Horizons Planetary coordinates / bearings / compass inconsistency

[The_Anger]

Greetings all... long time lurker with finally something to say, you know how it goes etc

I'll get right to the point. I've been exploring for a while now, having landed on 100's of planets, so I like to think I know how to navigate from A to B without even the need of bearing calculators... however once before and the planet I'm prospecting for fumeroles currently have thrown a huge curveball, the existence of which i cannot confirm via searches. so i'm posting about it here:

i thought that the compass / bearing angles were aligned to the planetary map. you see those blue lines and the rotational axis with mouse / keys when viewing the planet map, you can be confident that those refer to the poles (90/-90 latitude) and conventional wisdom says that bearings 0, 90, 180, 270 are N,E,S,W respectively. this applies to all planets i've encountered, whether theyre tidally locked or not, whether they're tilted at a weird angle or not... however - the planet i'm on right now doesn't obey this rule!

the N-S axis here is slanted at, roughly, 45 degrees of what it should be. attempting to reach the poles via coordinates / bearings has been beyond painful as the extreme latitudes are not at the poles on the planet map. coordinate 0,0 appears to be somewhere near the visual north. and no, this planet is not tilted at extremes, nor tidally locked, but it is both the first planet for the star and a companion of the 2nd planet.

Here are some screenshots (apologies if this is verging on link spamming) of locations on the planet with only a coordinate difference of 4.5 degrees latitude; these clearly show that to get from one of these locations to the other, you'd have to fly diagonally per the planet map!



from this, 2 questions - anyone seen this before? and what gives?

- CMDR The_Anger

 

[ChipStar65]

I have not seen this before. But is it possible that the coordinate system for this planet/planetoid is based on a magnetic rather than a geological north? Granted it seems far-fetched given the treatment of the vast majority of other planetary coordinate systems, but it seems a possible explanation other than a bug (which do also occur now and then ). In any case you should be able to apply a corrective angle much as is done with correcting for magnetic north on Earth.

 

[The_Anger]

it can be compensated for, for sure... but it's rather tedious dont you think ? especially since just about every planet you visit will obey the common-sense rule.

that said, supposing it's easy to figure out where the coordinate-north is, navigating by it isn't... the corrective angle depends on where you are on the planet which makes things rather hard until you figure out and correlate some geographical feature with respect to coordinate N/S and coordinate equator. basically, bearings are useless until you figure that out, and that's incredibly hard if the planet looks more or less the same from most sides (lack of a major crater for eg, or it's just too big a planet to see anything specific).

imagine, you're approaching a planet aiming for a geographic landmark you can spot from several Mm away, land on it, and try to navigate to another one (or just closer to where you wanted to go) based on where you landed via the map. it just happens to be a planet that's messed up like this with its coordinates... trying to go by instinct and checking periodically via the map if you've traveled far enough in OC, will throw you way, way off from where you wanted to go. by the time you figure out the planet is screwed up with its coordinates (because it's oriented to the planet and not to the orbital plane) as much as an hour can go by or longer if you didnt consider this situation possible...

what would really help here is having the ability to inspect coordinates from the planet map (to start with; i know there's ample requests to develop planet map with respect to coordinates & bookmarking). at least then this issue becomes trivial since you'd be able to see the coordinate lat/long meridians and gauge bearing based on that... it'd also help confirm if the coordinate alignment is actually a bug or not; if it is i suspect the planet map may be being displayed wrong. why? because im actually having a hard time correlating geographical features to where it shows i am on the planet map!

eg... currently im hunting fumeroles on this planet. from the screenshots you can see the patch im heading towards (a diagonal band with a smaller area near to the 2nd pair of screenshots). however ive come across those patches in places they arent marked on the map, and when im over them on the planet map, im not sure i can even see them (some sites worked some didnt)...

this planet is all sorts of messed up to the point i dont know what's wrong with it lol... is it the coordinate alignment? is it the orientation of the planet in the planet map screen and the coordinates are otherwise fine? is the position being displayed in the wrong spot? etc...

so... at this point some answers would be nice but i'd settle for anyone else's experiences with this sort of glitch / planet

as for magnetic vs true north... i dont think so just on statistics. this planet is most certainly an exception or i ought to have found others by now surely that weren't off by as much (or by a lot more)...

