NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Discussion of subs/INS
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2012 Apr 12, 13:43 -0400
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2012 Apr 12, 13:43 -0400
Greg, Thanks for this interesting piece of evidence: > the extremely stringent standard required for > launching nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles after being submerged for > long periods without position updates from offboard sources. The WSN-7 > and WSN-7A RLG-based systems require updates from the global positioning > system (GPS) every 14 days." Given that a modern system (which is for sale now; I gave a link in one previous message) does 1nm/day, and assuming that the performance of the INS is the same, we conclude that the "extremely stringent standard" is about 14 miles:-) Which is quite possible, because MODERN ballistic missiles do not rely solely on INS, but use Cel Nav (like space stations), a sensor which catches stars and possibly planets and/or sun by its sensor. But this sort of Cel Nav is probably out of the list scope anyway:-) It still seems to me that Cel Nav was the most accurate and universally available method for checking INS until the satellite era. Alex.
