NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: recommendation for slide rule ?
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2011 Nov 23, 18:24 -0800
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2011 Nov 23, 18:24 -0800
Re "don't need batteries": 20 years ago I purchased a scientific calculator at Target (for our non-US readers, a chain of discount stores) for under $15. It is strictly solar and claims that if one has enough light to read the display, there is enough light to make it work. I've never found a situation where that claim was untrue.
I'll also freely admit that a programmable calculator, such as the wonderful ones from TI and HP, make sight reduction a heck of a lot easier than trying to fight one's way through the law of cosines step-by-step, especially when one has to keep re-entering the values of Hc, dec, and LHA.
Lu
From: Alan <alan202@verizon.net>
To: NavList@fer3.com
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 10:51 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: recommendation for slide rule ?
Interesting comments on slide rules. I had a couple, never was really good with them, years ago. Used to use Smoley's Tables for calculations, they were somethng. These days, a great deal of such calculations, possibly all of them can be done with the ubiquitous "scientific calculator" or "electronic slide-rule". I use an HP 11C, that I bought in the early 1990's, It had gone out of production, HP having declared it "obsolete", I don't know why, it's a great machine, fits easily in ones shirt pocket. As I recall, I paid between $25 and $30 for it.I had thought that slide-rules were no longer produced, K & E gave up some time in the 1970's, correct me if I'm wrong. Is Pickett still in business, and what about Dietzgen, they also made slide rules. There are many, many buildings and bridges in use that were designed with the slide-rule, and they didn't need batteries either.
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