[Puzzle] Earth Radius
 

If one takes a look at the scene.dat file - you can see that in the main dropdown menu "General Enviromental Data" there is a setting called "EarthRadius" that default (in 1.3) is set to 800.000 (km?nm?).

This is a bit of a puzzle to me as the real earth radius (equatoriel) is 6378,135 km or 3963,189 mi or 3443,917 nm.

None of these numbers fits to 800.000

Any ideas why :hmm: :|\\

That's strange.

I have 337813 in my default v1.3 scene.dat for that entry.

Same here Maybe you are runing some mod there ;)

I read in another thread that earth curvature is not modeled in-game. If this is so, what could that setting possibly be used for?

For params calculations ...

Earth Radius, in meters/10 = A0F2A448 = 337813 ...
Celestial objects radius (distance) relative to camera position:
Sun radius (in meters/10);
Moon radius (in meters/10);
Stars radius (in meters/10).

Earth Radius is now edited here.

Anvart could you please explain the other three again in an elaborate form?

Celestial objects radius (distance) relative to camera position:
Sun radius (in meters/10);
Moon radius (in meters/10);
Stars radius (in meters/10).

Sun's distance to the camera should be a tad more then 975*10 as far as i know. and it does not fit with the radius of the sun either.

I suspect it has something to do with either a skybox/sphere setting or how distant ships appear slightly low on the horizon even though they modelled a flat Earth.

Edited my Scene.dat to give 18km+ horizon (2500 is the setting) and when zooming high up in the outside camera you can definetly see earth curvature. You can spot land before you can spot it from the bridge fx. and allso see the horizon curve.

It's not radius of sun, it's "Celestial objects radius (distance) relative to camera position" (distance from you up to the sun)...
Also do not forget that is it game only ... :D

Yea i got the point that it is from me to the sun distance (or to the moon for that sake), but thats where i stop dead in the water. The distance to the sun from earth is far from 957*10 either in Km or in NM or Mi.

http://www.earthmatrix.com/extract62/mercury.html

As its seen here its 92955800 miles (to greater or lesser accuracy in the average)

Even if its a unit distance its wrong. The unit distance - according to the above webpage - is 959.62

So....where did they get the numbers from ?

Probably mathematics... They didn't model a sun, they modelled a small image of the sun that hovers a certain distance above the Earth within the skybox. They just set it at the distance that was appropriate for the image they created.