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Don’t the circumpolar winds essentially prevent this, or at least make it really impractical?
“sail”
Sorry, can’t hear you down here in my submarine
No diesel sub is going to have the range to make that trip. And NZ doesn’t allow nuclear subs in its waters.
What about Stirling engine like on a Gotland class?
Oh that’s fascinating! I had no idea those existed!
As for answering the question. I searched to see if I could find the range of the Gotland class, but the best I got was this:
nuclear subs are all over the place and could even be in their waters with out them realising
It’s true I’ve got all the locations of the nuclear subs right here and this conjecture is totally correct.
Lmao I do love abit of sarcasm
Yeah, sure you do.
DON’T THE CURCUMPOLAR WINDS ESSENTIALLY PREVENT THIS, OR AT LEAST MAKE IT REALLY IMPRACTICAL?
Sailing near the south pole is not advisable, you might die. But thats also true for many other things, so whatever.
Ping.
Submarines don’t sail, they steam.
The only place you can’t sail is directly into the wind. You can go all the other places eventually but it’s a lot of back and forth.
Tacking back and forth is kinda the opposite of a straight line though, isn’t it?
If you zoom out far enough, the zig zags look like a straight line. Something like a fractal or how they measure coastlines.
All your tacks are straight, they just turn every so often. Over time that adds up to Velocity Made Good.
/kyr’sɛd/?
This isn’t actually surprising, like in a vacuum it is but when you conceder that each point on earth has a full 360 degrees of points that means a line can be drawn to every possible point on earth unless something happens to be in the way, the Earth’s surface is 70% water so you only have a 30% chance of hitting something that is already low but it gets much much lower since we know this is cherry picked as the most exaggerated example you only need one instance on the entire earth of a point that can reach around it out of all the infinite points.
30% wouldn’t be a lot if the land were all even-sized islands, but it’s all in big chunks; most of which is in a pair of unbroken masses that runs from more or less the North Pole to the Drake Passage. There aren’t any straight lines from the British Isles to Hawaii or to Indonesia, or even to Australia if I’m doing the geography correctly; nor are there any straight lines from Madagascar to Greenland, or from Iceland to anywhere in the Pacific, at least by liquid water.
Add in the fact that we’re not used to seeing the roundness of the Earth from any perspective other than along the equator and split on the date line, and it’s really just something that puts two things into a category together that don’t seem like they should be connected.
It’s like the fact that Mercury is (on average) the closest planet to Venus, but also to Earth, Jupiter, even Neptune. Ok, yes, that shouldn’t be a surprise, because it’s the closest to the sun and the sun is always in the middle; but it’s not the way we usually look at the Solar System, and also we know that Neptune is so far away from Mercury that it’s mind-boggling that Mercury could ever be the closest planet to it. It’s very unintuitive based on our usual perspective and existing understanding.
Straight line? That looks hella curved, innit? Can’t fool us with a globe. A flat map, maybe. But not a globe. Despite it being a 2D representation of a globe
If it doesn’t look right, change the way the data is presented and projected.
in case there are others like me who have to see what it looks like on a Mercator projection map:
Wow. I can’t believe my perspective of the world is that distorted. It makes me want to only look at it in 3D. If we’ve all mainly looked at Mercator projections our whole lives our sense of where everything is relative to everything else and what direction is completely off.
People complain about the proportional sizing of Mercator but the sense of direction it gives us is completely broken. I think the average person knows it’s off and people think there is an error factor to consider that a really straight like might be a little squiggly. But nope. This made me realize the Mercator gives pretty much zero accurate sense of direction if real distance is involved.
Short distances are fine, and obviously directly east/west are fine. Directly north/south is also pretty alright, but, as you move further from the equator, any east or west movement is covering less distance, and vice versa.
People complain about the proportional sizing of Mercator but the sense of direction it gives us is completely broken.
With respect, this is silly. People complain about the proportional sizing of the Mercator projection because disproportionate sizing is literally the only problem with the Mercator projection.
