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Old 05-21-2016, 12:40 PM   #9
weby
 
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Join Date: Oct 2008
Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation

Quote:
Originally Posted by Curmudgeon View Post
There are a few odds and sods based in reality that I've thrown out from time to time that throw a spanner into the usual GURPS defaults for my players.

1) Any orienteering above 60°N (or below 60°S) cannot make use of a magnetic compass, but can resort to using an astral compass with ephemeris tables (essentially a land-going sextant with astronomy tables). This switches them from Orienteering to Navigation.
That is not true at all except for two specific locations on the earth(Near the actual magnetic poles). Any good orienteering map will have a compass correction marked on it, it is part of basic orienteering skills to use it. The big problem is of course that the pole moves and pretty fast so if you are in North of Canada and have an old map...

Further the problem has been getting to be less and less in most places of the north as the magnetic north pole has been going close and closer to the actual pole, it will be interesting to see where it will end up in say 20 years.

Quote:
2) In pre-1970 settings, many maps of the north at 1:250,000 scale are blank sheets of paper with a grid system superimposed, i.e. they are featureless. Post-1950, they can make use of inertial navigation systems which give distance and direction from the starting point but require an accurately known starting point to know exactly what your current position is.
Again it depends on where you are. In Europe there were pretty accurate maps of all of the north in that period. The big breaking point in Europe was WWII as Germans actually did aerial photography of all of western Russia, including the far north, before that some parts there were not mapped.

But the other parts of the north were mapped earlier on. It is true that the level of detail varied from place to place, mostly so that in places with more people the maps had more detail, in places with less people less detail.
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