Richarde57
Active member
So, the more you live to the equator the lighter your weight is because of the spinning speed...
Conundrum - is Trainz flat?
- Thread starter mezzoprezzo
- Start date
cascaderailroad
New member
No ... When visting the Equator, you are usually on a Cruise ship, with an all you can eat resturaunt, and you gain 30 lbs on the cruise (and at $8.50 a brew, your bar tab is $1500, and your credit card is maxed out, so only your wallet is lighter).
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mezzoprezzo
Content appreciator
That made me laugh!
Worse still, some cruise ship are fitting Tempur Cloud mattresses so that you feel weightless when lying down.
The consequential increase in cabin charges results in your wallet becoming even more active and thinner!
cascaderailroad
New member
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raPLzhzxAeU
As good ol' Chris Colombo' once said: "Queenie ... The world'a ... she'za not'a flat'a"
And she gave him 3 ships to sail the seas: The Nina, the Pinta, and the SantaFe.
As good ol' Chris Colombo' once said: "Queenie ... The world'a ... she'za not'a flat'a"
And she gave him 3 ships to sail the seas: The Nina, the Pinta, and the SantaFe.
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Just subscribing 'cause I want to be here when Geophil puts his two bobs worth in......
Well, uh, yes.
Yes, it's flat, and it's not so odd as you might guess. Think of the ordinary (cartographic) map printed on paper. Ptolemy is said to have invented longitude and latitude as a method to map the round shape of the earth to paper (or papyrus), nearly 200 years ago. His diameter of the spheroid was a bit off, that's why Columbus expected to arrive in India and ended up in the West Indies instead.
We call this kind of mapping of a round shape to a flat plane a "projection". Many computer simulations dealing with our globe use the flat plane approach. Rumours say that the cancelled MSTS 2 project (2nd attempt) would have been the first railway simulation to use the WGS84 ellipsoid directly and do their projection on-the-fly, since it was based on the Flight Simulator X engine. But all others are definitely flat. MSTS 1 had the Goode Homolosine projection (the orange peel), RS/RW is UTM, so is Zusi. Trainz is somewhat neutral by default (although there is some sort of projection in place to calculate the orbits for the sun). With TransDEM, Trainz becomes UTM, too.
It always depends on what you want to achieve. Our first approximation is the plane, which isn't that bad, provided a suitable projection is in use. The second approximation is the spheroid (Microsoft Bing, Google Maps, OSM). The third one is the ellipsoid, "oblate spheroid", (Google Earth and almost every map projection used for topographic purposes). Finally the Geoid, the true shape of the Earth, irregular and complex and not really needed for most purposes.
So, all in all the Trainz approach is pretty reasonable and would stand its ground even under scientific challenge. You are simply not supposed to come anywhere near the edge because that's where the models ends (literally).
Here be Dragons!!!!!!!
Oh dear, are we suddenly going scientific here. So the edge where the models end is where Skyrim begins. :hehe:
Greetings from nighttime Amsterdam,
Jan