Tips when starting to do your own navigation.

[Barnacles]

~S~

On BoS servers without 'GPS' (the own plane map icon) navigation can be quite daunting.

I will give you some navigation tips and state some simple facts you should remember here to make the whole process of navigation easier and let you dead reckon at a basic level. Once mastered, it'll be easy to progress onto more complicated problems. Also, it is often a better idea to use something like IL2 mission planner which will do all this for you, but if you can do it in your head, it'll make things qicker and easier if your plan changes or things get hectic.

 

ALL SPEEDS MUST BE TAS not IAS

Although you can just follow features such as roads, rivers and forests, by doing a simple, in-your-head plan before you take off you can use dead reconing to estimate your position and back it up with what you see out of the window.

The process can be complicated, requiring slide rules, stop watches, sines cosines etc but you can do 90% of it in your head with results that areaccurate enough.

Firstly make things easy for yourself by

1. Only using cardinal courses (North South East and West) when you are figuring out your route to target.

2. Thinking in distances that are mutiples of 10km (the large grids on the BoS maps are 10km by 10km squares.

3. Flying at a constant speed for climbing and cruise (these speeds will be different, but the important thing is to be aware of them)

Secondly, things you will need to have or need to know:

1. A watch with a second hand (AFAIK all BoS planes have a clock in the pit)

2. 6 miniutes are a tenth of an hour, 3 minutes is half of six, and one minute is a third of that (Obvious I know but the point is to use simple maths.

3. Basic mental maths.

Now, I'll discribe a simple navigation problem



Imagine that you are in square 348 and you want to fly to square 352.

You can just turn to 090 and look out for when you are passing the landmarks on the way but if you use dead reckoning you can spend your time looking out for enemies.

So this is what you should do.

1. Work out how far away it is - it is 4 big squares, so because of the tips earlier (only NSEW and only 10s of km) we know that the waypoint is 40km away.
2. Work out how long it will take to travel there - look at your speed, say it is 400kmh (BE ROUGH, make the maths EASY, round to nearest 50 or multiple of 6). Now take the rule above (6 miniutes are a tenth of an hour, 3 minutes is half of six, and one minute is a third of that)

A tenth of 400 is EASY = 40km

So we know it will take 6 minutes to get there.

3. Now look at your clock occasionally and when 6 mins is up, you will be round about where you want to be.

Those numbers were deliberately chosen to make this easy, but if you round up, use cardinal courses, approximate etc, you should be able to make the sums easy for yourself too.

For example: You need to go 10k, how long will it take at 500kmh?
Well 50k will take 6 mins 25k will be 3 mins and 12.5k will be 1.5mins or 90 seconds. 12.5 is quarter more than 10k so we take away a fith of 90 seconds (18 seconds) to get 72 seconds.
1min 12 seconds.

Another example: You need to go 100k, how long will it take at 360kmh?

36k in 6 mins 18k in 3 mins 12k in 2 mins 6k in 1 min

so 36 into 100 is 2 remainder 28 (2 times 6mins is 12mins + remainder)
18 into 100 is 5 remainder 10 (5 times 3mins is 15mins + remainder)
12 into 100 is 8 remainder 4 (8 times 2mins is 16 mins + remainder)

You can see that very soon you have a remainder that is very low (4) that you can say roughly it will take you 16mins but if you are really want to be super accurate you can say 4 is 2/3rds of 6 (1min therefore the remainder is 40 seconds.)

 

​Once you are used to all this, start estimating courses, NE SW NW etc are easy to estimate, as are the directions between them (NNW ESE etc) and after a while you'll be able to 'eyeball' courses to a sufficiently accurate amount. Similarly, for your range to target, you can caculate distances easily by using pythagora's equation for right angled triangles, but you'll find you can get 'close enough' by just estimation and eyeballing the map.

Edited January 26, 2018 by 71st_AH_Barnacles

[OrLoK]

Maths... damn.

 

A great guide but im as thick as poo when it comes to maths! Still, practice makes perfect.

 

Excellent stuff!

Edited January 22, 2018 by OrLoK

[Eclipse4349]

Some good info, thanks!  

