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Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils To Help Avoid Collisions at Sea (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Urgent new orders went out earlier this month for United States Navy warships that have been plagued by deadly mishaps this year. More sleep and no more 100-hour workweeks for sailors. Ships steaming in crowded waters like those near Singapore and Tokyo will now broadcast their positions as do other vessels. And ships whose crews lack basic seamanship certification will probably stay in port until the problems are fixed.[...] The orders issued recently by the Navy's top officer for ships worldwide, Vice Adm. Thomas S. Rowden, drew on the lessons that commanders gleaned from a 24-hour fleetwide suspension of operations last month to examine basic seamanship, teamwork and other fundamental safety and operational standards. Collectively, current and former officers said, the new rules mark several significant cultural shifts for the Navy's tradition-bound fleets. At least for the moment, safety and maintenance are on par with operational security, and commanders are requiring sailors to use old-fashioned compasses, pencils and paper to help track potential hazards (alternative source), as well as reducing a captain's discretion to define what rules the watch team follows if the captain is not on the ship's bridge. "Rowden is stomping his foot and saying, 'We've got to get back to basics,'" said Vice Adm.
Please explain why US Navy warhsips have crews who "lack basic seamanship certification".
I mean.. I understand that they might not have the piece of paper, the same way they might not have passed the official driving test to drive a tank, but surely... surely at some point... someone gave them the equivalent skills and/or sent them on the same kinds of training such that it would be a cinch to acquire such certification?
Not to be outdone by the Navy, the army will go back to walking and emergency ration packs.
Those guys think they're going back to the basics but they are still sailing on their big modern ships with their fancy kitchens. We're real men, we're truly going back to the basics.
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Busy shipping lanes are too busy to monitor and track with paper and pencil.
Modern shipping works because ships are able to use technology like AIS and radar to track other vessels accurately and in real time. Navigation systems -- chotplotting, AIS, radar, autopilot, and weather information -- can be tied together in real time, allowing a ship's heading and course to be altered in real time based on actual conditions at sea.
I can definitely see the added advantages of humans with binoculars to spot closer in traffic and validate radar tracking and AIS data, but the idea that they'll just do all this in real time with paper and pencil is as silly as the SEC announcing it will combat stock fraud by switching back to pencils and paper spreadsheets.
Everyone relies too much on tech. I think semaphores is no longer taught in the NAVY. Same for morse code, even though in nearly every bad-guy movie, there is a 5% chance that the hero will tap-tap-tap a message to someone
After the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, one of the surprising findings was that adding more inspectors could actually make things less safe. Each inspector figured if they skipped inspecting a part, the other inspector(s) would catch it. So they felt it was not that big a deal to be lazy at their job and skip a few of the harder inspections here and there. But when all the inspectors think this way, the chances of a bad part passing "inspection" increased compared to if there was only one inspector.
In the same way, if you know there's a computer system which tracks your ship's location and the location of all other ships, and automatically sounds an alarm if it detects a collision course, then you're more likely to slack at your job and start reading slashdot or the latest J.K. Rowling book. OTOH if there is no computer system, and you and ONLY YOU are personally responsible for tracking your and that other ship's position and course to make sure you don't collide, then you're going to have 100% of your attention devoted to that task. Double or multiple redundancy works for equipment, but not always for people.
I'm pretty sure most people know the morse code for the letters "O" and "S".
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What if you can't trust your electronic instruments?
An uncle who served on destroyers long ago told me that "Navy regulations are written in blood". That regulations and training say this is the proper way to do something and you will do it in no other way. That the "proper way" was determined by people dying when it was done otherwise. That some ways of doing things are more than "tradition".
Just wait until Tesla unleashes autodriving on the American freeway. There will be carnage and lawsuits and tens of thousands of people dead and dying. Some idiots are looking forward to this because they are too lazy to keep their hands on the wheel, not realizing that it will cost them the horrible and painful death of their entire family.
