principle of position line for navigational purposes?
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Position line\nFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia \n\nJump to: navigation, search\n\nA position line is a line that can be identified both on a nautical chart or aeronautical chart and by observation out on the surface of the earth. The intersection of two position lines is a fix that used in position fixing to identify the navigator's location.\n\nThere are several types of position line:\n\n*Compass bearing - the angle between north and the line passing through the compass and the point of interest\n*Transit - a line passing through the observer and two other reference points\n*Leading line - the line passing through two marks indicating a safe channel\n*Leading lights - the line passing through two beacons indicating a safe channel\n*Sector lights – the lines created by masked coloured lights that indicate a safe channel\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Position_line
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A stick which is used for nevigation in video/pc games
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It is a straight line. You're looking at a map when you should be looking at a globe.  \n\nFind a globe and stretch a string from your North American origin to your overseas destination, and I'll bet it follow the same path you're talking about.
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Navigation with trig uses the basic principals of the patagorean theorem (a squared + b squared = c squared), sin (pronounced sine), cosin (pronounced co-sine), and tan (tangent).  If you remember the helpful hint SOH CAH TOA (pronounced so-cah-toe-uh) it will help you to remember sin = opposite over hypotenuse, cosin = adjacent over hypotenuse, and tan = opposite over adjacent.  These refer to the sides of a traingle.  Draw a right trinagle (that is a traingle with a right angle in it).  To find any one of the angles, you use what I described above (if you know the length of the sides).  You can mix the equations up and solve for any part of it that is unknown if you know the other two.  Now, back to your question...  A navigator will usually have a chart (map) with a scale on it (measurement on the paper).  With this he / she can tell the distance between any two points, thus giving the length of the side of a traingle.  If they do this from a couple of different points, it is called "triangulation".  Now they have the "triangle", they use the stuff above to figure out the angles, distances or whatever.  Finally, they use a formula of distance = rate x time (D=RT) and variations of it (T=D/R, and R=D/T).  Let's say the navigator want to know how long it will take to get from point A to point B.  They use what I've described above to measure the distance (D), and they know how fast they are traveling (with a speedometer or airspeed indicator, etc).  Now they can use T=D/R to figure out how long it will take to get there.  In "old" times, the accuracy of charts and maps was not quite up to par, so they used the "stars" as thier maps.  these were "known" quantities, with specific angles to the horiozon (which remained fixed).  The device they used was called a "sextant".  This gave them a reading of the angle.  They would also used an hourglass for time, and a specially-made board with a rope with knots in it.  As they let out the board and it hit the water, they would "time" how many knots passed through thier fingers.  This gave them "rate" (or speed).  Using what I described above, they could figure out the rest.  Hope this helped.
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Cool! But if the map is on my back, how can i see the coordinates and point them out?
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Nowadays, ground speed can be measured quite easily with positioning instruments such as GPS or LORAN.  Prior to having advanced onboard positioning systems, it was necessary to get two fixes on one's location and the time of the fixes to calculate ground speed from the distance travelled between the two times.  Before radio beacons, this usually meant that one would locate themselves based on visual landmarks, such as towns or large physical features.
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east/west.\n\nto remember, longitutde has lines that are all as "long" as each other (one pole to the other.)
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I see you're asking about the New Horizon's (Pluto) mission. A "straight Line" flight path is actually a linear curve due to the nature of space. The spacecraft will not travel a straight line to Pluto but will use Jupiter, and it's gravity, to boost the speed at which the craft can travel. When you're talking about distances of this magnitude even very small allowable deviations (.02%) must allow for in-flight navigation corrections. It isn't the speed, it's the distance travelled.
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Oh, wow, where to begin? I'm not a military person, but I do know that a quartermaster is in charge of the ship's navigation. Therefore he would need to use several calculations to find the ship's speed, how much distance it would cover AT that speed (in order to find an ETA), and be able to figure out which direction the ship needs to go to get to a certain point (there aren't exactly land references in the middle of the ocean). Many years ago, the quartermaster also would have been in charge of the ship's maps and for finding the latitude and longitude of the ship as well as keeping instruments and clocks in perfect running order. It's a much easier job today.
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well you can make a pretend display on a real compass, IE when its pointing north make the paper display say whatever direction you want, compasses work by pointing north  http://science.howstuffworks.com/compass1.htm
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This sytem was in place before GPS it was called Loran it was not as accurate. Really good thinking though Barbie, you are going places. Let me add that a system is in place now to locate cell phones in exactly the way you propose for emergency situations. However I believe in the future cell phones will incorporate conventional gps, as in an eperb and also for the user as location info.
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It is useful to know the absolute location of a place when you want to go there.  It is useful to know the relative location of a place when you want to stay away from it.
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No, you cannot automatically poll position information from other DSC users in the current system.  A new system (backwards compatible with DSC) called Automatic Identification System may be capable of this.\n\nThe primary purpose of DSC was to provide a means for one marine VHF station to specifically contact another while keeping the speaker muted during other unrelated radio traffic.  The positioning transmitting capability was added as part of an automated distress calling feature.
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- GPS technology has matured into a resource that goes far beyond its original design goals. These days scientists, sportsmen, farmers, soldiers, pilots, surveyors, hikers, delivery drivers, sailors, dispatchers, lumberjacks, fire-fighters, and people from many other walks of life are using GPS in ways that make their work more productive, safer, and sometimes even easier. \n\n- In this section you will see a few examples of real-world applications of GPS. These applications fall into five broad categories. \n\n  -  Location - determining a basic position \n  -  Navigation - getting from one location to another \n  -  Tracking - monitoring the movement of people and things \n  -  Mapping - creating maps of the world \n  -  Timing - bringing precise timing to the world \n- Since its a broad topic hope it will help you.....!\n--------------------------
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a globe should have the lat and long markings on them and lines that follow them.\nyou can also use google earth and scroll around until you hit that.
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All GPS can tell you is your location on the earth. GPS cannot tell you where your property corners are, unless you already know the coordinates of those property corners. Your GPS unit does not know where your property corners are until you provide it with the information it needs. \n\nIf you knew the coordinates, which could be either latitude and longitude that mappers use, or state plane coordinates that surveyors use, then you could use GPS to guide you to the corner locations. But since you do not know where the corners are, you have no way of entering the required data into the GPS unit. \n\nYou not only need to get a professional surveyor to survey your property, you also need to tell the surveyor that you need him to provide you with the state plane coordinates of those points, so you can enter them into your GPS unit, then you will be able to find them yourself in the future.
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It used to be very important. While latitude could be easily determined from the position of the stars, or teh sun, longitude was impossible to determine, without an accurate watch. so while captains knew their latitude very accurately , they had no idea of tehir longitude and often relied on a descxription of qweather patterns, coastlines, currents, fish, birds to try to figure out where they were, and of course often got lost :P\nThe problme was that since all clocks at that time were pendulum based, the motion of teh ship would dirupt the pendulum and make watches impossible on a ship. Until a british watchmaker invented a new type of pendulum tha t was imprevious to the ships motion, making teh british the foremost naval empire on the sea