The sense of direction being off has got literally nothing to do with Mercator. That’s an inherent drawback of trying to project a three dimensional globe onto a 2D image. Literally every single projection has this exact problem, in one form or another. It is considered ot be an acceptable trade-off for not having to work with globes all the time.
Stop looking for yet more baseless reasons to bash the Mercator projection, which is a perfectly reasonable and acceptable projection to use within its intended usecase (which this specific example literally is).
So would there be turning involved still orrrrr?
no, that’s a straight line
No. Similarly, if you look at how planes fly, they fly in what looks like arcs, going north and then back south. On a mercator projection in looks longer, but it is the shortest straight (ignoring the curve of the earth) line.
You’re constantly, gradually turning downward, technically.
Actually not turning would be falling. You are constantly being turned upward.
Comms Officer: Sirs, we still have quite a bit of time to change course.Red: But we’re going straight.
Purple: Yeah. Turning’s no fun. Why is this happening? Make it not happen.
straight line
So the azimut you set to your compass would be a constant, right??
/s/j
It’s a geodesic; a straight line in spherical geometry.
why do we have to frame info as “cursed”? so cringe
It’s not cursed, it’s bussin frfr
You can plot a course in a straight line. Unfortunately, weather.
One of the few world maps with New Zealand on it.
Only with an icebreaker
Hum, so it’s a straight line, but it’s curved, and the compas turns half way.
Y’all, I found the Flat Earther!
Don’t make fun of flat earthers, their ideology is spreading all over the globe!
Well, yeah…if you want a line that is straight in 3 dimensions then any point on earth at sea level to any other point earth at sea level will require you to go below the surface of the planet.
I got this far on the Wikipedia and gave up:
On a curved surface, the concept of straight lines is replaced by a more general concept of geodesics, curves which are locally straight with respect to the surface. Geodesics on the sphere are great circles, circles whose center coincides with the center of the sphere.
I went down a rabbit hole about globes and maps recently
Basically, to find the shortest distant between two places on a globe (a ‘straight’ line), imagine a hoop or circle round the earth that cuts it exactly in half, and rotate it until it passes through both places (still cutting it exactly in half)
That’s a great circle.
There are 2d map projections that are built around this, but they only work when one of the locations is at the center of the map. So it could show the shortest distance from, say, London to anywhere with a straight line, but it wouldn’t work for a route not including London
Another way to think about it is with elastic bands.
Imagine getting a globe and putting a pin in each place. One pin in the UK, and one in New Zealand. Now put an elastic band between those two pins so that it’s tight. The elastic will be as short as possible, which is as straight a line as possible. But, since the globe is curved the elastic has to curve with it. So, that’s your straight line on a curved surface.
If you wrap the elastic around the other side of the globe (you might need a bigger elastic), you can find the other half of the circle. It’s the place where the elastic is at its tightest, but also where its evenly balanced between slipping to either side. For example, say you have a pin in California and another one in Japan. Both Japan and California are at about 30-40degrees north latitude. But, if you put an elastic starting in Japan and then going around the earth at 30 degrees north through China, Turkey, Spain, etc. when you let go the elastic will slip to the north until there’s no tension anymore. To keep it from slipping you have to balance the tension so it doesn’t slip to the north and doesn’t slip to the south, so it’s going flat around the whole globe. That makes the long half of the great circle.
In case anyone else finds visual guides to be helpful for this sort of thing, I made a graphic to accompany your words:
Ah, okay that makes more sense! Thanks!
Another way to say it, if you cut a sphere in half and both sides are equal, its a great circle. All lines of longitude and the equator are great circles.
All that and not even one rabbit.
“Locally straight” is just a mathsy way of saying “it’s straight if you zoom in a bunch”.
Even better, imho, you can sail in a direct line from OG Zeeland (Netherlands) to New Zealand.
Can you, though? You’d have to squeeze through the narrow English Channel first, and that would probably require some turns.
Never mind the English Channel, Drake Passage will probably kill you.
How bad can it be, really. I’ve got a boat. I can swim. We’re good.
“This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe—and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone.” -Lansing
Below 40 degrees south there is no law; below 50 degrees south there is no God -sailing proverb
Math nerds are going to have a field day with this statement haha.
