Journey to the Corner of Kerbin: Adventures in Glitchy Tectonics!

[mattihase]

Yesterday I set out to try and find some of the old Kerbin easter eggs on the new Kerbin. So far that hasn't exactly yielded any results, don't tell me if they're not there, I'd like to discover that for myself. Despite this, this afternoon I managed to find some rather interesting terrain features on the new Kerbin, including a set of 4 lakes around where the inland KSC used to be. The main topic of this thread however is what I found next: Worldseams!

Flying along the river north of where the inland KSC used to be, I discovered this seam in the world going east/west. Now, I've programmed something inspired by the PQS system from KSP1 for a university project and typically, you see variations in the height between different parts of a PQS-style terrain system when two different parts of the terrain are at slightly different detail levels. You can get it to not break most of the time, but it's difficult to completely stop from happening, especially between different faces of the quadsphere.

I don't think that's what's happening here though, as in theory standing right on the edge of these two plates of the planet, they should be at exactly the same subdivision and thus match each other perfectly. I'm sure whatever it is, fixing it will probably give the devs headaches too, to which I offer my deepest sympathies.

Anyway, it'd be rude not to jump in:

yup, it's the ocean down there. Jeb was quite happily bobbing up and down on it but it didn't show up well on screenshot sadly.

Anyway, after some shennanigans trying to crash my plane into it I set off to continue my search for interesting terrain when I found another one heading north.

I decided to follow this one to see if I could find somewhere it met up with another seam, maybe a corner of a couple quadtree nodes intersecting or even a corner of the cubesphere, in which 3 of the planet's sides met up.

Doing this I had to do some fairly close to the ground flying, and swap between each side of the seam as which side was on top kept on switching. The plane I'd built, while not the most manoueverable, is definitely nicely suited for this kind of close-to-the-ground acrobatics. If anyone wants the workspace file for it, I can put it up on gdrive and add it to the thread. It's a really nice little plane.

Finally my efforts were paid off, as I caught the faint hin of another seam on a hill going in a different direction. I tried to put my plane down as close as possible to it, and ended up near these rather peculiar flowers.

Huge luck, this seems to be one of the corners of the PQS system's cubesphere, with 3 of the planet's faces breaking off from each other at 120° angles!

Here's what it looks like if you try to plant a flag close to the exact corner. The animation was completely messed up but the flag managed to go down anyway. Jeb looks chuffed with it, definitely.

And here's where it is on the map if you want to try and seek it out yourself. As you can see it's sort of close to a bend in the furthest down river on the green bit of the western continent, Included are the markers for the KSC and another jet parked on the north pole. Aside from the fact it's a meeting point between 3 different seams, it's location is another thing that tips me off to this probably being a corner of the PQS's quadsphere, as it's about at the latitude where I'd expect one to be.

It was a fun little journey. If you'd like to make your own pilgramage out to this world hole-y spot on kerbin, or manage to pinpoint the location of some other above-water corners of kerbin, or on other planets, feel encouraged to drop your own pics in the thread.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

I've been on a similar journey. 

Won't tell you the results.