For simulator purposes, astral navigation can be as easy or as complicated as you want to make it. If you want to calculate latitude then of course you'll need a sextant and an astronomical almanac. If you just want a rough confirmation of your instrument headings, then you just have to locate Polaris.
Truth is, variations in star positions over time are somewhat small. It's important if you want to calculate latitude, but not so much if you want a rough estimate of your heading.
If i were to make an educated guess, i'd say that astral navigation will not be a big issue in the sim. In late war scenarios where long range bombing is commonplace there will be electronic navigation equipment, so astral navigation will probably be a backup in case of instrument failure. For the early war scenarios like BoB, the distances are small enough that they can probably be navigated by maps and compass.
I still would love to see a realistic representation of the night sky and some navigation tools to draw up flight plans (something like the tools that Silent Hunter 3 had for example), but i don't think it's going to be a complete necessity right from the start of the new simulator's life. If we get an accurate night sky, then maybe a 3rd party/community mod will give us the tools to use it as well...after all most of the navigation and plotting tools in SH3 were also community made additions and then they were integrated in an official patch.
This is what i'm hoping for, if SoW is as moddable as we've been led to expect then Oleg's team only has to make an accurate engine (granted, it's a big "only" and not a small task) and we can make additional tools ourselves to "plug in" to it. Imagine for example the potential use of scripting. You could write a navigator script that calculates these things for you and adds some error to make it interesting and realistic. Then, you call up the command/radio menu and order your navigator to give you position data, latitude, or wind drift. The script calculates it, adds maybe a 2%-3% error and pops up a message on your screen with the answer...and the best thing is that if the engine can support things like that, we will be able to do most of it ourselves and distribute it just like we do with missions and skins, no need to tax the development team futher.
