I flew along a loxodrome

[TyphoonOfDvina]

I run out of things to do in this game and so I flew along a loxodrome.
A 37+ kly long 2400 ly wide Sagittarius A* centered loxodrome

 

[Vedmo]

Never heard of a loxodrome before, interesting stuff.

Any plans for another charting project?

 

[Lightspeed]

How do you go about doing that so perfectly?

 

[TyphoonOfDvina]

Never heard of a loxodrome before, interesting stuff.

Any plans for another charting project?

Hello Vedmo,

Loxodrome is a path on the surface of a sphere, which crosses all meridians at the same angle. It never crosses any of poles though.
I was thinking about flying other interesting curves but, in the end, this on was a little bit too tedious to do and so I guess I am done for now.

But I am fantasizing about hundreds of other commanders flying the same exploration route I did and making this particular loxodrome "a thing" in Elite
Just imagine somebody at Frontiers looking at data and wondering why there are so many systems explored along this route.

I am ready to share coordinates

 

[TyphoonOfDvina]

How do you go about doing that so perfectly?

Hello Lightspeed,

Let me answer in a broader way.

Loxodrome can take myriads of different shapes based on the parameters of the equation. I wanted to make sure mine would be aesthetically pleasing and practically flyable (say not too dense around poles). First I generated Cartesian coordinates of the route using JavaScript and visualized the result using HTML canvas. My initial curve was just 1 unit in size (all x, y, z coordinates between -0.5 and 0.5). I was tweaking the parameters until I was happy about the result. The next step was to scale it up so that it measures thousands of light years and move it to the center of the galaxy.

And now the accuracy, or perfection that you ask about, comes into place. My first approach was to match my data against EDDB (I did this in my local SQL database) to find closest systems to the points of my curve. This generated decent result but still, EDDB contains only stars discovered by players, which is much, much less than all the stars out there and so resulting route was a little too jaggy based on the density of discovered stars in the regions where parts of my ideal curve reside. There were deviations of up to 100 ly in poorly charted regions.

Then I realized that galaxy map in ED offers pretty usable axes labels [x, y, z] and so I can use them to find stars closest to my ideal route points manually.

And that's how I did it in the end. Plotting every one of 300 route points manually in the galaxy map

 

[Nick Sticks]

Plotting every one of 300 route points manually in the galaxy map

Rep just for that, let alone what the end result looks like.

 

[Sergio Smegolia]

You should let the Buckyballers know about this. I can just imagine a Loxodrome challenge!

 

[Lightspeed]

Rep just for that, let alone what the end result looks like.

Agreed ! Just when you think no new ideas could ever arise in the present development of the game, along comes somebody with an astonishing new achievement !

 

[TyphoonOfDvina]

I've just recalled what was my original motivation.
I wanted to head off for a longer exploration trip (actually I wanted to gather a 1 billion cr. worth of exploration data) but I was out of ideas where to go. Do I want to to fly to some specific distant destination? But where? (As we know, everywhere in the galaxy looks like anywhere else ) Or do I just want to fly erratically in a smaller region? No, that's just not my thing. And then I closed my eyes, I imagined a loxodrome and the rest is the history...

 

[Spaceman Si]

This is brilliant What an elegant and satisfying path to plot through the galaxy, and with such precision!

Well done, commander o7

 

[TyphoonOfDvina]

And here is a time-lapse video of the actual flight.
Unfortunately, inconsistent rendering of local stars (sometimes they are super-bright, sometimes they are completely absent) destroys the impression of continuity and a sense of direction. My inability to align perfectly with the galactic plane doesn't make things any better. The only obvious effect referring to loxodrome is progression from above the galactic plane right below it.

Source: https://youtu.be/tWCJXyy9a9g