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The US Navy Diving Manual is a great reference to have and it's a free download.
You may already know but the Navy tables were developed for 18-20 year old males in great shape. You might want to back off them a little if you do not fit in that demographic.
I'm not trying to needlessly argue or sound sarcastic here, but there are plenty of officers and chiefs who dive these table who are not 18-20 years old. I would agree that they are in pretty darn good shape, but I've seen some SALTY fleet divers. Plenty of people dive the navy tables successfully, and they used to be the only tables for a long time. I use them, and I'm not 20 years old, and I have never come close to being bent.
Now does anyone know where I would be able to find the Royal Navy Tables? Or am I just pushing my luck for this one, or how about the Norwegian table system.
The plan now is to have a nice collection of tables so when I stop using my computer I'll have some section to chose from based on the dive plan.
NAUI Tables are infact stepped off Navy tables. The important phrase being, stepped off. For example the Navy table is 60 feet for 60 minutes (60/60). Whereas, NAUI is 60 feet for 55 minutes. Among other differences, a significant difference is the way the actual time is measured. Navy measures time from the surface until leave bottom time. NAUI measures all time under the surface with the exception of the safety stop.
These additional safety measures are necessary for a variety of reasons. One of the stronger arguments I believe is the type of diving completed by each group. A Navy diver is a working diver and often goes to a depth, works, and returns to the surface. A recreational diver moseys along and ascends and descends through out the dive; shaking the soda bottle a bit ... Physiological variances certainly matter and I would argue that military divers, on average, are in far better condition than their civilian diving counter-parts. Though I still maintian the mission/scope of their diving is a factor of greater importance.
I also believe that recompression chambers are more available to Navy divers. There's a reason chamber operation is included in the diving manual.
A key to recreational diving is to avoid getting close to any form of DCS because there may not be a recompression chamber immediately available.
For tables, I would use the NAUI version simply because I was trained on them. When using a computer, I would want to see how it compared with the NAUI tables on a square dive. The idea of diving up against the NDL generated by a computer bothers me; there's too much voodoo going on inside the computer.