NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Comments on the units
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2006 Apr 7, 16:32 -0400
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2006 Apr 7, 16:32 -0400
Interesting! So the American artillerists sacrifice the ease of calculation to higher precision. A Alex Eremenko Department of Mathematics Purdue University West Lafayette IN 47907-2067 Please do not send me attachments encoded in a secret proprietary format such that MS Word or Power Point; I am unable to read them. Please use instead a publicly available format such as PDF or plain text (ASCII). For more information, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html On Fri, 7 Apr 2006, Royer, Doug wrote: > > Alex wrote: > And the compass ("bussole" in Soviet artillery, > but compass in the Soviet Navy) > was divided into 60 parts, correct? > > Do US and British Armies use degrees? > A. > > On Fri, 7 Apr 2006, jean-philippe planas wrote: > > > The French artillery (and infantry) > > uses division called "thousandth" (milli?me") as well. "One Thousandth" > > is the angle of an object one meter high seen from a 1000m (1 km > > distance) with the same conclusions as Alex. > > JPP > > In the US military (land forces at least) a recruit is trained for land nav > using compasses/optics that are graduated in degrees and mils. > In the US equipment there are 6400 mils to 360 degrees. And on long range > optics (rifle scopes, arty optics etc) there are markings on the horizontal > and vertical stadia for range finding. These markings (round dots) are 1 mil > in diam. Because 1 mil subtends a certain area at certain ranges these > optics give good results in range finding. > I had a Russian (Soviet actually) compass a few years ago. It, as you > stated, was marked in 6,000 units instead of the 6,400 units I was used to > using. It was confusing as I always had to think about the difference when > using it instead of just using the equipment. I got rid of the Soviet > compass. Not because of inferior quality of the compass but I am comfortable > using 6400 mils to a circle. >