Perhaps the 5x5 tap code is easier than morse. If the 5x5 code forgotten it can be reconstructed.
There are already tens of thousands of dead and dying, so it looks to be an equal tradeoff if what you claim is true.
I've sailed all my life with charts and without GPS. It's absolutely doable. You don't need weather info in real time. The weather doesn't change that fast. Traffic that poses immediate risk can be handled visually. Long term traffic is knowable via VHS. Autopilot shouldn't be used without a lookout. You're only using a chart and compass for the overall route anyway. If you're looking at radar to avoid an immediate hazard, you're doing it wrong.
Has nothing to do with those GPS scramblers we heard about last week I'm sure...
In the case of espionage, if the nav systems are compromised, it would be good to know how to navigate by hand; to know what the computer is automating. Relying solely on the computer to steer the boat is a point of failure. I'm fine with them learning how to navigate manually. If their data contradicts the computer's, then identify which is wrong, and if it's the computer, that's a huge discovery. It's a backup AND check. TFA does not state that the nav systems are being replaced or shut down.
When the navigation computer has to reboot on the B-52 bomber, the crew breaks out the slide ruler and map to figure out where they're going.
Yes, but the E6B slide rule is not something that ever went obsolete like traditional slide rules. The E6B was still used in ground school in the 1990s, might still be used in classrooms today. And many pilots still carry one in their bag, next to the paper chart and a flashlight, just in case. Its not a B-52 or a military thing. We're talking Cessna 150 pilots too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'd not come across that before, but it's a pretty poor code. In English, the frequency of the letter e is 12.7%, yet it's 6 taps in that code. In contrast, f is only 2.2%, yet is 3 taps. The five most common letters in English are (in order) e, t, a, o, i. In tap code, they are 6, 8, 1, 7, and 6 taps: of the five most common letters, only one requires fewer than the average number of taps. In contrast, in Morse, they are 1, 1, 2, 3, and 2 taps.
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I have a relative in SURFLANT who tried teaching juniors how to use a sextant for fun and for just in case. He was told to stop.
What if you can't trust your electronic instruments?
Presumably part of the reason you have lookouts is for this reason, but if you *always* believe your instruments to be unreliable then your navigation is limited to what you can visually see.
I'm not saying they should only rely on AIS & radar, obviously a military ship should validate those systems' targets which should be in visual range. But those electronic systems can actually do a great job of predicting potential collisions, especially AIS. It's literally a broadcast of a ship's position, heading and speed. Even consumer marine electronics can produce collision prediction and course plotting for these targets.
The Navy's problem isn't that technology doesn't work, it's that they're not using it.
Hikers shmikers. Every time I use my GPS to navigate in my car and can feel my brain cells rotting away...
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Because they can be spoofed and sometimes are.
A simple "watch the radar screen" and "plot the contacts" works.
Letting the machine do it works most of the time, except when it doesn't, and no one notices.
Plotting closest point of approach is simple with pencil and paper (polar coordinate paper).
planing for a North Korea attack where GPS may not work right in some worst case scenarios.
So it's the qwerty of the code world. Maybe it was designed to prevent printers/typewriters from jamming to.
It wasn't devised for efficiency, for day to day use. It was devised for simplicity, for use in an emergency by nearly anyone. Its what would get used in the "movie scenes" with the "tap tap tap", when one sailor is trying to communicate with someone in the neighboring cell. It was a primary means of communications by isolated POWs in Vietnam.
Morse may have been standard training at the Naval Academy but I don't think all enlisted were taught morse. Signalmen and radiomen certainly, but others, not so sure. Two uncles served in the Navy long ago. When I asked one about morse he said to talk to his brother, that his brother was the radioman.
Maybe so, but any idiot can sketch themselves a 5x5 grid to use as a reference to send code. Using Morse would require memorizing a complete alphabet of codes and retaining it through years of non-use until that one time it was suddenly needed. The grid may not be efficient, but it's a lot simpler for someone who doesn't use codes day-to-day.
