On Mon, 26 Oct 2015 20:34:15 -0400, wrote:

On Mon, 26 Oct 2015 16:52:26 -0700, Califbill billnews wrote:


Bringing it back.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...025-story.html

I understand at the academy level you want to teach the traditional
course. Would they still want the fleet doing it this "old school"?

Now the question becomes, will they still use the almanacs on paper or
on a small tablet with a calculator? Perhaps they would use something
with a burned ROM so it can't be hacked or corrupted. These days a
small device could carry 100 years of almanac data and be able to do
all the calculations directly from the observations. It could even
have a tutorial and a star finder for guys who get rusty.
That would give you the ease of electronic help and the reliability of
looking at stars.
With the right interface, it could just be a "fill in the blanks"
thing.


Quick, someone call Intel!

===

Celestial navigation apps have been around for a long time. I had one
on a TI-59 programmable calculator back in the 1970s. It had both
canned programs on ROM chips and also the ability to store your own on
mag stripes. There was also a big library of user contributed
programs. I got the calculator as a perk when my manager at the time
threw me on to a "mission impossible" assignment and I told him I'd
need a TI-59 to get the job done.