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sdenham's user avatar
sdenham's user avatar
sdenham
  • Member for 7 years, 7 months
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Are there any examples of orienteering (off-trail) route-finding software?
This is an excellent answer, but I feel there is also an ethical issue if you are the developer of such software: if it does a reasonable but not perfect job, you know that it is going to be used by people who do not have the good judgement to know that it is not working out and they need to implement plan B, or even if they do, be unable to figure out what plan B is for their situation. So, should you make it available or not? I don't think there is one right answer.
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How do you aim a signal mirror?
@JamieHanrahan But that means you have to get the mirror to within a 1/4 degree angle window in two dimensions (because reflected beam's angle change is twice that of the mirror). If you are trying to attract attention, wiggling it around approximately the right direction should suffice, but to send a message, you probably need some aiming assistance. BTW, that 1/2 degree is about 1/110 radians, so (using the small-angle approximation for sine) the spot size has expanded to about 9m at 1km or 48 ft at 1 mile. Any convexity in the mirror will broaden the beam, at the expense of brightness