Word: compassable
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Looking forward to the day when it will have its own intermediate-range (1,500-mile) Fleet Ballistic Missile (the IRBM), the Navy this week placed in commission an experimental vessel named the Compass Island. The ship is jammed with feather-sensitive navigational equipment. The Island's mission: to test a navigational system capable of making the continuous hairline computations necessary to missile launching...
...Compass Island is a 17,600-ton converted merchantman, commanded by James A. Dare. Without reference to any shore-based aids, the Ship's Inertial Navigational System (SINS), designed by M.I.T.'s Dr. Charles S. Draper, will furnish continuous position reports, the location of true north and the ship's speed. Essentially a superrefined gyroscopic system, SINS is self-correcting and will be continuously checked for accuracy against a star-tracker...
...bulk of the SINS equipment is housed in a 67-ton, temperature-controlled navigational tower that looms just forward of the superstructure in the most rigid part of the ship. To protect the instruments from as much motion as possible, the Compass Island is equipped with wing-shaped gyrofins, which cut down roll from 7½° to a barely perceptible .4°. Among the ship's other refinements: a giant, airfoil-shaped sonar dome beneath the keel that will measure ship's speed (and which has already earned the nickname "droop snoot...
Though he thus barred himself from the fighting, Trumbull dreamed of recording it for posterity. In London he made a pilgrimage to the studio of compatriot Painter Benjamin West, who urged that Trumbull stick to small pictures that his one eye could compass. This led Trumbull to compress heroic compositions into canvases more concentrated and powerful than West's own. Returning after the Revolution, he traveled from New Hampshire to South Carolina to portray the VIPs of a Very Important Period, and to sketch the quieted battlefields...
...footloose Publisher Parrish spends little time enjoying his new $175,000 home in northwest Washington, finds it more rewarding to write his chatty fortnightly column. "En Route," from all points of the compass. "I was looking at myself the other day." said he. "I was wearing an English hat and shoes, a Peruvian shirt, an Italian tie, and a topcoat I bought in Hong Kong. That can only happen to you in the air age. I've got only one problem-a small one. I'm the only man in the U.S. who has to ask his wife...