Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish
About those references... there will not be GPS. The US military works extensively on how to operate in a GPS-denied environment because any major war is going to see someone icing the constellations. There will not be any radio signals, Morrow or otherwise, during the period when most of the field teams start up. In particular, the Recon teams have to be able to operate for months without support, and that includes radio location services that would expose Morrow facilities. Want to guess what the error, relative and absolute, would be after a few months in a 1980's ground INS operating without GPS or other reference signals?
Yes, there are things you can do to accommodate these issues, but they are problematic - stopping every so often, revisiting reference points, these are all operational constraints that may be difficult to manage in many circumstances. And rebuilding the map is even trickier, you need to be able to register everything together, accommodate the errors, and then (eventually) reconcile your new map with anyone else's. Today, that kind of registration can take hours, even days, and that is for relatively small maps with the aid of powerful computers and staff for whom that is their job. Doing it on the fly in an MPV? Cumbersome, to say the least.
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Or you just stop your MPV beside a United States Geological Survey Marker ... read the Latitude, Longitude, Hours, Minutes, and seconds off the brass or bronze medallion. Then the operator manually enters this data into Autonav.
This is another way to get a GPS to "know" it's location. Another skill lost on this generation of Soldiers like manually entering Time into a GPS to sync this up with satellite signals.
There is always a simple manual solution. No need to over engineer a solution to a minor task.