Talk:Milliradian

message: The chapter makes references to Soviet Union and NATO, however, obviously the concept of angular mil is older than WWII (and likely also older than Soviet Union), some historical perspective would be useful, i.e. when the different definitions in fact have emerged. --Sivullinen (talk) 12:16, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  History of the four definitions of the mil 

message: Instead of clearly defining a mil, the article makes a reference to its section with the number of mils in a full circle in various parts of the world, e.g. 6400 within NATO. While on the surface it makes sense, it is no good. The problem is that the defining characteristic if the angular mil lies in its name (meaning thousand), i.e. it is the angle one looks into when observing an object with a size 1000 times smaller than its distance. If the mil was actually defined so 6400 mils equals a full circle, the relation between subtension on target [in meters], distance [in km] and observed angle of view [in mil] would not be the familiar
 \text{distance} = \frac \text{subtension} \text{angle}
, but rather something that with an accuracy of 7 digits would spuriously be
 \text{distance} = \frac {\text{subtension}}{\text{angle}} \frac {2000 \cdot \pi}{\text{6400}} (in the case of NATO). (7 digits because 1e-8 < (2 * Arcsin(0.5/1000)-1e-3)/1e-3 < 1e-7).
I posit that this spurious correction (of 1.86% for NATO, 6400/(2000\pi) - 1) is _not_ part of the angular mil definition (at least not in NATO nor in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation) and that therefore the whole article is fundamentally flawed.
To fix this we just need a WP:RS with an actual definition (which I suspect will base itself on the D = S / V property, but what I suspect does not really matter). Would there not be a Wikipedian out there with a field manual that we can quote? Lklundin (talk) 22:39, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, the article has been updated a lot since your comment was written, so I think this should be clear now. There has formerly been some confusion in the shooting community whether the mil is based on a circle with 2000 Pi ≈ 6283.185.., 6400, 6000 or 6300 milliradians. But a milliradian is mathematically defined as a thousandth of a radian, so the first of ≈6283 mil per circle is the one that is correct. This is based on the definition of the radian and the metric prefix "milli". Sauer202 (talk) 15:38, 25 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Defining the milliradian 

message: Because the word subtension isn't in most dictionaries, it would be a good idea to define it here if it is going to be used in the article.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.78.86.54 (talk) 15:40, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, and thanks for the suggestion. Subtension refers to the length between two points on a target. For a given angular distance (or angular diameter) the subtension will vary with viewing distance to the target. In shooting the units for angular measurement will typically be given in either milliradians or minutes of arc, while the subtension on target will be given in centimeters, millimeters or inches. For instance 0.1 mil will subtend 1 cm at 100 meters, 2 cm at 200 meters, etc. I've added this explanaition in the article. Sauer202 (talk) 15:00, 25 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is a subtension? 

message: Not sure where to put this, but the Approximation error section had a bad formula to calculate the error for MOA/inches per hundred yards. I've corrected the formula and the resulting approximate errors, but didn't touch the footnotes.  Are they necessary if the formula's already provided? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.241.126.122 (talk) 23:51, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Approximation error 

message: With the war in Ukraine, there were discussions looking at the use of NATO artillery where people did wrongly assume they would use Gradian for aiming. The definition of the artillery mil was not found - as it is hidden behind the Milliradian topic.
In de/es/fr wikipedia there are two articles for milliradian and artillery mils. I propose to do the same in en-wiki which would also be a good idea as this article here is quite long already. Guidod (talk) 09:36, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Split artillery mils