"...will now broadcast their positions as do other vessels. "
So the 'other vessels' will have to take care of avoiding them, what about lighthouses and islands and other dangerous pieces of 'land'?
And they are supposed to notice missiles coming at them from hundreds of miles at supersonic speeds?
The problem is that while most sailors knows someone who can read or write, only officers can read and write. Therefore, going back to pencil and paper may not be good enough. They need to start with crayons.
All it takes is for people to pay attention.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
.. crosschecking: a good practice for many things.
Does make some sense to have humans in the loop, with both the knowledge and the manual tools to at the least double check and keep an eye on things.
So where does that leave the "RAPID AT ALL COSTS PUSH" to autonomous unmanned ships at sea, airliners in the air, heavy trucks on the roads and cars with no drivers or controls for manual use.
I am not against these things, I just think the path to get there is longer than most think. Since you often have to alter code for the exceptions that were not predicted or expected during the design and testing phases.
At least for officers, the basic navigational and shiphandling courses got replaced by a dvd set.
I'm not kidding.
How about we just stop with all the "war on X"s? When you are constantly on a war footing training takes a backseat and duty patterns change, leading to fatigue. In the Navy's case ships are kept out of port for much longer than they should, meaning many repairs are done underway which leads to a further reduction of training time and off duty time for the sailors. Stop wasting money on massively overbudget projects like the DDX/Zumwalt program (only 3 ships produced for a cost of almost $4 billion per ship) or the LCSs which are under-gunned, have engine issues, and have hulls so poorly made that one got cracked from a champagne bottle at the christening. $12 billion just from the DDX program would have gone a long way towards refitting ships and training current/more crews for said ships. And let's not even get started on the F-35 program.....
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
When the navigation computer goes toes-up on ANY aircraft, the crew breaks out the charts to keep track of their location & course. The B-52 is old, but that response to a failing instrument is no different than on any other aircraft.
AIS is great on a ship until you end up at Moscow Airport. The fact that the Navy didn't use it in busy shipping lanes previously seems quite stupid, and if their ships have radar absorbing properties it becomes all the more important.
Good navigators ALWAYS have a map out with their last known position and expected flight path marked on it. I don't care WHO you are or what kind of navigation system you have, good practice demands that a pilot keep situational awareness as sharp as possible, meaning that you are keeping track of where you are, the status of your equipment and where the nearest emergency diversion airfield might be.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
A lesson many programmers could take to heart.
This is dumb. American drivers are already too lazy and stupid to drive properly and attentively, and as a result, we have tens of thousands dead every year on the road (about 30k, last I checked). The number has gone down, though (used to be 50k/year), thanks to safer vehicles (airbags, better crashworthiness, etc.).
Autodriving can only make things better. Sure, it'll fail sometimes and people will die, but it'll be an order of magnitude fewer than now.
If you want *real* safety, we need to 1) legislatively *require* auto-driving software to be developed to avionics standards, not developed the way most software is these days, and 2) we need to fund and build SkyTran to get most people (esp. commuters) out of personally-owned vehicles, and to get them to their destinations much more quickly than the 2-dimensional road system allows.
Yep, you just convinced me. I looked up the Wikipedia page for tap code, spend about 30 seconds looking at it, and now I can say I know how to use tap code, because the table is so simple (the only "hard" thing to memorize is that K shares C's space). By contrast, I don't know Morse Code, even though I had a little interest in it when I was young. All I remember now is how to signal SOS.
Definitely a good example of simplicity and ease-of-learning trumping efficiency.
I don't; it offloads something that used to be a pain in the ass, and adds clairvoyance too.
I remember driving without GPS very well; I've spent more years without it than with it, after all. Driving any place that I wasn't familiar with was a PITA: you had to get verbal directions from people, which were completely unreliable, only worked from one direction, etc. Or you had to study maps and try to figure out exactly where "123 Main St" is on a road that runs for miles, and frequently has the same street number used in different places (e.g., "123 Main St NW" vs "123 Main St SE", and the idiot who gave you the address didn't bother giving you either NW or SE). Good luck even finding a street number on many maps, and when you did get nearby, good luck actually seeing the street numbers on any of the buildings in the vicinity to help you find it.
