NavList:

Murray Buckman you wrote: “This is a useful explanation of the way the Mark V stadimeter works - for a general audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuN8rvSo8pg”

Hasn’t the narrator got his laser explanation mixed up?  It’s no good the index mirror reflecting light back to the ‘target’.  Don’t you get parallel light beams arriving at both mirrors.  Then the index mirror reflects its beam up to the horizon mirror where it joins the ray through the clear part and is reflected into the telescope, the angular difference between images being twice the angle the index mirror has been canted?  Asking for a friend while still working on the maths.
 On Replenishment at Sea (RAS), I would have thought the vessels were too close for a stadimeter to be practical unless you had a series of marks along the side of the command ship.  Is it not a visual aspect technique thing like formation flying, or perhaps the tight span wires have ‘length pulled out meters’?  It's possible modern versions of the range finder are used while closing from fine astern on the relevant quarter.    DaveP