Short, frequent posts on what is new in Debrief v4, written in the same pull request as the work they describe.
Sensor bearings and TMA solutions had no walkthrough: the only taste of TMA was Tidy a track's shear. Now there is a fifth, Bearings and TMA, after Annotate and export a figure. Seven steps, about twelve minutes, on a fresh copy of serial 1, the same in VS Code's Get Started page and in the browser. It fits a solution the way legacy Debrief's TMA tutorial teaches, one leg at a time, and ends near what the bearings allow.
Bearings were the ground; this is what stands on it. Choose a period of a sensor's cuts, make a first guess at where the contact was and how it moved, and drag it on the map while its bearing residuals follow the drag, after legacy Debrief's Stacked Dots. Leave a wild bearing out of the RMS, split the solution into legs at a manoeuvre, and drag each leg on its own. Every one of those is a step you can undo, and a legacy plot's solutions come in as solutions.
Bearings are where TMA starts. Legacy Debrief drew a platform's sensor cuts as lines from its track, and let you say which side of a towed array a contact was on. Debrief now does the same: bearings come in from REP and DSF files, legacy plots and a Rider's narrative, are drawn from the track at their time (or from a towed array trailing behind it), only in the time window, and a towed array's ambiguous pairs are resolved one cut at a time or a period at once, each an undoable step.
The browser version of Debrief, the playground and the web demo, had grown thirteen panels in one column beside the map, and analysts scrolled up and down to find them. Now, on any screen 900 pixels wide or more, the panels sit in tab groups around the map, grouped by task, and you can drag them where you want them.
An analyst new to Debrief should be producing something useful within an hour of first opening it (OUT-05). Debrief now has four short walkthroughs that teach the common work on the sample exercise, each step ticking itself off as the analyst does it, in VS Code and in the browser alike; and a web demo, full screen, where anyone can try them without installing anything.
A figure in a post-exercise report is only as good as the analysis behind it. Months later, someone asks: which plot is this, and was it before or after the track was corrected? Debrief's exported images now answer that themselves. Each carries an ID naming its plot and the exact step of the plot's history it was exported at, in its metadata and, small, in its corner; and Find source of image… takes the image, or that ID typed in, back to the plot as it was then.
An exercise rarely arrives in one file. The serial comes in from the range, a ship's own navigation log a day later, a colleague's corrected track the week after. Collation is putting them together: seeing which items have data for which platforms and when, choosing which supplies each period, and taking new data as it arrives without losing the work already done on the plot. Debrief now does all of that, from the catalogue, and keeps a record of every choice.
A track on a chart is more use with the times written along it. Legacy Debrief let you label a track's fixes every so often, mark them with its symbol, and put direction arrows along it, each at its own frequency. Debrief now does the same: select one or more tracks, say how often, and the map labels the times on the clock's round numbers, beside each track, thinning them as you zoom out so it never turns into a smudge.
Most of an exercise's narrative doesn't arrive as REP lines. It arrives as Word documents and PDFs: a ship's log typed up with its metadata hidden in the text, a rider's table of times, bearings and remarks, a printout of either. Legacy Debrief read four of these house styles, and Debrief now reads them too, on the desktop and in your browser, asking the questions legacy Debrief asked before it reads anything in. And the Timeline has gained legacy's Narrative viewer extras: words highlighted wherever they appear, choosing an entry without moving time, text size and wrapping, and the columns shown, all tucked into one small menu so the list stays quiet.
Every platform in an exercise keeps a log, and reconstructing what happened means reading them side by side, against the tracks. Debrief now holds narrative properly: each entry has its time, who wrote it, what kind of entry it is and its text, and every platform's entries sit on one Zulu time axis. You read them in the Timeline, with notes and periods of interest, and it follows current time as you play, without ever fighting your own scrolling. Choose an entry and current time moves to it. Filter by source or type, search the text, add and correct entries, and see the current one beside its track on the map. It copes with sixty thousand entries.