|
|
|
|
|
|
by mrandish
798 days ago
|
|
|
Yeah, this surprised me as well. I get how reading ocean swells, sea life, birds, ocean color (indicating depth and/or plant life below) could give a general sense of position. And I can see how stars, prevailing currents and maybe even estimates based on the relative movement of clouds (adjusted for ambient wind direction and weather conditions) could give a general sense of distance traveled. But on a completely cloudless day (or fully overcast night) gauging distance traveled seems like it could be catastrophically imprecise often enough to make for short navigation careers. I'm not sure how the concept of tracking virtual islands over the horizon really helps. The only thing I can think of is maybe the idea of it encourages the navigator to stay focused on estimating the passage of proxy points on the far horizon based on whatever composite of wind, current and swell signs they are intuiting from. While still quite variable, I assume gauging distance estimates on the far horizon is better than the alternative of trying to estimate distance traveled from the immediate surroundings of the craft (which are only useful for estimating velocity). |
|
|
You can practice navagating against physical islands over the horizon, and when you're good at that, you've mostly gotten good at dead reckoning against a real reference point; of course, with corrections from the islands influence. Having a community shared archipelego of virtual islands lets you focus your dead reckoning skills on a point while offering a vocabulary of distance and reducing travel times between waypoints.
Go 1000 miles in this direction seems a lot harder for me to follow over many days than go X miles to A, then Y miles to B, then Z miles to C. Even if A and B aren't real. If I treat them as very small islands that will be over the horizon, no big deal that they don't influence the environment, they're small; but I can't really use them to course correct, my reckoning needs to be good.