3000 yd compass

[KlassenT]

Originally Posted by TorpX

I believe what you are describing amounts to, for lack of a better description 'sloppy helming'. The rudder movements, and the resulting turning effects, are not instantaneous. The helmsman must gradually ease the rudder as he approaches the desired course, then at the right moment bring it amidships. Were he to wait until he was at heading X deg., the ship would continue to turn some, and would come to X + 1, or X + 2 deg., which is not what we would want. To put it another way, the turning ship has a certain rotational momentum, and this makes perfect precise helming difficult.

Yep, that's how I tend to adjust rudder when manually setting course as well. The ultimate problem (as it relates to the bearing plotter) is that the graphical icon of your ship on the map doesn't seem to account for the same momentum-- Once your helmsman sets rudder amidships, the navmap sub/bearing graphic stops short (even though the physical sub continues settling onto desired course). It could also be a simple lazy programmer, that decided to only rotate the graphic until the "remainder < 1" instead of "remainder = 0" Since a bearing plotter was never devised in the official releases, you'd never be able to eyeball that +/- 1 degree difference based off the icon of a tiny sub, so it was probably just an oversight.

As an aside, you CAN correct for this by manually adjusting rudder to the point where your 0-bearing is perfectly aligned with your nav waypoint, then use the return-to-course function. Since the sub doesn't need to turn more than one degree to resume travel, the Plotter doesn't even have to rotate. At least it's a viable workaround since I don't expect to see anyone touching SH4's source code again.