Now, it's easy: fire up Google Maps, type in the *name* of where you want to go, it shows it to you on the map, select it to verify that's where you want to go (there might be multiple places with that name, as with chain stores), the hit "navigate" and it'll tell you how to get there, turn-by-turn.
Even better, it can tell you if there's any traffic jams along the way, and route you around them if feasible. Before GPS, that required you to have ESP, which obviously isn't real, or maybe listening to some radio station and hoping to hear a useful traffic report in time, between all the ads and crappy music. Now it's routine. (Also, those traffic reports weren't that useful; they only reported on really big jams on main highways in large metro areas, not smaller jams elsewhere.)
The thing is that with modern navigational systems, it's pretty easy to detect GPS spoofing. Let's say it happens.. Suddenly, the data coming off your GPS unit isn't going to match up with the rest of the sensors installed on the ship. In addition to the GPS, ships carry gyrocompasses, speed logs, and other sensors.
Modern navigational suites are supposed to compare the SOG derived from the GPS with the STW (Speed Through Water) from the speed log. If they're more than, say, 6kt out from each other (to allow for current), it throws an alarm. Same thing with gyro heading and COG from the GPS.
Lastly, an observant crew should notice that something is wrong as if they get spoofed to a place far enough away, their satcom suite should become very unhappy as the computed angles to the satellites they're targetting will be wrong enough they can't track any more.
As far as the AIS thing goes, all I have to say is "Finally"... The US Navy is pretty much alone in western nations in not participating in AIS during peacetime. As a recreational sailor, I always follow the rule "If it's grey, stay away" but that's hard to do if you don't know they're there. I'm in the PNW, and more than a few times I've been out sailing in the islands, come around a point, and been surprised to come across a (small) warship that was hidden by the headland. Had they been participating in AIS, I could have better avoided them.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
With all that said, though, AIS & Radar massively improve safety by radically improving your situational awareness, especially in foul weather. I was sailing up in the Broughton Archipelago. On a couple of occasions we got stuck out in dense fog, where we could see maybe 150m or so. We kept an appropriate watch, with the other guy onboard maintaining a bow watch, emitting appropriate fog signals, etc... but the radar was a huge help, especially to ensure we remained in channel.
On that same trip, we were crossing Queen Charlotte Straight, and passed (in fog) within 2 nautical miles of the Crystal Serenity (largest cruise ship on the Alaska run this year), and the only reason we knew she was there was due to AIS, seeing her on radar, and her crew being active on the VHF. Had we not known she was there, our original course would have brought us too close for comfort.
So yes, it's doable, but done right, the modern aids are a huge improvement in situational awareness and safety.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
He's not talking about planing wood, silly. He's obviously talking about hydroplaning. They're going to replace all their destroyers with these...
I was legal to fly by myself before I was legal to drive myself to the airport.....
Signed off to fly solo on 16th birthday...driver's ed didn't finish for another month or two yet, so couldn't get a driver's license yet :(
and, umm, how did those ships get where they are? Don't think some random dude parks those things :O
One hopes they included: LOOK OUT THE WINDOWS as part of the procedures also ! Don't want those pesky cargo ships sneaking up on you.
No, good navigators always have CHART out. However, the navigator has been replaced on most aircraft with a GPS.
They want to sailors to understand what the software does and why it does it. No different than doing arithmetic with a pencil.
love is just extroverted narcissism
It's hilarious to read comments and posts about how this is due to "budget cutting". These cuts are not perceptible at taxpayer level. https://www.statista.com/stati... ...yes, there's a "drop" in there from 2011-2016, but I believe that's in overseas adventuring. Far more importantly, the "drop" is to the 2008 budget, more than double the 2000 budget, when there were few of these collisions. It's now nearly $2000 per American citizen. Add up all spending on Pentagon, DOE (nukes), DVA, and the spy/surveillance services, debt servicing, and it's a trillion a year, nearly $10,000 per household.
