Astrogation was Re: (TFT) Navagation

[PvK <pvk@oz.net>]

Hi Jay, 

If you are moving a ship from star to star, and you have observations of stars recorded for your part of the galaxy (such as we have already had for a long time from earth-based telescopes), then you can figure out where you have moved to from look-up and trigonometry. That is, we know where the stars are in much of our own galaxy because we can see them and earth moves 2 au by itself during a year, giving us some parallax with which to determine their distance from us (you can compare their movement as earth orbits, relative to much more distant objects such as galaxies). We can identify which stars we are looking at, even if we suddenly teleported somewhere hundreds of light years away, because we have records of the size, brightness, and light frequency spectrum emissions of the stars we have in our records. So given that we can identify the stars we see, and know their positions, we can figure out where we are from any new perspective on them. It will take some computation time to figure it out, but the info definitely exists. This is the standard procedure which has been used when people have teleported to unknown distant parts of the same galaxy from Star Trek (original series) to more recent works such as the Honorverse (q.v. War of Honor).

(navIgation not navAgation BTW)

PvK
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