NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: The Spirit of this List
From: Dan Allen
Date: 2003 Oct 1, 13:38 -0700
From: Dan Allen
Date: 2003 Oct 1, 13:38 -0700
On Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 01:02 PM, Noyce, Bill wrote: > Cleaning out old mail, ran across this from Dan Allen just over a year > ago: > >> My own >> kit of equipment has a very reliable calculator (an HP-48G+) but also >> has the most important formulas printed out and a slide rule in case I >> need to do it by hand. This gives me both self-reliance and ease of >> use with a non-electronic backup. >> >> Dan > > I'm curious, Dan, what you use the slide rule for? I don't think > it's useful for sight reduction via Law of Cosines or similar > formulas, because you can't get enough precision. It *would* be > useful to speed up interpolation in tables, or for time & distance > or wind/drift/course problems. > -- Bill You have a good point. So far I mainly use the slide rule for fun, just messing around. The precision would be okay for lifeboat navigation I think, but I have never really had to rely upon it. Dan