[56RAF_Roblex]

You can just turn to 090 and look out for when you are passing the landmarks on the way but if you use dead reckoning you can spend your time looking out for enemies.

 

My objection to this would be that the most important rule of navigation is *Always keep track of where you are no matter how simple the route looks on a map*   If you set out on a simple East-West course that will take you exactly 20 minutes to complete and don't look at the ground until 18 minutes have passed then you could have been pushed off course by a wind from the side or overshot because of a tailwind etc.  Anyone using this simplified navigation method will have no idea  how strong the wind is or its vector so will have no idea where they are and will now spend several minutes staring at the ground & their map and not checking for enemies.   When (if?) they do find out where they are they will then have to hastily work out a new course and probably end up doing it by following landmarks anyway.

 

Don't get me wrong,  knowing roughly how long it should take to reach the target is a good thing.  I have seen peoples careful plan go horribly wrong because, for example,  they wanted to turn 45 degrees at a lake but turned at the wrong one because they had not realised they had not really been flying long enough to be at that turn point yet.    My only objection is that you should never assume you don't need to keep track of what landmarks you will pass and you should still be able to devote most of your attention to checking for enemies.

Edited January 24, 2018 by 56RAF_Roblex

[Barnacles]

I agree with you on that Roblex. One should actually still look at features on the ground rather than rely on this dead reckoning. I think that it's much quicker to correlate what you see out of the window with where you are if you know what you expect to see though so with this method you can afford to spend more time looking for enemies whilst having a regular check to correlate your estimated position. There also could be a cloud bank or something obscuring a feature you're looking out for so it's nice to have dead reckoning to fall back on.

[56RAF_Stickz]

hello Barnacles

dont wanna appear a smart ass, but in your second example, 100/12 is 8. Was a bit perplexed why 100/6 + 40 sec didnt match your 18mins til I saw you had result=9 not 8. Pity I cant fly fighters (nor read) as well as I can do maths in me head.

Hows lincolnshire nowadays, spent 9 years there in the 70's?

[=TBAS=Sshadow14]

Great stuff man.

Will help many out there.

1 thing i will say.

Auto level is great and gets you to target without drift.
 

[Barnacles]

hello Barnacles

dont wanna appear a smart ass, but in your second example, 100/12 is 8. Was a bit perplexed why 100/6 + 40 sec didnt match your 18mins til I saw you had result=9 not 8. Pity I cant fly fighters (nor read) as well as I can do maths in me head.

Hows lincolnshire nowadays, spent 9 years there in the 70's?

Thanks! Corrected the error. Bomber County is great, hope it is represented in BoBP!

[=OPFR=ColNinny]

Excellent advice.

 

If I may add to that with in-game footage:

 

 Basic Map reading and Navigation

[JG27*Kornezov]

Very good thread thank you.

I think this approach is practical enough and a very good mind exercise.

This topic interests me. I read about the slide rules that were once used.

For example the mechanical flight computer E-6B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B

 

Edited January 29, 2018 by JG27_Kornezov

[Barnacles]

Very good thread thank you.

I think this approach is practical enough and a very good mind exercise.

This topic interests me. I read about the slide rules that were once used.

For example the mechanical flight computer E-6B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B

 

 

Some watches have a rotating bezel which is actually an aviation slide rule like your picture, so you can calculate things like fuel usage, TAS etc.

[Barnacles]

Excellent advice.

 

If I may add to that with in-game footage:

 

 Basic Map reading and Navigation

 

Excellent video!

[JG27*Kornezov]

android app lol

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dao.DaoSoftware.FlightComputerSim

 

There are very interesting android apps. So you can use your phone or tablet as a flight computer.

I think it will be fun to learn the historical E6-B. I saw a link where you can print a part of it and make it. Or even buy it on amazon it will be cool to hold something real in your hands.

 

Or you can download more modern implementation.

Nevertheless the mind method in the first post may be all you need in WoL, in order to calculate ETA fast and communicate it to your friends.

The more advanced versions I think are really for the enthusiasts and full real servers.

Edited January 29, 2018 by JG27_Kornezov

[[CPT]Pike*HarryM]

Have this oldie but goodie from my parent's garage...

 

[[CPT]Pike*HarryM]