Ship Lengths for TMO 1.7

[karamazovnew]

Since in my last patrol I had 10 duds (Mark 10's), 1 circling torpedo and 3 ships which refused to sink and even one that was almost underwater but almost blew my hat off when I surfaced to finish her, plus escorts that either ignored me completely or saw me from 5 miles away during the night as I was diving to periscope depth (P.S. I never save if there's anything near me, habbit from SH3), I take offence to your comment.

Well, let me put it this way. First of all, we had the lengths in the manual in SH3. Those values were preety much wrong, check this link for example. http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=152524. In the game we do have Height values, too precise if you ask me, so I never ever push the check button, but instead I move the mast dial by hand. In reality it was the other way around, as the height of the ship was very easy to mask and very hard to make out in all weather or at night.

But then, TMO and RFB both tell you to keep Map Contact updates ON. That preety much settles all of my plotting problems, right? Wrong, because I never use that bloody thing, altough it's useful when shadowing a convoy. And if I do plot, I do so in the middle of the Pacific, so as not to see my own sub. I use only relative bearings and calculate my own movement in that time interval. So I need to do manual plotting right? Wrong again, as we have that chronometer thighie. 2 clicks and you have the course and the speed. But I hate using that too. Now, I can figure out AOB from 5 miles away by eyeball, and range is piss easy with the SH4 stadimeter (unless it refuses to lock on a ship that's 3000 yards away in medium fog). But what about speed? And what if, instead of playing a US sub in TMO, which has auto recognition and a US TDC, I play a german sub which has a broken Notepad, in RFB+OM? The fixed wire method has a bigger error if you go at 1 knot (which I always do) or if the target is at >30 AOB than because the length was off in the recognition manual by 10 bloody meters. Not to mention that the US TDC doesn't allow decimals in the speed. And yes, most ships I've seen go at X.5 knots for some reason. And do try once to use the fixed-wire method in rough seas. The scope deviates by as much as 2 degrees since it's off-center. You're lucky if you nail the time within a 5 second error.

And to finish off, if you're using wither TMO or RFB, let me give you a bit of news. The height value is almost exact to the 3d Model. The length is way off on some ships. Since I only used the data in the cfg files, my data is way off too. the ONI manual would laugh at me.

[karamazovnew]

Ups, almost forgot. One time I actually met a ship which I couldn't recognise. I had RFB at that time and I now know that it was a Minelayer. But then I didn't. So I matched it's course and speed. After I knew both, I applied the inverse tactic to find the length and the mast(by getting close and pinging it for range). I looked in the whole manual and found the ship. My height was off by a lot as I was using SCAF, but even my length was off by almost 8 meters. I reloaded and checked again. I had heights for the deck, for the funnel, for the masts, for the top of the command tower, all were perfect, just as in the picture. I guess that for a slow ship, if you're not seen, it doesn't take more than one attack to figure out the dimensions. Fool me once, game's fault. Fool me twice... mine.

[Rockin Robbins]

So you're saying that your tolerance for uncertainty has been exceeded?

Welcome to RFB and TMO! Gotta love 'em. I could do without the SCAF though.

[karamazovnew]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

So you're saying that your tolerance for uncertainty has been exceeded?

Welcome to RFB and TMO! Gotta love 'em. I could do without the SCAF though.

By a long shot :rotfl:. A while ago I dusted my trygonometry book and managed to get a formula for preety much everything. I entered that 2 row long formula intro excel. You had to enter your speed, and 3 target bearings by 2 methods (at constant time intervals) or 2 time intervals (at 3 simetrycal bearings). Then you entered the bearing at which you wanted to fire and it gave you the gyro for that fire bearing. I think I used it a couple of times before it started ruining the game .

About SCAF... it's actually preety easy to ignore it completely. Make all the masts 50 feet, all the max speeds 10 and use that tehnique I talked about to make your own recognition manual in your next career. But first erase all your memory of the previous known values :rotfl:.