And yet, there isn't enough money for the PEOPLE in the American military, not even enough for their really basic training. Is is really all blown on overpriced weapons systems? Can't you include training in the weapons-system budget or something? Sneak it in.
on the Great Lakes.
caught that in an article last year, Celestial navigation has made it back into the curriculum. Now factor in a 3 to 4 year window before you see any results of that into the system (training enough people in the arts, & getting them in enough mustard in chief positions, yada yada. in other words it takes time for solutions to take effect, unlike. Hence it is gonna take a year or two before the navy finally changes course to a core competent naval force,,,, again. Because in the long run, nothing beats reinventing the wheel every two generations. (P.S. yes, yes it is Master Chief, but if you can't be creative you shouldn't join.)
In digital world, your security and privacy can be compromised by others even if you do all due diligence. Many of my friends and relatives have my birthdate, phone, address, email, anniversary etc in their contacts. They readily give permission to read contacts to every imaginable app. How do I keep this info private? I can't.
Navy can go to pencil and drawing board, but how will it prevent other ships getting fooled by GPS spoofing? The only benefit I see here is that they will be able to file a civil suit against the other ship.
NPR had an interesting take on this recently. It seems that seamen have received less and less training over the last few years, an effort to save money. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Touché
Chart, map... Not many know the difference..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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It's so much more than that. The bridge is manned by deck, which are the same guys who make the ship pretty and they also have their hands in a bunch of other shit.... but the most important thing to the pissbaby CO is how much paint he can get these kids to put on the ship so the admiral will say "OH BOY THE SHIP LOOKS GREAT". They make these guys sweep and paint nonstop until some of them kill themselves no joke.
The most relaxing times for these guys are lunch, watch, pooping, and the few hours a day they get for sleep.. and if they have watch during sleep time.. they simply get no sleep! For them free time is measured in minutes a day, they sleep and poop at the same time. It's an absolutely unimaginable way to live. Doing a watch that would be the same as a normal civilian workday might have been the only time these guys weren't doing hard labor in the past 24 hours.
Lastly, an observant crew should notice that something is wrong as if they get spoofed to a place far enough away, their satcom suite should become very unhappy as the computed angles to the satellites they're targetting will be wrong enough they can't track any more.
GPS has an omni-directional antenna. You don't know the angle to the satellites. GPS coordinates are based off the difference in time from the various satellites the receiver gets signal from.
Not only is it great for that, it works just as well in other countriea. I could do it without GPS and traffic info, but boy would it be a lot less effective. It has saved me many, many hours of frustration. The only hard part is figuring out when it's confused, which is rare but not unheard-of, especially if there's an unexpected road closure.
You can trust electronics in peacetime. You can't when there's a war - especially if Russians somehow 'advice' the other side. But in a war, you are not meeting a lot of other ships. You fire at them as they come within reach of your guns - until you're hit badly.
A tanker is not going to ram a warship during war - they'll sink it before it gets too close.
Because the whole point is to have a code that is easy to remember. Who knows the frequency of all the letters in various languages? Sure, 'E' is the most frequent in English - what is the seventeenth most frequent? Everybody knows the order of the alphabet.
I haven't read Clarke this decade, but I think 'The City and the Stars' might be somewhat closer to a description of "a future in which nobody really understood how anything works."
I'm deeply impressed by your geek credentials. What sorts of things do you get into these days?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
it does not matter how fancy your nav stuff is worst case you should be able to run with
"Is the Sun Coming UP?? PUT IT ON THE LEFT"
and if you have to post seaman with Lanterns then a Captain might want to be current on the correct colors and such
I never understood the military love of working exhausted. The Army loves it too. under man and overextend. Then when bad things happen blame the men. Obviously it is need occasionally. War is about pushing it. But it is not a badge of Courage.
