Tanaka came up with coffee. "Captain? The auto-helm is acting strange. It keeps trying to correct two degrees to port."
Saito didn't answer. He opened the manual to the last page. Not a specification, not a schematic. A single line in small italics:
Tanaka nodded, unimpressed. "So, like a GPS."
Captain Haruki Saito didn’t believe in ghosts. He believed in magnetic declination, precession error, and the cold, unyielding physics of a spinning rotor. So when the Mirai Maru ’s old Sperry finally seized after twenty-three years, he felt no romance. Only relief.
"Local variations in gravitational gradient exceeding 0.0003 m/s² may induce a precession torque on the gyroscopic element. The CMZ 700 will reject up to 0.0005. Beyond that, output is undefined."