How to read contact reports?

[thedoctorking]

What do the numbers on the contact reports mean?

"1 BC course ESE 01 05:20" - I'm guessing that's 0520 Zulu since it's 1340 local time. What's the 01, is that the date? Do you ever get speed? That would be really useful. Also, I frequently get reports without time attached, how does that work?

Any way to make this more verbose in the settings?

[WLRoo]

I think that's correct.

This information is available in the old RtW 2 manual, but for some reason didn't get added to the RtW 3 manual.

One is abvaialble here:

https://nws-online.proboards.com/thread ... anual-rtw2

[mrchuck]

I think the sighting and contact reports need work. See my previous post for some suggestions.
https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopi ... s#p5202588

In addition:
Zulu time is not that useful, there should be a setting so the player can configure the time displayed or remove zulu display altogether.
Sighting reports should be 'aged' and this should be clearly discernable. Even if they are vague or wrong, which is realistic, the UI displays them all in exactly the same way, which isn't helpful. I would very much like to be able to set reports more than say 2-3 hours old to just go away, or only display if requested. An admiral would have staff officers to do this sort of grunt work; the player doesn't.
It should be possible to track major and minor unit sightings separately. If they're inaccurate, fine, but I'd like the option.
Font size and colour should be selectable for accessibility. They are hard to read!
Mouseover should be available rather than having to fiddle with zoom level.

The end result of the current UI is a great deal of visual clutter--typically a screen covered in undifferentiated blue dots, which you then need to hunt around and see which ones arrived when, what they were and so on.

[thedoctorking]

I'm with Mr. Chuck on this. The contact report in general could use a lot of work to be truly useful. As I said in the original post, I'd love to get a report on speed as well as course. Another thing that would be useful is some sense of damage level, especially fire or flooding (from visible leaking oil).