It would have to be slightly more than just that. At the very least,
you'd need a delay-factor for the local hour-angle of the moon. Also an
amplitude-factor.
Even then, you'd sometimes get the tide happening about an hour
displaced from reality due to the loss of the solar tide. If you added a
simple solar tide (i.e a delay factor for the local solar hour-angle and
a solar-tide amplitude-factor) then you'd probably be getting a pretty
good rough approximation for a given area. Good enough for a flight-sim,
certainly.
Yes, some kind of tide delay factor, preferably one that can vary from place to place, as well as solar and lunar tidal amplitudes (from hour angle and distance) would probably be required to get something roughly accurate.
However, calculating the tide for a given coordinate is probably the lesser problem here (one can use xtide's output for reference, etc.) My main issue is whether the visualization of the tidal effects can somehow be done with e.g. a Nasal script (good) or by extensively modifying the FG engine itself (not so good, since the FG/SimGear source code is pretty abstract and not very well-commented IMHO)
It would also better model those areas of the world where the solar tide
dominates
I thought the lunar tide is always dominant and the solar tide just adds to it during spring tide. Or have I misunderstood you there?
Martin
