Pat, let me clarify some of your WOD calculations
...you want the wind out of the ship's crotch. That little corner where the angle deck meets the forward portion of the flight-deck. Split the difference between the ship's heading and the angle deck's heading, approximately 8° off the BRC. Thus, the wind's direction should be approximately 4° left (port) of the BRC to be absolutely perfect.
Please see the attached image. A moving carrier produces its own wind (the red arrow). When there is some natural wind (cyan arrows), the carrier will steer a course which will put the resulting wind (the yellow arrow) down the angled deck, meaning the ship will steer slightly to starboard of the wind direction to achieve this effect (but not having the wind out of the crotch).
How fast is "forward" with the carrier?
25 kts is standard for the carrier speed. I understand it can be changed in the carrier's sim.cfg file, but I haven't looked into that. I am sure there's a way, I just don't know it yet.
Yes, there's a parameter in the sim.cfg dealing with the speed, but it sets the maximum speed of a carrier:
max_speed_mph = 50
As far as I know, both AIcarriers programs set the forward speed of a carrier via setting its throttle to 60%, which gives 50*0.6=30 kts. There's no way to change that 60% value unless you edit and recompile the software. However, you can tweak the
max_speed_mph parameter and set it to, say, 42 which will result in the desired 25 kts.
Since the default carrier speed is 25kts, if you set the wind to come out of the the ship's BRC, as discussed above, then you need 10-15 kts windspeed to get the required 30-35 kts WOD, for the F/A-18C.
And, because those winds are vectors (they all have directions and magnitudes), here starts pure trigonometry
I suggest using
this online calculator to compute natural wind parameters.
First you will need to enter:
- the
A angle, corresponding to your carrier's angled deck (8.5° for Javier's Nimitz or 9.2° for the default carrier);
- the
b side, corresponding to your carrier's speed (25 kts in this example);
- the
c side, corresponding to the desired WOD (35 kts in this example).
Then hit the Calculate button and you'll get a solution:
- the
a side is the natural wind's speed (~11 kts in this example);
- the
C angle is the angle between a and b sides (~152° in this example).
But for natural wind's direction you'll need to use not this obtuse C angle but its acute pair: 180°-152°=28°
So, if you have a carrier moving @ 25kts with the BRC 270°, you should set natural wind from 270°-28°=242° @ 11 kts. This will give you WOD 35 down the angle.
Hope this helps.
PS. You can play with this calculator and see how reducing the carrier's speed will decrease the angle between the two wind components. Also, I'd suggest using
Beaufort scale.
