NavList:

Alex,
I've been meaning to read that book by Mackenzie for years. I think I'll buy myself a copy and read it this summer. It's a fascinating story even if his conclusion is as broad-brush as it seems. You can read many sections of the book here: http://books.google.com/books?id=QymEXZIWEe8C

Regarding those submarine periscopes, if I remember correctly from many lunations ago, you bought a copy of the Institute of Navigation CD that has a collection of celestial navigation-related articles. Yes? If you dig that up, you will find an article from 1960 by Lt. Cmdr. Robert Irving, USN entitled "Celestial Sighting through the Submarine Periscope" which should help quite a bit since he is specifically addressing the issue of aligning the INS of missile submarines. The "sextant" function here depends on the inertial system's ability to provide a highly accurate vertical. It's the ultimate "bubble". So no sea horizon is required, and of course eliminating the uncertainty of the sea horizon is absolutely essential to high accuracy celestial.

You wrote that back in the USSR:
""All research of the Earth gravity field in the Arctic". Publications in this area were "totally prohibited"."

Yeah, I can imagine so!

I don't think you were following NavList messages when I started visiting museum submarines. There are quite a few scattered about. I've been aboard 21 submarines in the US in the past four years and two in the UK just three weeks ago.

-FER

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