What Skill(s) for a land surveyor?

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Witchking

Well the person I was thinking of when I posted had the MOS Combat Engineer. However when I met him he was a Captain in the US Army Reserves.

A combat engineer officer would have a lot more skills besides just being a surveyor. I wouldn't know how to do justice to a 21st century engineering officer template, my expertise, such as it is, is more on 18th or 19th century military operations.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by malloyd

I don't know about that. A lot of civilian surveying jobs are likely to start with hike through the woods/abandoned fields to a specified coordinate and find the survey marker you are using as a point of origin there.

Hiking & Navigation are very common skills for modern surveyors who do surveys in rural areas. Your average surveyor who just reconfirms boundaries for real estate transactions in urban or suburban areas won't need those skills, however, which is why I didn't list them as being required.

[Bud]

Related - my friend used to be a Surveyor. He said the equipment was very expensive - he had $50,000 plus of kit at one point.

[cvannrederode]

Originally Posted by Bud

Related - my friend used to be a Surveyor. He said the equipment was very expensive - he had $50,000 plus of kit at one point.

That doesn't surprise me; historically, they've had some very fancy mounts for the spotting scopes, for precise angle measurement, and recently have add on very high-end, high-accuracy GPS equipment.

Which means that at TL 8 and above, there's probably an Electronics Operations skill needed (if that hasn't already been mentioned).

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by cvannrederode

Which means that at TL 8 and above, there's probably an Electronics Operations skill needed

I chatted once with a surveyor doing their thing in front of my house, about twenty or twenty-five years ago. I asked them how to figure the area of a polygon knowing nothing but the angles, because it was a problem I'd pondered a couple of times, but never thought hard enough about to solve. He just looked at me and said "we just put it into the computer".

So, TL8 surveyors can drop the Mathematics or Navigation requirements. Electronics Ops has it covered. These days, I expect you wouldn't even have to type the numbers into a laptop. Just push a button when the instrument was where you wanted and looking in the right direction to trigger capture of that point, and move on. Bluetooth (etc) will handle the rest.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

I chatted once with a surveyor doing their thing in front of my house, about twenty or twenty-five years ago. I asked them how to figure the area of a polygon knowing nothing but the angles, because it was a problem I'd pondered a couple of times, but never thought hard enough about to solve. He just looked at me and said "we just put it into the computer".

You need at least one length to set the scale. Though you could arbitrarily call one of the sides "1 unit" and find the area in square units I guess.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by malloyd

You need at least one length to set the scale.

In that case, I don't feel too badly about not being able to figure out how to do so without that info :)

But yes, now that you point it out, without one length to fix an absolute value, all you have is a set of proportions that could be at any scale.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

So, TL8 surveyors can drop the Mathematics or Navigation requirements. Electronics Ops has it covered.

Alternately, PS (Surveyor) in any setting where you don't have to do the math yourself, but can off-load computation to mechanical or electronic computers.