planktonette

While that's true, when you lose crew and then have to take on replacements, the previous close-knit well working teams are no longer as close-knit or well working due to inexperience. If the mechanism for training is purely from battle, without the ability to perform drills, then the next time you go into battle a portion of your crew will still be raw untested recruits learning on the job, which if anything should really apply penalties until they get their butts in gear if we're going for any sort of accuracy.

That makes far more sense to me than equipping a book to a ship and thereby getting an arbitrary effect. Success in battle and crew training should result in better efficiency in future battles from the increase in morale and testing of mettle. We already start out in a crap boat and work up from there, I don't see why it would be a hardship to incorporate some sort of skill tree application to take advantage of the existing XP and allow people a little more control over the behaviors/abilities of their crew.

1km per in game minute, or real life minute?

I think, quite honestly, that is the perfect solution. Perhaps also offer a "premium" map kit that is laminated (so that a grease pencil could be used to make erasable marks), and includes a game-scale ruler, 1 game-hourglass, protractor and dividers and suddenly the immersion factor sky rockets, and it becomes more than just a game but also a teaching tool. I also personally find that having the physical map in front of me to refer to or keep helps a great deal with my dead reckoning, rather than having to alt-tab or pop open a map.

True, but equally, some degree of physicality increases immersion and can sometimes be easier to deal with than a screen. I've printed some of tdamap just simply so I can lay in a more accurate course than eyeballing on screen. That said, my initial desires after a couple days of testing are for a better compass - the 24 point rose feels cumbersome to use for any sort of accurate headings over time, and I hate to suggest a digital bearing display, so it would be nice if there was a hotkey to push to open a compass popup similar to the map for a better than eyeball course reading. The second thing I really desired was some way to plot my position along a heading based on my time at speed, but unless I'm being really dumb, that seems non trivial outside of the game due to game scale, and non-trivial in game due to the map being non-interactive. Are the game knots * game time passed = real world distance? I agree that it's a slippery slope, but let's be honest, we're not talking about a gps here, but just the tools to perform adequate dead reckoning, either in game or out. Also, it's useful to remember that these ships were not crewed by a single person, but by a complement of men all performing different tasks to allow the captain to make the best decisions possible. I think with very little leap of faith, that could account for say a crew-member on the ship making course and speed logs at given time intervals that can be referred to later to calculate a rough position. Make the player work for it, but at least give all the tools needed to try.