[Outryder]

gets me to thinking - could sombody mod the ground target object to be a compass rose?

If you are flying in a Full switch dedicated DF server, the bases and targets will not be displayed on the inflight map. The briefing map only shows the bases and the target objectives are not shown. So I don't believe this idea would work.

My original reason for creating the Nav Rose was for Dead Reckoning navigation useage with printed maps. Part of the Dead Reckoning Nav technique requires pre-plotting and close monitoring of flight times at alttitude that may vary. This means calculating IAS/TAS against flight time.

One of the things I learned about trying to get to a target area in my ground pounding SBD was that taking a straight line approach to a target area was futile. I'd meet the enemy fighters head on before I got there. I adopted a technique of taking a wide indirect approach to the TZ. This left the opposition side guessing as to where I was going to be coming from. Since I flew PTO flights mostly, this meant that I often did not have landmarks to guide me. Sometimes I had to deviate from my planned course and needed to be able to plot a new course from my present location. I could do this from a printed map as long as I had kept tract of my flight time on a course heading.

In essense, this is how the pilots of WWII had to navigate. By adopting those same Dead Reckoning techniques we inhance the simulated experience of flying combat missions with this simulator (or any other).

Give me a few days and I'll try to produce a pictorial on how I use the rose and printed maps. I've also got to hunt up a IAS/TAS conversion chart I used to calculate flight time distances.