I am always interested in knowing if there are any land surveyors in this forum. The profession is to common for any conspiracy theory, while their tools of trade relies on assumption that the world is round. Any surveyors here to share some thoughts?
I'm not a professional land surveyor and don't pretend to be, but I've surveyed my share of fence lines and laid out a few soccer fields (75 X 120 yards or less) using transit and tape. But I've stayed in a Holiday Inn Express (if you don't get that reference, never mind... it's silly).
Small tracts of land (a few city blocks or some more) can be treated as planes. The process used is called plane surveying, and the difference between, say, a square mile on the surface of a sphere with a radius of 4,000 miles and a square mile on a plane is insignificant for most practical purposes, and treating it as a plane makes the math
much simpler.
When surveying over longer distances the curvature of the earth becomes a factor. When you're doing this, you're in the realm of geodetic surveys. The measurement effort and analysis needed for proper geodetic surveying is much greater than for plane surveying, but is sometimes necessary.
Where the transition between plane and geodetic surveying is needed depends on the precision required.
What I've personally done is obviously very (very!) basic plane surveying.
[Edit] Typo, clarification.