an old CRT 4:3 monitor to a LCD 16:10. Would probably be a good idea to see how it plays on this one, especially considering most people use widescreen LCDs these days (God knows why though :P).

See what comes from that, pretty sure it's going to look a lot different on this monitor.


And the versions got progressively darker I think. TDW might have nabbed an earlier one for his project.

[Xrundel]

But now you make a proposal. I'm open to those, and that one got me thinking: I've recently switched from an old CRT 4:3 monitor to a LCD 16:10. Would probably be a good idea to see how it plays on this one, especially considering most people use widescreen LCDs these days (God knows why though :P).

See what comes from that, pretty sure it's going to look a lot different on this monitor.

That actually could be the reason. I am using LCD with factory default settings, didn't ever touch brightness adjustment or anything else.
I have SONY 26" CRT in garage - I used it for editing astronomical images - I could not use LCD at all because of very limited shadows and colors that it have compare to CRT.

Another thing that I was thinking about - I am not sure that snapping picture using modern camera will help you much in perception of how it really looks.
I had extensive discussions about it on Russian astronomical forum. Problem is that CCD and SMOS are accumulating photons over the time. But human eye is not capable of it. That's why we can take picture of nebulae in color, but to visual observer even in most powerful telescope it still in black and white - not enough photons enter retina to excite color-sensitive receptacles that is much less sensitive than black/white ones. Time of exposure have to be related to sensitivity of used chip and at the same time be equivalent to human eye sensitivity - practically impossible to reproduce.

[Arclight]

Yeah I had the same thought about a photo. Not a digital one, but still, getting the exposure and all that just right would take some effort.

Tinkering with it a bit, but the nights in SH5 are really bright by default. Need to test it with a environment mod.