SailNet Community - View Single Post - Coast Guard seeks opinion on scrapping LORAN system
View Single Post
  #38 (permalink)  
Old 02-09-2007
hellosailor's Avatar
hellosailor hellosailor is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 7,040
Rep Power: 8
hellosailor will become famous soon enough hellosailor will become famous soon enough
"How much of American smart weapon stuff relies completely on GPS for guidance?" Just the cheap stuff.

Honest, even in the 70's some of the defense contractors used to advertise for people to work on their imaging systems. The really good toys used inertial navigation and then switched to cameras that compare the terrain under them to onboard photographic maps, so they don't rely on outside support of any kind--except for being able to "see".

Inertial nav used to be big & expensive, like computers. Now, the Wii controller has solid state 3-axis accelerometers in it, and is sold as a toy. Imagine what the military has--or should have had--in stock by now.

And, if you can't drop a smart bomb, no big deal. You just drop a daisy cutter, and anyone who can see it falling, is within the kill radius. That's a conventional explosive too, not even a nuke. It just means folks have to take a little more responsibility for who they are harboring down the road.

You know, like all the innocent Germans who swore they never knew about the camps.
Reply With Quote Share with Facebook