Dalisclock said:
So, to your first questions, No, I wasn't taught astronavigation in basic training and being an engineer I spent a vast majority of my time down in the deepest part of the ship so I rarely saw the sky to begin with(I actually went days without seeing sunlight at times). And no, I didn't get trained in advanced training either. I can't be 100% sure but I'm fairly positive the only ones who might have been taught how to navigate by the stars were the guys whose job it was to navigate(Called Quartermasters in the Navy) and pretty much no one else. I didn't ask around about it when I was in but I don't recall "How to navigate at sea using the sun and stars" coming up in conversation....ever.
Normally people are more surprised by the fact I only fired a weapon in the military on one day....in basic training. I never touched a government issue firearm after that. This is the first time I've ever been asked about being trained to navigate by the stars.
But I agree with you the other points. I actually didn't even consider that.
Ahhh. Yeah, I can see that. I was infantry, so orienteering was considered a 'pillar of being a soldier'. Which makes more sense than a naval engineer, given the infantry is pointless if it can't get someplace and it's far more hypothetically congruent that the infantry will find themselves someplace they need to enter or leave on foot and possibly only under its own power to guide itself.
That being said, celestial navigation wasn't a big thing, either. It was more things like dead reckoning and topographical triangulation, and internalizing regional magnetic declination for charting courses. Only two of which might be consistently useful if you're fighting over large bodies of water as opposed to fighting on a land mass with observable points of reference.
What surprises me personally is that people do not know how to use a compass. That they do not understand the basics of it. The people that would miss entire towns by double digit degrees of miscalculation because of it even under the shortest of traversed distances if in rugged terrain.
Though that being said I imagine dead reckoning is more hit and miss on the high seas. Given uneven water surfaces, uneven water displacement (like, say, after unloading soldiers and materiel) and damaged enginery and its total output may be illusive or harder to chart.
Celestial navigation is a recent hobby of mine. Plus it's interesting ina revelatory sense. Why the stars are such powerful mythologized and concrete aspects of various world religions and social constructs. You appreciate why groups like Aboriginal Australians incorporated it into a holistic animist interpretation of the world and how it relates to themselves given their crucial nature.
In the Southern Hemisphere, we don't have anything as convenient as a Polaris. It's actually 6-7 more steps determing whether you are consistently passaging across a celestial latitude. And because of that, there are organic reasons why cultures at the equator and south of it holds the constellations of Crux and Centaurus in such high regard, for example. It's a pretty fascinating topic. The whole reason why the constellation of Crux appears on so many flags in the South Pacific is due in part to its relevance in terms of its hemisphere's asterisms and the intimacy of oceanic frontiers.
And this leads me to whyI think flat earthers are kind of sad to me. It's not that they believe such things. Plenty of people believe in things beyond empirical proof ... it's the fact that they would take such a beautiful, ever-present, intimate relationship to the universe, a realm for which our sapience recognizes it as a part of ourselves, born of it and recognizing itself, and cheapen that intimate and personal perspective to the cosmos and its revelation by refusing to simply look at the stars.
I mean if you want to talk 'spiritual enlightenment' ...I can't think of anything more touching, more romantic, than interpreting your passage through time and space by learning how, say, Magellan tracked longitudinal position shifts to an exacting degree by observing the moons of Jupiter.
That being said, if you're interested, I'm sure you might be able to get your hands on various volumes of an 'almanac of corrections'. I'm not sure what specifically it might be called in the USN, but they're usually gigantic books that allow a ship to chart and navigate waterways by sun or starlight by season and time of day.
Even if it is considered defunct, whether for emergency or decorum reasons I'm sure the Navy produces their own each year. It's nowhere near as complicated as you might think it is. As an engineer with a likely head for numbers and visually solving mechanical problems, you'll probably puzzle out how it works over a weekend.
Impress/bore your colleagues with how you guys did blue water navigation in ye olden times.
One thing I do want to ask and I think as a naval engineer you might be able to answer concerning navigation. Prior active GPS monitoring of ships calculating total surface speed to the minutest degree, how did you guys chart dead reckoning over long passages of open water given uneven sea surfaces and possibly damaged enginery and lacking a modern tachometer of things like land vehicles? It's not like you can have a speedo cable to a wheel, and it's not like the rotational speed of the propellor drive necessarily means a ship's speed and battle damages might occult actual performance ...
It's easy to determine whether a land vehicle's instrumentation can't be trusted (or a helicopter's for that matter in terms of blade rpm and centre of gravity, altitude, and in relationship to the ground)... But on a ship I imagine that might be much harder to determine and when all you have is ocean in every direction, there is a far reduced correlation between propellor rotation and distance travelled overtime than with wheels on the ground, and it's far harder to intuit speed just by eyesight.
I mean, if you're 0.2 knots slower than you think you're travelling, that's the difference of being visible to another ship if at the correct speed in a day or two later planned rendezvous with a fleet or convoy, or not being visible at all and being hidden by the horizon if not. Paricularly if we take datum swell into account like tidal forces on water surfaces.
Is it literally a case where once you get attuned to the performance of a ship you simply 'know' when something is wrong with her? You feel like she's a bit sluggish, or something 'feels off'? Kind of like me and my 'classic' (not old) bike I've riddewn around the clock 4 times. I just know when I need to replace anair filter, I just know when she's firing slightly off ...
Oh, actually ...have you been on other same class and design of ship and it simply 'doesn't feel right' in comparison to an older ship you started your career on? Not merely the different interpersonal dynamics of the crew itself, or with refittings for newer equipment, but the machine in a holistic sense itself just doesn't feel the same? Like it doesn't 'purr' the same (or in the case of the bowels of the ship 'scream')?