... is to make the Navy ship hulls and engines stronger, so they can just drive though any other boat.
Then they can just pilot around at ramming speed all the time!
Yeah, once in a while it gets confused, but it's usually pretty obvious. That's a lot better than the "old days" where I had to drive around in circles looking for some little road to turn onto, or figure out what someone meant by the "3rd right turn", or try to find some street address.
if a bunch of crewmen coming out of the complete trainwreck that is American education, and can't operate simple navigation systems on 5 hours of sleep, how would you expect them to be able to do the same with traditional means?
Your crew 1) lacks education, and 2) are overworked. Pens, charts, and compasses will not fix it.
Two words: affirmative action.
The GPs point was that other satcom systems are not omni-directional but rather require you to point the antennae at the bird; which you know how to do as a function of where the satellite should be and where you are currently. If your knowledge of position is based on GPS and its spoofed by a large amount you will not be able to properly point your other communications systems.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Google Maps does not tell you where there will be a traffic jam, it tells you where there IS a traffic jam. Unless you are either IN the jam (in which case it is too late) or VERY close to the jam, that information is near useless.
Just yesterday, on a long trip with friends, I had two experiences with Google Maps. First, my friend is driving on a 4-lane highway, and traffic comes to a stop. I look at Maps, and it shows the problem is construction about a mile ahead. But Maps helpfully suggests an alternate route. This 'alternate route' was a single-lane windy road, that ended at the intersection of another 4-lane highway. It doesn't take much sense to know that if a bunch of people follow that route (and it was clear that they were), that road is going to get VERY backed up at that intersection. Decided to stay on the original route, and was through it in about 10 minutes. By the time we made it through, the ALTERNATE route was solid red. Those poor suckers were stuck in that mess for at least a half hour.
Second situation - farther along we are about 2 hours from home, and everyone is getting tired. I am now driving, and my friend asks me how I plan to go. I tell him the route I usually take. He says Maps says it is 10 minutes quicker to go another way. A few seconds of discussion and we realize that the suggested route is going to go right past an NFL stadium, and we should arrive at that point about 1/2 hour after the game ends. No thanks! We looked at Maps later, at about the time we would be there, and it was one solid mass of red, nobody was going anywhere.
The only thing I find GPS and Maps good for is pinpointing a location. The actual routes they choose are seldom what I would call the best routes (for instance, I think it is worth a few extra minutes to go on a route that has lower stress than a fast-but-insane-traffic route).
I wouldn't automatically assume that modern sailors are lazy and incompetent and previous generations were much better. From Wikipedia:
"The Honda Point disaster was the largest peacetime loss of U.S. Navy ships. On the evening of September 8, 1923, seven destroyers, while traveling at 20 knots (37 km/h), ran aground at Honda Point, a few miles from the northern side of the Santa Barbara Channel off Point Arguello on the coast in Santa Barbara County, California. Two other ships grounded, but were able to maneuver free of the rocks. Twenty-three sailors died in the disaster."
Give me a stopwatch and a map and I'll fly the Alps in a plane with no windows.
GPS denial or GPS spoofing are very real and very much in view of military planners, trainers, etc.
Maybe some ship captains were not keeping up with training for these cases as they should have been?
But unlike the examples in the related story: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... In order to create a collision in a busy channel you only need to put the ship a few hundred meters out of place to hit another ship. Possibly a narrow enough margin not to be detected as spoofing. That and the lack of basic skills, listening to the VHF, binoculars on watch, knowing navigation lights, etc etc. With a full deck on watch, just visually scanning there shouldn't be these fatal accidents even if instigated by bad actors.
Right, but think about how GPS actually works. Each satellite is transmitting a precise time signal, and the receiver determines its position through trilateration. It basically measures the distance to each of the satellites in orbit, based on the path delay between the satellite and the receiver. Spoofing works by replacing the signals received from the satellite with one of earth origin.
