MAGNAV: The Military's GPS Failover Plan

I hope that they teach sextant sight reduction arithmetic on paper unless they have EMP resistant calculators.

Do you believe can do anything without their smartphone or tablet???
Other than us old farts!

I'll be glad to loan them my Astralab.

I know I have a slide rule around here someplace guess I could loan it out.

I always keep a record in cuneiform.

By now it's been decades since I last held my circular slide rule, but I knew there had to be a good reason to keep it. I just need to unearth wherever it's ended up. Coincidentally, a nice, hard leather cased "regular" slide rule of my Dad's was in my hands in the past 48 hours as I found a new cubby hole for it in my office.

That said, I have serious doubts that anything hand operated by a human will be fast or reliable enough for high speed aerial guidance systems if our GPS system becomes suddenly unreliable or missing. The stated accuracy of current magnetic-based guidance is only likely to get even better as the technology advances and insufficient/missing map info acquired, unless another technological approach comes along and overtakes it.

The explanation I was hoping to see and didn't would have explained how they plan to track and allow for changes in Earth's magnetic fields as movement within the molten iron core shifts them around.

I assume that this would be handled with continuous updating of the data. This has to be done now (in a different form) with the GPS satellites, so the basic issue is not really much different.

- Tom -

If GPS goes down, I'd probably get lost going to the market. Well that's an exaggeration, but I realized early on with GPS that we become dependent on the technology and as we rely less on our own innate sense of direction, it atrophies.