http://motherboard.vice.com/read/it-wil ... the-navy-1It Will Take More Than Celestial Navigation to Hack-Proof the Navy
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Navigation nowadays, however, isn't a skill to be practiced and perfected so much as it is an app, a crosshair-emblazoned button ready to query dozens of satellites in mere milliseconds. It's a bit miraculous really, and notably susceptible to the same threats facing any other networked electronics: cyberattacks.
In light of this realization, the Navy has begun to once again teach the old ways, with a program set to begin next fall that will have all enlisted personnel learning basic celestial navigation, according to the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland (home to the US Naval Academy). The training was eliminated only in 2006, the culmination of a long winding down beginning with a 1996 curriculum review.
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I'm hoping the reporter has his facts wrong. That is just dumb, dumb, dumb. One might decide to teach those at the Naval Academy for no reason other than to punish them, and that's okay, but to teach everyone? sTupid.
Only Quartermasters have [traditionally] been responsible for navigation. Nobody else, save high ranking boatswains, ever need learn it. Ships today (and for about the last half century) have about a half-dozen ways of knowing exactly where they are within a three-foot cube. Even though star-navigation is no longer necessary, even when I retired it was still taught and still practiced, even if only redundantly.
The most interesting method of them all is a 3~6ft 'box' in the Devil that contains a spinning gyro. It is more accurate than sat, or so I'm told. Why it need be I do not know.
I had a bud who was a Quartermaster (QM). He promised to teach me navigation if I would satisfy his homosexual needs. I declined. Told him to find a Mess Cook (CS), as they are always up for new challenges.