What you can't do when spoofing a position is replicate the geometry (and thus differences in path delay) that makes GPS work. What will suddenly happen is that everyone's GPSs in the area affected by spoofing are suddenly going to give exactly the same outputs. The same lat/long, the same Course over Ground, the same Speed Over Ground.
So let's take the example of a ship doing 14 knots, heading 90 degrees true, and located at 123.03W by 49.05N. As a bad actor, I want to misguide them, and cause them to move to 123.04W and 49.03N, so I setup my spoofer and start broadcasting the signal. Here's the rub: as soon as I turn the spoofer on, everyone in the region is suddenly going to have their GPS readout "123.04W and 49.03N, doing 14kt SOG at 90 True COG. Furthermore, if I have two GPSs onboard with decently separated antennas (say on either side of the bridge), they're both going to be showing the exact same values, which should also trigger alarms in the navigation system.
Now, you're absolutely right, none of this should eliminate proper watch keeping and situational awareness.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
GPS has an omni-directional antenna. You don't know the angle to the satellites. GPS coordinates are based off the difference in time from the various satellites the receiver gets signal from.
Right, but the Ku-Band and X-Band communications antennas are highly directional, and calculate their lookangles to the satellite based on the known position of the satellite and the GPS position on the ground. Furthermore, many TDMA based modems depend on knowing the precise position of the transmitter so that they can synchronize the transmissions properly. if the ground position doesn't match the time-of-flight for the signal, collisions start happening and error lights go on.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
That's still no reason to ignore the colregs (collision regulations), which require adequate watch to be kept at all times while underway. This includes both visual watch keeping (aka the mk1 eyeball), and in the case of limited visibility (fog and/or smoke), a requirement to maintain an auditory watch (so listening for other ships), and produce sounds on your own, namely fog signals, gongs, and bells.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
What they *NEED* are apps that emulate a sextant.
Circa 2000 I believe that on aircraft carriers an enlisted man used a WW2-era mechanical chronometer and a sextant to plot the ship's position at least once day. It was recorded along with GPS and at least one other electronic method (LORAN, inertial, ?).
This was shown in a documentary. One of the filmmakers asked the crewman why they were using such ancient methods when they have all this fancy and redundant electronics. The crewman responded with something like: "We're a warship, we have to navigate when all the fancy electronics fail (satellites, land based navigation beacons, etc)".
I guess you don't realize that Google Maps will continuously update your route based on the latest traffic conditions. No, it's not that great at predicting things like some NFL game ending, but it sounds like that was quite some time before you would have gotten near it; if you had gone that way, it would have likely seen the stopped traffic before you got there, and attempted to reroute you around it. You seem to be assuming that whatever route you pick at the beginning is the route you're stuck with, which simply isn't the case. Anyway, as for your NFL example, what exactly do you suggest as an alternative? If I'm visiting that city, there's no way I'm going to know about such a thing because I don't follow football (even if it was in my city I probably wouldn't know, and certainly wouldn't have any idea of what time the game ends). So you're not being helpful here: for me, the choice is to use GM and hope it routes me around the game traffic in time, or go back to paper maps and probably get stuck in traffic because that's the most direct route. In short, you're expecting too much.
Compasses, pencils and Xbox controllers???
"Long term traffic is knowable via VHS."
Well, there's the problem. They need to upgrade to CD at least, if not BlueRay.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Sorry, what did you say?
And now for something completely different...
Communication Breakdown...
The reason the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines squabble among themselves is that they don't speak the same language. For example, take a simple phrase like, "Secure the building."
The Army will put guards around the place.
The Navy will turn out the lights and lock the doors.
The Marines will kill everybody inside and make it a command post.
The Air Force will take out a 5-year lease with an option to buy.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
This will be good for when they have to go full no computer Battlestar Galactica mode
If you put the vowels in the top row, aeiou, and then the rest of the letters in alphabetical order, then you'd have a much more efficient code and one that was only marginally harder to remember.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So why do submarines have laser ring gyros, but not surface ships ? One GPS or land fix every three months and you're good to go.
