Prime base, forty years in the hole!

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by mmartin798

While I agree with you that more things arrived from the future that just a laser and fusion reactor, I have to disagree with you on the Autonav. Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) have been around since the 1960. By the time we get to the 1980s, there have been many advances in the types of gyros, the means to minimize drift errors and more, without the use of GPS. GPS is great when you have it, and I have little doubt that the Autonav does have GPS as one of it's inputs, but it can also use terrestrial radio signals, perhaps even private Morrow Industries eLoran towers. All of these receivers and sensors were quite small in the 1980s. None of this requires the use of 2020+ tech. Drift factors can be minimized by stopping the vehicle and letting the INS correct the velocity. When you are at a POI that is in the Autonav and you are stopped by it, you can completely reset the position. Plus the Autonav, for most purposes, just needs to be close enough. This is where I do drift from one of the books where it said something like the Autonav assured a first shot hit with the mortar I think. That just didn't seem plausible to me.

First, it is the accuracy of the autonav that is one the primary technical challenges to making it in the 80's - we've had inertial guidance since the 50's, the question is always how accurate it needs to be and for how long (between updates from a reference). If we downgrade the accuracy, we can make this in the 80's no problem... and the team will be lost within a day. The team has a few things going for it, like the fact that INS work better on ground vehicles than either air or water (since there is less slippage), but it also has to remain accurate for much, much longer between references than the average INS.

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.

Second, there is more than just the INS in the autonav. There is also a computer containing a complete and detailed electronic map of the United States, cryptological gear, a milspec UI, and no doubt a few other interesting things I am not thinking about at the moment.

I am not an INS expert, but I work with the experts because INS is integral to the products I design. I would love to have something like the autonav now and I can't get it. So I'm having trouble believing that a strictly 1980's manufacturing line could spit one out using 1980's core technology based on some idea that it could be done. You couldn't make the iPhone in the 80's, you couldn't make the Model T in the civil war, and you couldn't make full steel plate armor in the bronze era just by going back in time with a plan for the item in question. They are all require improvements in underlying technologies and manufacturing tools. Technique and an interesting idea is not enough.

[mmartin798]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Second, there is more than just the INS in the autonav. There is also a computer containing a complete and detailed electronic map of the United States, cryptological gear, a milspec UI, and no doubt a few other interesting things I am not thinking about at the moment.

If you chose to add functionality to the Autonav, then you are correct. But as described in both 3rd and 4th edition, it only has an INS, an emergency battery, a screen to display microfiche or digital map (depending on generation), a method of entering coordinates for waypoints, preloaded cache locations, and a thermite charge. No mention of crypto at all. The UI is just a keypad and a couple lines of text. Other than the digital version of maps and flat panel display, nothing is beyond the 1980's level of manufacturing.

[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.