NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Traditional navigation by slide rule
From: John Brown
Date: 2016 Jan 22, 02:07 -0800
From: John Brown
Date: 2016 Jan 22, 02:07 -0800
It seems to me that the debate on the relative merits of dividing trig scales into degrees and minutes, or degrees and decimals, is futile until the length of these scales is decided. Are we talking about cylindrical scales, in which case degrees and minutes are an obvious choice, or a ten inch slide rule where consistent precision of results to within 3' of arc seems highly doubtful, no matter which subdivisions of degrees are used?
In an earlier life a major tanker company obliged us to record position fixes and other shipboard operations rounded to the nearest six minutes to faciliate various calculations. A little bit of practice at this soon made it second nature - perhaps that's my problem!
John
