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Flat Earth General / Re: Jane's FE Compendium
« on: February 12, 2019, 03:58:00 PM »SatellitesSlight problem with the GPS delay system. Has to work for multiple users and there is no communication back to the transmitter to derermine the delay. And not just distance, it's the angle that gives the position. And a reciever can 'see' about 20 transmitters to get an accurate reading. Apart from that...
This is a little outside the usual wheelhouse for this thread, as it's not exactly a principle specific to FE models and this isn't intended to answer every question asked of FET, but there are a few interesting concepts used so it seemed worth a mention.
First, as ever this is not universal. There are FE models (like the non-Euclidean) that allow for conventional space travel. Beyond that however, what fills the roles of satellites if there is no space travel? This question can especially be asked when there is no clear means for a perpetual orbit.
The catch-all term here is stratellites, which are literally just in-atmosphere equivalents. Commonly these are posited to be anything from planes, airships, balloons... though there are models (such as AFET) that have an alternate explanation for gravity that can be cancelled in certain circumstances allowing for machines that we have no real existing name for that can stay aloft easily. More conventionally, there can also be communication towers with either a direct line of sight, or a signal bounced off the upper atmosphere.
This allows for signals to be transmitted.
These can also be used to simulate points higher up. A satellite dish pointed one way could receive a signal from anything along that line, no matter how far it is. Two dishes claimed to be pointed to the same satellite are not necessarily doing so. This kind of simulation is connected to the GPS question; at a basic level GPS functions by a receiver picking up a signal from a transmitter containing the time at which the signal was sent, which is then used to determine how far away the transmitter is. With multiple transmitters, this ends up providing enough information to find a location as there will only be one spot that is the known distance away from the various points.
If a stratellite staggers the signals it emits, it can give the mathematical equivalent of a signal sent from higher up, at least if the signals are more directional.
For an example, forgoing units so we don't have to be constrained to realism, in the RE model a person on the ground might have a GPS transmitter telling them that they are 10 away from satellite A, and 12 away from satellite B.
In the FE model, stratellite A would be 5 away from the person in question. To compensate, the signal it emits is delayed; it gives the signal it itself would receive if there was a satellite A 5 away from it. Thus it creates the illusion of a satellite at higher altitude. A transmitter would still receive the 10, but this is just because the stratellite is giving data staggered as though it had already gone a distance of 5, only for it to go another 5. The same holds for stratellite B.
With this principle, GPS essentially functions as a landmark system. If you are a known distance away from a known point, it naturally gives an accurate reading of where you are. This is true independently of whatever world map is programmed into the receivers; any error that would creep into a journey based on differences between a flat and round map would, on the comparatively small scales of normal journeys, be put down to typical error just from the process of travelling and immediately be corrected for by locating another known point of a stratellite.