Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
The percentage that gets filtered out depends on how highly polarized the light you're filtering is. It's fairly easy to experiment with this, decent polarized sunglasses are maybe $20.
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Looking into this a bit more, there's two different sources of polarization you can filter away underwater:
- The polarization of the incident sunlight
- The polarization of the scattered sunlight
Filtering away the incident sunlight provides maybe a 30% increase in contrast. Filtering away the polarization of the scattered sunlight is a lot more effective, but works best when you're perpendicular to the sun rays. For instance, if the sun is shining straight down at the water, the light has peak polarization when you're looking horizontally, and no polarization (other than the inherent polarization of the incident sunlight) if you look up or down.
This article suggests
up to 80% increased range in detection. This is roughly equivalent to halving the penalty (possibly also granting a +2 offset) in the horizontal plane.
Coincidentally very similar to the bonus
Enhanced Senses suggests for using Ultraviolet Vision underwater!