[trhway]

>modern devices position you within cities by using a combination of WiFi SSIDs + MAC addresses of routers and devices around you as well as GPS to triangulate your location. This was also the reason that our WiFi only iPad was able to display an accurate location in apps even though it had neither GPS nor cellular.

can't wait for this to find its way into Tomahawk missiles as a fallback for the jammed GPS environment

[beardyw]

Google street view cars have been collecting this data since the beginning. Google have, or at least had, an api where you can feed in mac addresses (SSIDs are an irrelevance) and get a location.

[rtkwe]

They can already perform accurate strikes without GPS with terrain following and INS so not sure this would actually help it that much.

[trhway]

My point wasn't about it being necessary. The point is what it may happen as part of complex engineering involving multiple components and large organizations. And/or by integrating consumer tech - the cheap consumer drones are actively used in the modern war and they may have such fallback mode which would be fine for civilian drone, until of course the drone gets a real warhead attached :)

[rtkwe]

For something slow moving like a quadcopter drone munition it might be viable but it seems like you'd not get good signal until it was too late to maneuver if it were in something fast moving like a guided bomb or cruise missile flying down.

Also the probability that power is still functioning long into a conflict is pretty low so it may only really be useful for early strikes.