Re: [GZG] Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi! - Artillery

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 7:37 AM, John Atkinson <johnmatkinson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I leave it to other people to discuss the question of whether there
> are alternate techniques available to a force of Hypothetical PSB-Tech
> which can pinpoint one's location without sats.

I don't recall if FT ever mentions anything about inertial dampers or
the sort, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did somewhere. At the very
least, we know the Tuffleyverse has anti-gravity. It wouldn't,
therefore, be a stretch to assume that ground forces have excellent
topographic scanning (from air/space elements) coupled to very
accurate inertial guidance systems.

In other words, you find a reference point on the planet, calculate
the ground force's location from that, and then use supercomputers to
figure out exactly how far you've moved in 3 dimensions along the
topography. Very, very hard to do accurately today (probably
impossible on the ground without adding a whole lot of error into your
location), and not needed as GPS gives you an accurate result in an
easier fashion. Advance the time line into the future and this stuff
becomes possible, and probably necessary.

That's assuming you don't go with some form of neutrino beacon system
that lets you triangulate your exact location through neutrino
emissions, or some other highly advanced tech.

I think we can assume that if ships are capable of accurately
navigating the stars at FTL speeds that they can figure out how to
determine a ground force's location accurately on a hostile planet.

-- 
Allan Goodall http://www.hyperbear.com
agoodall@hyperbear.com
awgoodall@gmail.com

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