Clock orientation

It takes practise but clock directions are a good and relatively quick way of describing the relative direction of an object using the analogy of a 12-hour clock. Just imagine the clock-face around you with 12 o'clock to your front, 3 o'clock to your right, and so on.

Left and right orientation

I find that people sometimes like to say "to your right" or "to your left" and there often being confusion about how much someone should rotate in these directions.

Allow me to set a standard by making left and right 90° angles and adding finer rotation with "by left" and "by right" to mean 30° rotations, equivalent to an hour's rotation on the clock face.

You could describe 5 o'clock as "behind by left". Though it may be simpler to only use "by left" and "by right" as adjustments to a "left" or "right" call, or as a refinement to the clock method.

Compass orientation

The two major ways in which we can orient ourselves are in terms of compass directions and clock directions.

A compass has 4 major "cardinal points" at 90° to each other; north, south, east and west. This can be further divided by the "half cardinal points" north-east, south-east, south-west and north-west.

We sometimes want to be even more specific. The division of the half cardinal points are known as the "false points", otherwise known as "three letter points", as they take a major cardinal direction + a half cardinal direction for example ESE orients east by south-east. The 8 false points are NNE, ENE, ESE, SSE, SSW, WSW, WNW and NNW.

The last refinement I will describe are the "by points". These are the points dividing the false points and so there are 16 of them on a compass rose. For example, north by east is between north and north-north-east.

It can be handy to visually divide a battlefield into segments that can be quickly described to help pin-point an object of interest to your team. A rectangular area can be cut into 4 as the north-west segment, the north-east segment and so on.