I am aware that Maps continuously updates. When I am talking about alternate routes, I am not talking about getting off the highway onto some surface street for a few miles. I am talking about avoiding the problem areas in the first place. In the case I mentioned, we were northbound on the NJ turnpike (I95) heading towards the NYS thruway (I87). Google's suggested route was stay on I-95 all the way to I-80, take I-80 to NJ17, and take that to I-87. Even without the Jets game in the mix, it doesn't take much thinking to realize that is an awful route. You are heading inbound to NYC, on a Sunday afternoon when everyone is returning from the weekend. It is an extremely congested area. Even when traffic is moving fast it is stressful driving, and traffic is likely to come to a screeching halt at any moment. Yeah, when that happens Maps will helpfully route you through Newark or something. Great.
However, if you actually look at a map, you can see that they helpfully built I-287 which steers far clear of NYC, and you can avoid the whole mess. It is slightly longer. The time to make that decision is about 30 miles before you get into the congested area, and Maps doesn't help you with that at all.
For another example, use Maps to get a route from Albany, NY to Orlando, FL. It gives two choices, fly, or I-95. I-95 takes you very close to NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC. Those are some of the worst areas for traffic in the country. However, if you can read a map you can see that there is an alternate route that is slightly longer that avoids ALL of those cities - I87,I287,I78,I81,I77,I26,I95. The time to make that decision is at the NY/NJ border at Mahwah, not when Maps notices it is now rush hour in DC and you are in it.
Good idea. Hulls that just sit in the water have some pretty severe speed limits due to wave resistance. If you can get that 8K-ton destroyer planing, it'll move a lot faster and save fuel.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yeah, but the problem is that you're simply wrong about those being better routes: according to Google's statistical data, you will get there faster if you take their route. The only metric that matters is time, and Google is surely correct about that. So when you pick an alternate route that's "slightly longer", you're choosing a less optimal route. Of course, the reason for this is that you aren't looking to optimize based solely on time, you're willing to trade off a few minutes of time for a less stressful drive, and perhaps a lower risk of an unexpected slowdown (or even getting in a crash).
Google Maps does usually present you with several routes before you start a trip. This usually happens when I start a longer trip, and the #2 or even #3 route might make more sense. Now, for your Albany-Orlando example, I just tried this in Google Maps, both in the desktop and Android versions, and it gives me 3 choices on the desktop, and 2 on the mobile. On mobile, the 2 choices are the I-95 route, and the exact route you describe. (On desktop, they add flying.) So it is giving you that other choice. However, it doesn't look so great to me: it adds an extra 1.5 hours! You might hit some traffic, but 1.5 hours' worth? Doubtful. Google Maps does also take traffic patterns into account, which is why you get different routes depending on when you plan the trip (that's why they have a selection so you can set the departure time to some other day and time than "now"). (Interestingly, I just tried this and it took away that other route, and replaced it with a Megabus option.)
Anyway, the problem is that you're expecting too much. You might be willing to spend an extra hour on another route in exchange for less stress. Someone else might not. Or they might not want to put 100 extra miles on their car for that route. How exactly do you program a navigation application to not optimize solely on travel time anyway? The best they can do is present a few options.
Anyway, my point to all this is that GPS with Google Maps is far, far better than what we had before, which was paper maps and stopping and asking strangers for directions. Your alternate route might be a better choice for you usually, but today the road might be closed because of a huge wreck. Without a system like Google Maps, you probably won't find out about that until it's too late (unless you listen to the radio constantly, with its awful music selection and annoying commercials, and happen to hear a warning in time, or you get yourself a CB radio and listen to truckers--yay). In the days before GPS, all this stuff was a serious chore; now it's much easier. You can still take the alternate route, and it'll guide you that way and warn you of traffic problems ahead.