Really?

[Ukulelemike]

When I was in the Navy, stationed aboard a ship in San Diego, it was well-known among the sailors about the Soviet Balzam class intelligence-collecting ship that sat just at the edge of international waters.  Once, when our ship went to sea, working as I did on the highest deck of the ship, equipped with 'big-eyes', which were like binoculars on steroids, (you could about read hull numbers on a ship on the horizon), I saw the Soviet ship there, but something was od about it-I was familiar with what it looked like, as it was a very unique-looking vessel, but now it seemed to have extra masts and such. As we got closer I realized it was doing a replenishment, (getting gas, for those non-military-types), with a Soviet replenishment ship-very rare opportunity to see them work, particularly since, American ships do replenishments side-by-side, while the Soviets did it front to back, with one ship behind the other. Made it very slow for them, while we could zip along at full-speed.

Balzam Class Soviet Intel Collector ship.  That's some maintenance they did on those ships, eh?

[Invicta]

They don't need to fly over to photograph. they just need Google Street View.

 

I noticed the other day, that the EU is too much opf a monopoly and wants it broken up into smaller companies.

[DaveW]

They don't need to fly over to photograph. they just need Google Street View.

I noticed the other day, that the EU is too much opf a monopoly and wants it broken up into smaller companies.

Google is far lower resolution than even regular civilian aerial photography, let alone the detail available to high res stuff such as the military were using in the 60's.
Street view is edited to remove any data that might be sensitive (faces etc).

When I was playing with aerial photography we could ID cars, 'spy' on swimmers, read advertising hoardings, determine what street signs were, tell the difference between a road grate and a metal manhole cover, and the list goes on.

Google maps, street view, etc is sandbox stuff compared to stuff that I have personally used, let alone the stuff we heard about that we couldn't afford.

[Invicta]

Google is far lower resolution than even regular civilian aerial photography, let alone the detail available to high res stuff such as the military were using in the 60's.
Street view is edited to remove any data that might be sensitive (faces etc).

When I was playing with aerial photography we could ID cars, 'spy' on swimmers, read advertising hoardings, determine what street signs were, tell the difference between a road grate and a metal manhole cover, and the list goes on.

Google maps, street view, etc is sandbox stuff compared to stuff that I have personally used, let alone the stuff we heard about that we couldn't afford.

 

I take your point.  Although Google satellite shots are from commercial satellites.  I have noticed that their resolution is far higher in some areas than others.  Thanks for you responmse. 

[DaveW]

The reason for the differing resolutions is primarily cost of access - Google, as you point out, get their data from commercial sources, and some areas are simply too expensive to capture at better resolutions.

For instance, the Australian outback is really low res, because there is just not much there and it is such a large area that cost of capture is prohibitive.

 

The second thing that affects the resolution is simply that the higher the resolution, the larger the file - and we commonly used aerial photos of 500Gb plus, and a typical mapping jOB could use as many as 100 frames of that size.

 

You can see that to stream multiple images of that data size is simply not viable - imagine how slow your refresh would be......... Will be viable one day, and google is far better than they were 5 years ago, because the internet tech can handle that data size..... remember dial up?

 

We used to do mapping for sewerage building, and we measured to an accuracy of 10cm - that was the quoted accuracy - we were more accurate than that.

I could position the corner of a house to that accuracy in both position and height.

 

This was from plain old run of the mill aerial cameras (about $100k for the camera 20 years ago) onto film! taken from a cessna 610 or similar (Twin engined light aircraft) or even the old Cessna 172.

 

Later we changed to digital camera, which is where we started talking about image resolution in pixels and Gb.

 

The computers we used were the hottest in the office running two mega high spec video cards so that we could use the imagery we were getting.

 

Prior to that the machines we used the physical photos in were able to measure to 5 microns on the image - 5/1000ths of a mm.

 

On occasion we would pull some very old photos out of the archives to do some historical mapping, and you could actually see the grains of silver oxide on the diapositive.......

 

Zeiss high resolution calibrated optics - how sweet.

 

 

Is this ??????

[OLD fashioned preacher]

I may have asked prior, but what was your rating? 

 

My dad was a skivvy waver (signalman, SM) and QM for a while (they integrated the two for a while before re-segregated and then finally eliminating SM). I had plans to strike for radarman (RD) which has sense been reconfigured and I would have been a striker for OS (Operations Specialist).

 

All was a moot point after watching the Navy take a nose dive (in my opinion) under Zumwalt as CNO and I opted to not enlist with the USN.

 

Side note: did get to go on a shakedown to Gitmo with the Dewey (DLG 14) when my dad was SEA for ComCruDesFlot 2 Newport, R.I.      Boy, was that a while back!!

 working as I did on the highest deck of the ship, equipped with 'big-eyes', which were like binoculars on steroids,

[Ukulelemike]

I may have asked prior, but what was your rating? 

 

My dad was a skivvy waver (signalman, SM) and QM for a while (they integrated the two for a while before re-segregated and then finally eliminating SM). I had plans to strike for radarman (RD) which has sense been reconfigured and I would have been a striker for OS (Operations Specialist).

 

All was a moot point after watching the Navy take a nose dive (in my opinion) under Zumwalt as CNO and I opted to not enlist with the USN.

 

Side note: did get to go on a shakedown to Gitmo with the Dewey (DLG 14) when my dad was SEA for ComCruDesFlot 2 Newport, R.I.      Boy, was that a while back!!

Like your dad, I was a Signalman. And yes, they got rid of the rating sometimes back-very sad, one of the few real "old-Navy" ratings left. Its also unfortunate, because with the tapping technologies out there that can be used to retrieve communications, the need for good old visual, directional communications will surely be needed again one day. They'll have to call up all of us old shellbacks out of retirement and put us back to work and training the young wogs how to sailor properly again. And if they don't want to, we'll take 'em to the fan room and give 'em what for, until they understand real navy life.

[OLD fashioned preacher]

Like your dad, I was a Signalman. And yes, they got rid of the rating sometimes back-very sad, one of the few real "old-Navy" ratings left. Its also unfortunate, because with the tapping technologies out there that can be used to retrieve communications, the need for good old visual, directional communications will surely be needed again one day. They'll have to call up all of us old shellbacks out of retirement and put us back to work and training the young wogs how to sailor properly again. And if they don't want to, we'll take 'em to the fan room and give 'em what for, until they understand real navy life.

I knew semaphore at age 11 and Morse Code at 12, had my own copy of Naval Orientation and the Bluejacket's Manual -- also owned a Corpsman Manual.

 

If I had realized the amount of boarding activity the USCG does I prOBably would have gone there -- but as a lifer's kid I was prejudiced against knee-deep sailors (as an AD vet I'm still somewhat prejudiced against weekend warriors and backdoor defenders).