How the Soviets navigated Soyuz capsules - mechanical navigation computers

[beepbeep]

If you like this sort of thing as much as I do (I designed electronic long time ago), I recommend this channel. He is going deep into different topologies of space hardware, including reviving Apollo-age Earth to Moon comms suite. He is very knowledgeable, and has all the gear you can think of.
Nerd alert!


This one is about Soyuz space clock. It was surprisingly crude, but fulfilled its purpose. Bad accuracy. This is part 1, he goes much deeper in next part.


And its electro-mechanical counterpart:

[masraum]

Very cool!

[unclebilly]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

BTW, the GPS system "dithered" the civilian GPS signal in those days, meaning it was not as accurate as the military GPS systems. I have no idea why.

I’m pretty sure that dithering was to prevent other militaries from using the US GPS satellites for missile guidance.

I worked for a high end GPS company in 1997 as an engineering student. We defeated the dithering using DGPS where we had a WAAS box with antennas at known locations. The differential between the GPS position and the known location of each of these antennas was calculated and sent in real time to the field GPS receiver so it would know true position.

We also developed a dual antenna receiver (I designed the RF shielding for the board) so you could get azimuth on a flying object if one antenna was mounted in the front and another in the rear of a flying object…

[GH85Carrera]

We hire surveyors to put down aerial targets for us before we fly a project. They used to have to find a marker at some corner, and calculate from there. Something that was hard in the middle of nowhere. Now they almost all use a GPS based system, and claim accuracy of the thickness of sheet of paper, so fractional millimeter accuracy. We take their number and tell our program that the center of the target is X, Y & Z values, and over numerous targets, the aerial map is + or - a centimeter or two over the entire area.

Surveyors are a primary customer of ours. Instead of slogging through a field infested with mosquitoes, rattle snakes, poison ivy, steep hard to traverse ditches and swampy areas a few targets is all they have to do, and we do the rest from above.

We have onboard GPS in the airplane and to get the full accuracy, post process the GPS data in some insane expensive software to get centimeter accuracy of the position of the camera on the airplane as it flew along in three dimensions.

It is all just really cool to see all the aerial triangulation. We then output a point cloud of the surface of the earth. All made much easier with the GPS system.

[Crowbob]

Originally Posted by jamesnmlaw

A Russian antikytheria device.

I was thinking the same thing but not exactly. They’re opposites. The antikytheria device looks outward into space, the Globus looks inward to the earth.

Amazing, really. I used to want to be an engineer but I found out math is hard.

[sc_rufctr]