Everyone who' been in the military should know how to use one, though practically it's not taught a lot anymore There is a simple scale along one side, the lid can fold up halfway as a sighting system not unlike the mirror compass, and there's a lens (lensatic!) that allows you to place the compass close to your eye, and both sight into the distance, and glance down to read the numbers on the capsule. Many surplus compasses with mils are not 6400 so are hard to use properly in a team environment or with conventional training materials.Most have only degrees or mils, not both the few with both usually have one prioritized in the photo above, it is hard to get accurate readings off the degree scale, for example.Not all features are implemented the same way, so it can be hard to train a group who all have different baseplate compass models.They are plastic so can be broken under extreme conditions I've seen them break. Most do have plenty of phosphorescent bits, so you can use a tiny UV light to make them glow enough to navigate at night. There are a number with tritium, but not very robustly employed so they are hard to fully use. There are almost no good night capable baseplate compasses.The baseplate includes the features of a roamer or "protractor" with scales and plotting aids Low cost even expensive models are only relatively expensive.Almost anyone can figure out the basic operation with little or no instruction Huge selection of styles, sizes and features.The basic baseplate we're talking about has no additional sighting features, so practically is only capable of moderate precision, or takes additional skill by the user. There are many, many sub-variants with additional features. Because if they say "you can get it at WalMart" then be really, really careful. Then, read carefully, and check my last section. If you work with a team of people who probably carry compasses, start with asking them what they suggest. If you are in a team and they say to march at a certain heading until you reach a road, your 6000 mil compass is pointing a different direction than their 6400 mil one. This does matter because NATO settled on a nice easily-divisible 6400 a while back, so many good military surplus "mil" compasses are surplus because they are some other weird, antiquated number. The WARPAC generally agreed to call it 6000, the Swedish Army (they make the best compasses, so we care) had 6300, someone had 6280, and many others. Instead, armies have standardized on various other rounded off versions. There are about 6283 milliradians in a circle, but again, you don't need to know that, exactly.īecause it's an inconvenient number. Yeah, don't worry about that, as you don't need to know. A radian is the angle subtended at the center of a circle by an arc that is equal in length to the radius of the circle. That's an SI-derived unit of angular measure which is a thousandth of a radian. Instead, they use mils, which is just short for milliradian. Degrees are very common, well-understood, but not used by most military forces. A circle can be broken up any number of ways, and a number of them are not useful for our purposes so we shall not speak of them. Speaking the same language is basically one of mils vs degrees. You all want to be speaking the same language, and to be able to brief in things like declination changes to everyone at the same time. The first thing to consider is that you likely work with others. Consistent, well-communicated position information is critical to operational planning and actions. Squad leaders are briefed, with a map and protractor out during the brief.
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