Psycho Warren

iTrader: (5)

youd be surprised at how often you can use pythagorus in daily life if you want to Used to use it loads when at sea on the periscope for calculating range of ships, closest point of approach etc.

Although you do simplify some equations to do them in your head so not 100% accurate.

whybee

yep, its official, i now feel very very dumb

DanW@FastFord

iTrader: (1)

Do the military not have a 'gadget' to do it for you?

Psycho Warren

iTrader: (5)

yes dan we have combat computers with algorithms but doing it in your head is often quicker and just as accurate despite modern computers. Plus you have to know and be well practised at doing it manually incase the computers break!!

the more information you give the computer, the more accurate its fire control solution but the element a computer cannot take into account is human judgement and experience from seeing ships behave in the past and how things change etc.

its not all that complicated. its pythagorus and speed time distance calculations.

botters

iTrader: (2)

my brain hurts

mrjenrst

I'd be suprised if anyone wanted to freely use it in daily life tbh.

Saaamon

iTrader: (2)

Psycho Warren

iTrader: (5)

Youll find it quite useful if you learn it by heart and learn most of the sines and cosines in 5 degree angles and the common answers to speed distance calculations.

If your quick you can use it almost autonomously in driving to work out time to next junctions, clearance distances when taking quick overtakes etc etc.

Simple example is overtaking. If you reasonably accurately estimate the speed of an oncoming vehicle, accelearation rate of your vehicle, distance to the oncoming vehicle etc you can estimate the time and distance you have to overtake a car safely based on the oncoming vehicle you can see or the next blind corner/safe distance you can see. Obviously you err on side of caution. But with practice you can do it as quick as normal distance judgement will tell you and it gives you a mathmatical "bollocks check" compared to what your judgement may say is a safe overtake.

STAFFY OWNER

And by the time you've taken all that into account the gap has gone and you've missed your overtaking opportunity .

Psycho Warren

iTrader: (5)

depends how crap your mental arithmatic is if youve already got the figures in your head then you know the answers and just fit the picture you see to an answer which matches in your head then estimate the difference between!!

fraser9764

iTrader: (3)

read this last night and for some reason was thinking about it thismorning while eating breakfast,
easiest way i could think of was,



using 10 for the baseline as it can be anything, and each side is proportional to its vertical so it works out at 6 and 4 again.
can also be done/checked working from the opposite side triangle

alistairolsen

Yeah, normally several ways to skin a cat. Triangles have me thinking trig and pythagoras and like Warren says, when you use it all the time, both in real life and in work its not hard to do.

Worth the working to get the formula if you had to do a few different ones, but then if i had that many to do Id set it up once in a spreadsheet and drag down :P

Rod-Tarry

Autocad told me its 2.4 & i need no more calcs to prove it.

scoooby slayer

iTrader: (4)

i wouldnt have a fecking clue, but when you look at the height of the 4 mark side its 57mm high, and the x mark is 34mm high so 4 / 57 x 34 = 2.385.

i have no clue about algebra as to what it is or what it means but thats how i got the height of x.