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The All New Groundspeak Uk Pub Quiz!

The Golem
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lordelph

+lordelph

Posted
Posted (edited)

I'm thinking Calcium, since we're mainly Hydrogen, Oxygen and Carbon, and there's a lot of boney type stuff with Calcium in it, so I'll go with Calcium....

 

that's a metal, right?

 

(Edit - dadgum, too slow!)

Edited by lordelph
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The Forester

+The Forester

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Posted

Before satellite navigation revolutionised electronic position fixing, there were several hyperbolic radionav systems, such as Gee and Decca, which were based on a system of measuring range differences rather than measuring ranges directly.

 

What was the first application of hyperbolic position fixing?

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The Forester

+The Forester

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Posted

Can you be a little more specific?

 

How was hyperbolic nav used in "weapon firing"?

 

Gee was certainly used by the Royal Air Force's Pathfinder squadrons of Bomber Command to bomb Germany many years later, but what was the earliest application of the fundamental principle of hyperbolic position fixing.

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The Forester

+The Forester

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Posted

Golem's got it.

 

A vicar on the South coast of England noticed that he could hear the heavy artillery pieces of the German army in the background during a telephone conversation with a colleague some distance along the coast. He realised that by timing the difference between the bang he heard directly and the bang over the telephone he could plot a hyperbolic line upon which the location of the gun was located. He also realised that if you do that for another paor of locations, you can plot the intersection of the two hyperbolic lines and that will show the location of the bang.

 

The German army on the Western Front was using some absolutely enormous artillery pieces mounted on railway wagons and they were causing havoc. The Allies were having great difficulty locating those guns until they set up a network of microphones, rigged into a field telephone network, to compute the position of the gunfire so that counter-battery fire could be laid down.

 

Acoustic hyperbolic position-fixing is still in use today in the detection and location of submarines. There are networks of hydrophones arrays on the seabed which relay the sounds of submarines to central computers which analyse the harmonic frequencies of the machinery and crew activity sounds to locate and track passing submarines. Even now, well over a decade after the cold war ended, the main players in the "great game" still mess about with eachother's arrays, such as the now superseded SOSUS chains, to gain advantage in the sub-tracking game. It keeps hydrographic surveyors in chocolate, so I'm not complaining!

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