Navigation involves management of the vessel’s movement in space, including superluminal travel between stellar systems and maneuvering the vessel around other vessels and objects at subluminal speeds.
Submitted by Chief_Sonya on November 21, 2017 - 11:53
So this may be one just for the nav-nerds, but as it affects how we descrbe the space around us I thought it might be of interest to the wider group. Which way is "forward" in space? The mathematical model seems to suggest "backwards", so do we need to change it?
Details of the vessel's navigation systems and the technical framework they use will be published soon. One issue that has arisen is around the orientation of the 3D Cartesian grid used for navigation, which seems less suited to describing movement when you're inside a vessel rather than looking at it from some external viewpoint.
Propulsion and navigation prototype systems are being delivered and before we got too far with the associated documentations I thought this would be a good time for a debate on the terminology we’re going to use for navigation.
There are two possible sources of tradition on this: navy and airforce. Space efforts were traditionally run by the airforces of the world and so that was the source of a lot of the terminology used in space. The vessels were small and maneuvers were tight, making them more like aircraft to fly (quite literally in the case of the Shuttle).
