What are the two dials in compass and possibly a bug

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by Leitender

Well, I believe to have seen a compass design of the same way than the one in Silent Hunter. But I´m sorry for not having in mind where it was, since it is long ago. The only thing I remember was that it appears clear to me why the design was that way in Silent Hunter.

IIRC, the compass design was untouched in all versions of Silent Hunter, and the initial version was an american submarine in the pacific (SH1). So this explained the difference for me. I´m not sure to have read the source you´ve linked above earlier, but now it seems for me that my assumption could be wrong. But what was the reason for the SH Devs to create that design? Did they have different sources?

No, Silent Hunter (SH1) did not have a compass with a rotating outer ring and a fixed inner dial. The compass in SH1 was a fixed card (North up) with a rotating pointer or "compass needle", probably necessitated by the limitations of the SVGA graphics of the time. That compass is clearly illustrated on Page 23 of the Silent Hunter manual, available on-line here: http://www.uboat.cz/down/sim/shmanual.pdf. So SH1 could not have been your source.

Of course, the rotating outer ring and fixed center is exactly the configuration used in Silent Hunter Two. The compass in SHII is illustrated on Page 46 of the Silent Hunter II manual, available on-line here: http://www.knightdiscounts.com/downl...2%20Manual.pdf. But SHII is a simulation of German U-boats only, and has no playable American subs.

Are you quite certain that the compass with a rotating outer ring and fixed inner bearing card was not actually a German design?

[Leitender]

Originally Posted by BigWalleye

Are you quite certain that the compass with a rotating outer ring and fixed inner bearing card was not actually a German design?

I´m quite certain that I never saw a different compass on a german wwII uboat than the Anschütz Gyro compas which I tried to reconstruct in my modification.

In an earlier post you wrote:

a dial face with a fixed external ring and a rotating inner compass card, the way nautical compass faces in ships of all nations have been laid out for a couple of hundred years.

So, if this particular compass design has a hundreds of years old tradition, I wonder how the SH devs came to that special design, if they had not a historical ideal. Was it completly artificial? What was the origin of both SH1 / SH2 compass designs? Does anyone knows that?

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by Leitender

I´m quite certain that I never saw a different compass on a german wwII uboat than the Anschütz Gyro compas which I tried to reconstruct in my modification.

In an earlier post you wrote:

So, if this particular compass design has a hundreds of years old tradition, I wonder how the SH devs came to that special design, if they had not a historical ideal. Was it completly artificial? What was the origin of both SH1 / SH2 compass designs? Does anyone knows that?

As I mentioned in a previous post, the configuration of the compass dial in SH1 was pretty clearly dictated by the limitations of the computer graphics available at the time. It was not feasible to have revolving dial faces, so no revolving dial faces were used for any SH1 gauges. All SH1 gauges were a simple fixed dial face with a solid white moving pointer. None of these gauges was based on, or made any attempt to look like, any historical prototype. To do so would have exceeded the capabilities of the PCs in use at the time.

I have no idea where the developers of SH2 drew the inspiration for the compass dial design they used. SH2 was obviously targeted for a more capable PC than existed when SH1 was published. The prototype they selected may have been used on a German submarine of WW2 or later vintage. Since the developers of SH2 made use of the improved graphics available to try and give a more historically accurate look to the game, I suspect the compass design was based on an existing U-boat compass that they had seen. Certainly the other gauges in SH2 at least tried to emulate historical U-boat prototypes, as have succeeding titles in the series.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Leitender

I´m quite certain that I never saw a different compass on a german wwII uboat than the Anschütz Gyro compas which I tried to reconstruct in my modification.

As I tried to express in my earlier post, the compass you did such a good job of recreating in your very nice mod had two rotating dials. The inner dial was marked 1-10 because each mark was a degree, and it rotated once for every 10 degrees on the outer 360-degree dial.

From photographs I've looked at it seems that the outer dial of the US compass was part of the housing, and it was the inner ring was part of a flat disc that rotated.