Angle Of Bow.......Quick Question

[valpospe]

I don't have the game, so I don't know how the plots work yet, but the problem with this idea is that the AOB is HOW you determine target course. And it has to be assessed by the Approach Officer from a couple of grainy, watery looks. You can't take three bearings, connect them, and call it a course because bearings are the result of relative motion--you're on a moving observation platform. You also don't know the target's speed (yet) and bearing presentation is affected by speed. A close, fast contact will have little bearing change if it has a narrow AOB; a distant, slow, broad contact will show the same bearing change. One is a collision, the other a pretty picture.

The AOB is critical. It establishes the target course--the "track"--which gives the distance-to-the-track, which gives the optimal approach course and speed, and ultimately, gyro angle. Unlike speed (sonar) and range (stadimeter), AOB depends on the skill of the Approach Officer and years of practice.

In real life, perhaps, and for the manual purist who wants to do it like they did it. I'm not pretending to be an expert as I indicated in my first post, but I have found that I can get a pretty good solution using the method I described.

To clarify, I'm not talking about taking three bearings, the way to angle tool works on the map requires three clicks in quick succession. Like I stated the first click out in front of the target along it's projected course, another click at the target bow and the last click on your sub will draw an angle on the map which represents the AOB (at least roughly). In my limited experience a decent way of getting an AOB value in a relative hurry at a single point in time when you have a pretty good idea of the target's course (map updates on, or through visual contact, or sonar contacts over time).

For example, make visual contact with target, mark location on map. Make another mark in 3 minutes. You can use this to get a rough idea of speed and if you a draw a line through those two marks you get a pretty good estimate of course. You can then use the angle tool to grab a AOB measurement. Go to Scope and take bearing and distance and enter speed and AOB and you should have a decent solution that usually requires a tweak here or there. I'm not claiming that this is the offical way to do it, but the original poster asked for ways to calculate AOB and I offered one way that works for me in the game.

-happy hunting