Compiled by Robert F. Caine

Background Information

As a bit of an introduction to the logic used to derive this data: I was in my misspent youth a Boy Scout and one of the things that the Boy Scouts trained people in at summer camp in the days before consumer available GPS and inertial guidance systems was the art of orienteering (or finding your way around with a compass and/or a variety of other things like constellations, maps a pedometer etc…) Having learned from this experience that walking x number of paces in direction y, turning to heading z, walking Q paces, turn etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, only gets you lost if the length of your stride is not exactly the same as the one of the person who laid out the course. So much to the disgust of my scout master I got into the habit of summing all the vectors and getting a single straight line course that I could follow to the objective. Applying this logic led me to the same solution that the Noble Robot posted on the game forums, and I will not bother to repeat the solution here (He has a nicer graphic of the whole thing than I made anyway.) I did however in the process discover a few other interesting things about the game and the coordinate system used by the D’ni.

Measure of Length and Distance

• There are 3 flags with numbers printed on them: one the D’ni number 125 another 625, and the third is 3125; all of of these are powers of 5 the D’ni’s favorite number and the root for their base 25 numbering system.
• Checking the number of walking paces from the center of the compass rose to each of these, we find that the number on the flag divided by 5 approximates the number of paces to reach to the flag.
• According to “the Book of Ti’ana,” a span (the D’ni unit of length used in the KI coordinate system) is “slightly less than 40 inches”
• Knowing from my time in the Boy Scouts that the average person’s walking stride is about 18 to 20 inches per step, and checking the strides of an avatar against its height, I found that an avatar’s steps are to a realistic scale.
• Therefore every 2 steps an avatar takes covers a distance of approximately one span.
• Therefore the flag with the number 125 on it is 12.5 spans from the center of the compass rose, the flag with the number 625 on it is 62.5 spans from the center and the flag with 3125 is 312.5 spans from the center.
• However, assuming that the KI displays Spans as its distance measure, the Minkata units are in fact 1/25th of a span, putting the 125 flag at 5 spans, the 625 flag at 25 spans, and the 3125 flag at 125 spans. This would make the Book of Ti’ana definition of a Span inaccurate, which is most likely, given Cyan’s past interpretation of their previous works.