Wow, when basic navigation is no longer taught, a heading is figured out by a machine and a sextant is a word in the dictionary. What is the result when you have battle damage or electrical failure reducing the “navigator” to a pile of junk?
If I remember the stories of my father in law, 93 years young and a 26 year navy vet from 1935 to 1961, young sailors learned how to use the sextant
Most ships have a myriad of different systems to combat failure. Redundancy isn’t the right word for it. Plus most of the navigation guys and the deckapes took celestial navigation at the very least to be able to teach ESWS. It is true that most techs don’t fix the electrics anymore, we would need twice the amount of specialty techs on board just to fix one unit. Sailors are fighting men first and formost, give us the parts and leave everything else to those on the pier. And as a tech I could repair almost anything our best weapon (a Marine) could do to break itself!