NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: SNO sextants
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Nov 11, 22:19 -0500
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Nov 11, 22:19 -0500
But the words "Merchant Marine" in Russian have no letter "M" in them. Neither any synonimous expression I can think about. Merchant Marine is "Torgovyi Flot". So this cannot explain the meaning of the letter M in SNO-M. I never held a SNO-M in my hands, so I cannot compare. My impression was that SNO-M is an older model and SNO-T a newer one. Sometime in 1930-s or 1940-s they tried to copy a C. Plath with aluminium frame (Joel: is it true that all SNO-M's have aluminium frames?) and then, in 1945 or later they decided that Freiberger design is better for some reasons (maybe better for aluminium frames?) maybe took some machinery and/or experts from Germany, and based their new model on this. There are also rumors that they used German optics. I really don't know, these are just speculations. But I would be very interested to know any details on their production and problems they confronted. Someone earlier mentioned in this list that in 1945 "Soviets plundered the Freiberger factory", I remember this sentense but cannot find the message. Interesting, where this information comes from? Alex.