 

[Lightspeed]

I suggest you should submit a bug report and refer the Devs to this thread for further details, if you wish (copy and paste the link). I'd like to hear from them if this is "working as intended" or is a bug. Like you say, it's not as if you are new to this, and I don't remember encountering it before.

Alternatively, post in the Exploration Section and see what they say about it there. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/forumdisplay.php/117-Exploration

 

[The_Anger]

I suggest you should submit a bug report and refer the Devs to this thread for further details, if you wish (copy and paste the link). I'd like to hear from them if this is "working as intended" or is a bug. Like you say, it's not as if you are new to this, and I don't remember encountering it before.

Alternatively, post in the Exploration Section and see what they say about it there. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/forumdisplay.php/117-Exploration

Thanks, I've submitted a report, we'll see what happens with that I guess...

 

[The_Anger]

Out of interest I flew to coordinate-south. rather than plastering all the images here, gallery link - https://postimg.org/gallery/ppqrahd4/

This shows the south pole of the planet and the surrounding areas from free-cam with max FOV as seen from the ship for comparison. There should be a ravine / orange discoloration here if you go by the planet map, but clearly there's no such thing anywhere nearby. for that matter... this is the south pole going by coordinates; im on the equator!?

Edit - further investigation on other planets / moons in the same system, found another planet who's the first of a pair exhibiting this issue. trouble is these are a fair bit out (16,000ly from sol give or take a few, traveling counter-clockwise an arm or two in) or i'd ask anyone in the area to check these out to confirm.

other symptoms im seeing is selecting surface map via 1 / navigation menu displays the planet in a rotating state. that is, the planet rotates as if you're looking at it in system map rather than surface map, even when in surface map. opening surface map via system map doesn't do this however.

playing around i'm getting the impression that the coordinates are in fact correct with respect to the planet. what's incorrect is the placement of the marker indicating where you are on the planet. consider this last planet's north pole's location; you can see that the mountain on-screen resembles the ridges as seen from true north on surface map, as my coordinates confirm, however the location marker showing where i am on the surface map is once again on the equator. i dont think im getting the coordinates the wrong way around, and i dont think the coordinates are being swapped for the purposes of the surface map - misaligned or tilted seems more probable. ill add this to the report as well.

 

[duckofdeath]

I got the same impression when I decided to find a specific, deep looking, crater from the system map on the actual planet once. It didn't help that it was that huge 9.90 G planet, making the discrepancies a lot wider... Anyhoo, in my case I just decided I was looking at the system map representation wrong, and eventually gave up.

 

[The_Anger]

I got the same impression when I decided to find a specific, deep looking, crater from the system map on the actual planet once. It didn't help that it was that huge 9.90 G planet, making the discrepancies a lot wider... Anyhoo, in my case I just decided I was looking at the system map representation wrong, and eventually gave up.

heh... yeah i cant go near anything above 3G in what im flying right now, but found a random crater to illustrate what you probably encountered:

approaching the crater


on the crater


buuuuut.....


:shrug:

edit - adding more info to that, experimenting on one specific planet, i think i tracked down the source of the problem.

get this, apparently on non-tidally locked planets, it seems that the player marker's latitude is calculated by adding latitude to longitude! i went to exact coordinates such as 0,0 (lat,long), 0,90, 30,90 and 30,30. 0,0 was on the horizon; 0,90 was the south pole (should be equator but on another quadrant); 30,90 was 30 degrees north of the south pole, and 30,30 was 60 degrees north of the south pole... there's clearly some addition arithmetic going on here for latitude for the player marker. see below:









i highly suspect the same situation is happening with the marker's longitude... the reason i suspect this, is bearings 0 and 180 alter both your longitude and latitude via the surface map as if you were heading to bearings 45 and 225 respectively.

update - ive added a lot more info to the bug report, see last post. short version is that the player marker on these worlds is undergoing a 90 degree rotation, along either the 0/180 longitudinal or the -90/90 longitudinal