Real Navigation Mod

Originally Posted by divingbluefrog

The dev made only one little error which will save our lives. The compass give you your true heading, not the initial one. Of, course, you aren't obliged to read your compass after a long ride in rough water...
For the speed variation, no other means that your best estimation.

Yeah the sim might be correct but still we need constant adjustment to our course. For me it should be that way. Helmsman corrects all the time to keep us on 0° course and after 500km we end up still heading 0° but we're 20km SW from our estimated end point because of drift, wind slowing us down etc.

In a very heavy weather I let them go, hit the TC and watched. We end up heading 60° of given course... probably we would be doing circles soon...

[divingbluefrog]

It's not really surprising... Imagine that, you are caught in a storm, not the most terrific one, but a serious, wind speed 15m/s which is equal to a 10 in Beaufort scale, with a surg of 7-8 m. And you have to keep the course on, say, 0°... but the wind is blowing straight port, and so is the surg direction. The ship will easily show a helms compass moving from 355 to 05, and you will try to keep it in the average position.
Your speed is slow, 7-8 Knts, with sudden acceleration and short braking when the fore hit the wave, the ship isn't really well responding to the helms.

This is modeled in the game by a 1-2° drift per hour for an average distance of 31-32 km, which seems very close to the reallity. I don't think that high TC (I mean 256<, never play above) have any influence on that. But for sure if you let her go for 15 or 20 hours in a raw whitout giving any corrections, you can easily be out of course for 30-40°.

Major rule for the RealNav navigator : in a storm, stay on the bridge, or you will get lost.

[ichso]

The thing is that noone says the subs behaviour under stormy conditions is unrealistic. It's just tiring to play sometimes if you have to click on the compass every 2 seconds under 128x TC.
Imagine that if you want to travel over to NY and the storm wouldn't end for 1-2 weeks.

That's where it isn't fun to play anymore so we would like to give the task of keeping course trustfully in the hands of our helmsmen

[divingbluefrog]

But you can as the compass give you your true heading. It's just a matter to make one correction point every day.
If you travel to NY, roughly, you will get a 270° heading. After the first day of storm, you find a 260° heading. Well, you spot your new estimated position. You set a new course to, say, 280°. 24H later you find a 282° true heading. New correction and so on.

[ichso]

I know that the compass gives the correct absolute heading of your sub. But the matter cannot be solved that easily by correcting the course once a day because of the thing that Hadrys said sometimes he got off course by 60° (I assume he meant in far less than a day).
Also if you correct an error of 10° in your course by 10° in the opposite direction you want to travel you produce even more error because the course changes slightly over time and not abrupt all at once. But I don't know how big this error would be in the last case this might be the smallest problem overall.

Originally Posted by ichso

I know that the compass gives the correct absolute heading of your sub. But the matter cannot be solved that easily by correcting the course once a day because of the thing that Hadrys said sometimes he got off course by 60° (I assume he meant in far less than a day).
Also if you correct an error of 10° in your course by 10° in the opposite direction you want to travel you produce even more error because the course changes slightly over time and not abrupt all at once. But I don't know how big this error would be in the last case this might be the smallest problem overall.

It was a f..in storm of the year, I've hit TCx256 and watched how the compass turns on my eyes like in roulette...

Problems produce problems. If we assume a correction once a day that would be: we are +10 so for the next day go -20. But under condition that speed, sea state etc are the same. So the only way to navigate properly in heavy weather is to constantly click the compass. I can see that when allowing up to 3-5° divergence in 128 (256max) and than clicking -3-5° should give a nice accuracy but this is insane when you need to go 5000km even in a straight line!!! Add up to this plane attacks after max 2hrs on the surface (maybe 4 during night above 60°N which isn't that dark...).

[ichso]

I really don't know in which RealNav thread to write, there are at least 3 big ones of them.

I have a little suggestion as I made a little mistake while playing yesterday:
I accidently deleted all my drawings on the nav map with the stupid delete-all button (which doesn't even ask if you REALLY want to erase EVERYTHING ).

In the ...\data\Menu\*_menu.txt files are the functions of these buttons listed, I commented out the ones which refer to the everything-eraser. To be sure I did that in the de_menu.txt and the en_menu.txt although just the de_... should be used in my case.

Didn't test it yet, will do it later.

Did you erase your entirecourse plottings from weeks of patrolling accidently ? This is really frustrating. I don't want to redraw it from my written log book either.