[babygene]

" Yep, many "moons" ago. Ever do orbital mechanics?"

That was good, and no...

So you think it would be trivial to do such caclucations with the equipment avaviable at the time?

[RightWhale]

it would be trivial to do such caclucations with the equipment avaviable at the time?

I will answer, yes. I did work in that general specialty in those days. The hard part is knowing where you are so you can plug in various quantities to your program at the appropriate time. Apollo relied on a certain amount of pilot intervention just in case, but orbital mechanics was well-known even then.

[TomB]

So you think it would be trivial to do such caclucations with the equipment avaviable at the time?

The calculations necessary are straightforward, if not a little esoteric. If someone knows what they are doing, it is a relatively simple task to plug the numbers into the equations and get the results. The flight computers just allowed many more calcualtions to be done more expediently.

[TomB]

The link below is a great site for info on the workings of the Apollo Flight Computer (click on the picture). You can see there it really isn't all that magical.