Conundrum - is Trainz flat?

mezzoprezzo

Content appreciator
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This is something I’ve been ridiculously pondering whilst tweaking one of my routes for better performance and tidying up the edges.

One of the dilemmas is deciding where to stop, whilst still making the route visually believable.

In the real world we can travel around the World and end up where we started. No edge to fall off!

Now I’m not suggesting anyone should try this (it certainly won’t be me!), but what would happen if you completely “circled” the Earth (40,075 km at the equator) in Surveyor with single line of 55,659 x 720m baseboards?

Would you find that you have caught up with first one laid, or would you endlessly carry on laying an infinite number of boards? :eek:
 
I think you would just end up laying millions of baseboards into infinity, and would never meet with the first one unless you used a portal or two. :)

My reasoning for this answer is that Trainz and its baseboard style route creation was originally made for model train layouts, not as a driving simulator.
 
Trainz world is flat for coding purposes unlike our Earth which is on the top of a giant turtle. If Trainz was coded true to cosmos, the last board would have a cliff off the turtle's back.

:)

Regards, Mimes
 
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This is something I’ve been ridiculously pondering whilst tweaking one of my routes for better performance and tidying up the edges.

One of the dilemmas is deciding where to stop, whilst still making the route visually believable.

In the real world we can travel around the World and end up where we started. No edge to fall off!

Now I’m not suggesting anyone should try this (it certainly won’t be me!), but what would happen if you completely “circled” the Earth (40,075 km at the equator) in Surveyor with single line of 55,659 x 720m baseboards?

Would you find that you have caught up with first one laid, or would you endlessly carry on laying an infinite number of boards? :eek:



Latest satellite photo ( See their been lying to us all these years )
You would need some really bendy track for the turns though



6a00d8341bf67c53ef0154348c4dce970c-800wi
 
I think you would just end up laying millions of baseboards into infinity, and would never meet with the first one unless you used a portal or two. :)

My reasoning for this answer is that Trainz and its baseboard style route creation was originally made for model train layouts, not as a driving simulator.

I suspect you are right.

That probably rules out creating a complete globe then!

I reckon you’d need 983,796,296 baseboards to do that.

There’s no real way of finding out though. I did try placing the Word Origin at a high latitude to see what the sun arc did, and whether the grid shape might be any different. However, the maximum North/South limit seems to be 75deg. Entering a figure any higher defaults the value down to 75, with no distortion to the grid shape.

Regarding the Flat Earth Society, they are clearly wrong.

Based on what I’ve found so far in Trainz though, (if the equator can be ringed with baseboards), we could support a new theory that the earth is cylindrical.:D
 
Oh, in class today (I'm in 6th grade), someone asked "How do the people in Australia not fall off?"
:hehe:
 
Trainz world is flat for coding purposes unlike our Earth which is on the top of a giant turtle. If Trainz was coded true to cosmos, the last board would have a cliff off the turtle's back.

:)

Regards, Mimes



But, but ... the last board DOES have a cliff! ... maybe they just didn't bother to draw the turtle, to save cycles? :p
 
Latest satellite photo ( See their been lying to us all these years )
You would need some really bendy track for the turns though



6a00d8341bf67c53ef0154348c4dce970c-800wi


Gosh, how *do* they get the oceans to hold all those nice, crisp place names without blurring? :eek: And OMG, what happened to the Arctic ice cap?!?!? :eek: :eek: :eek:
 
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The Earth IS cylindrical, just ask Microsoft ACES Studio (Flight simulator has a cylindrical earth model, makes flying over the poles impossible and or behave VERY strangely like the Bermuda Triangle)
 
The Earth IS cylindrical, just ask Microsoft ACES Studio (Flight simulator has a cylindrical earth model, makes flying over the poles impossible and or behave VERY strangely like the Bermuda Triangle)

In which case it must also be flat... at the top and bottom.

We could be on to something here!
 
The Earth IS cylindrical, just ask Microsoft ACES Studio (Flight simulator has a cylindrical earth model, makes flying over the poles impossible and or behave VERY strangely like the Bermuda Triangle)

This was done to avoid a condition called "gimball lock" (google it). The calculations for position fail at the north and south poles.

I've had to deal with these conditions when converting rotations of attachments in Trainz. Fortunately the designers of the game have made sure that such conditions rarely (hopefully never) occur.
 
I don't think you could do an all the way around the equator route anyway, 25,000 miles would require somewhere around 60,000 baseboards, and I suspect the program would crash before you got a tenth of the way around.
 
I don't think you could do an all the way around the equator route anyway, 25,000 miles would require somewhere around 60,000 baseboards, and I suspect the program would crash before you got a tenth of the way around.

If I remember correctly, at about 555,555 baseboards you reach the moon, at which time a new Surveyor is displayed within the original Surveyor. From this 2nd-level Surveyor (within Surveyor) you can then build a route to either Mars or Venus, at which point a new, third Surveyor (within the 2nd Surveyor, within the original Surveyor) pops up...

At this point it becomes much more than just laying track. The user experience inexplicably becomes more Vision Questy...
 
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