Prime base, forty years in the hole!

[ArmySGT.]

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.

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.

[.45cultist]

They could build a mining town and not tell their dependents until close to the date. Or they could tell their dependents it's a CD fallout shelter/ storm shelter provided by the company. The abandoned town could have become the refugee colony.

[Nowhere Man 1966]

I think the AutoNav could have been done in the 1980's, I do remember Oldsmobile working on one in the mid 1980's for its Toronado that used a green screen. As you got closer to 1989/90, the Oldsmobile Toronado Trofeo had a full color display.

http://www.businessinsider.com/gms-o...-system-2014-9

[tsofian]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

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.

And this is why ALL USGS markers are in the autonav. Pretty simple solution. In fact I think GPS is a "nice to have" technology for MP, especially in the 1989 time frame since GPS wasn't commercially available until the mid 1980s and the network wasn't completed until the mid 1990s. Plus as has been stated these birds are going to be some of the first things that get killed, either with hard kills or soft ones the destruction of the other guys GPS network is a "kill these first" set of targets.