The price: all sorts of fun complexities. However, sometimes we find that we need to model the Earth with its proper oblate shape, so we them switch to the WGS84 geoid, or any one of its brethren. Quite often we can do all the modeling we need with a spherical Earth. If a particular problem does not call for advanced models, why waste budget developing and maintaining them?Ī real life example of this shows up in geoids. The more things you model, the more things you need to develop, verify, and maintain. The reason is not computation time, like it was in 1988, but development time. The other sources of error here, such as winds, play a far larger effect in deviations from a flight plan, so all the rotating and spherical effects can just get lost in the noise.Įven today, we still make flat Earth models. It'd simply see it wasn't on the right path and make a correction. However, many aero problems include a guidance unit which would address any error due to Coriolis effects or the spherical ground the same way it would handle any other errors. If you're shooting a shell 15km, and need it to land with pinpoint precision, you need all that extra complexity. round are minimal (much less the effects of rotating vs. It turns out that for a vast array of aeronautical problems, the effects of a flat earth vs. In those days, you didn't waste computational power on frivolities. A Geforce GTX 1070 is capable of 6,500,000 megaflops (6.5 teraflops) and has a price tag of around \$400. For perspective, the Cray Y-MP was sold that year. This approach works great until you come across real development or computational limits. Why would you ever make a flat Earth model when everything is eventually going to make its first flight on a real rotating spherical-ish Earth? Those who think that way would agree with you. These days there's a popular trend when simulating things to simulate every possible mechanism we can imagine.
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