Developing the Cosmic Compass System

For the flintlock fantasy story setting I’m developing, I’ve decided that the way people travel between planets is by taking “shortcuts” through other planes. Where I’m having some issues is coming up with a way for people to navigate these other planes, since each one has its own structure and obstacles. I’ve settled on the idea of some kind of magical compass that people can use to at least determine which way they're facing and how far they are from the center of these planes. But, I need help figuring out if my ideas would actually work and if there would be problems with these compasses within certain parts of the planes, i.e. being too close or too far from a particular pole to get accurate readings on the compass and stuff like that.

Since I have a limit on how much I can write in a post, I'm going to only give you certain key details about these planes and how they work. The most important detail is that people are using magical compasses to determine their location inside of a sphere. These other planes are three-dimensional and pretty large. Ignoring the specifics of what they're like and how people traverse them, the concept is that these planes are spherical. You're not traveling on the surface of a planet, you're traveling around inside a ball the size of a solar system. (Which is still smaller than the much longer distances between planets that are set in separate galaxies, so, yeah, no point in complaining about that.)

The point is that my characters can't use a regular compass that points north and south. They having to use a spherical coordinate system. And that... is not something that's easy to explain to readers. It also lacks a certain, shall we say, organic quality. When people give directions, they don't usually specify things like latitude and longitude. You don't give the exact GPS coordinates for the corner grocery story, you say something like, "Head west on Main Street then take the third right after Market Street." There's also the issue of how my characters could figure out their coordinates inside of these very, very big spheres.

What I've settled on is that these planes have seven poles, of sorts, that are detectable by a magical compass, called a Wayfinder's Compass. Further, those poles aren't a result of some kind of magnetic field. I don't know what causes them, yet, but each pole only affects a certain type of material. So you have some kind of compass which tells you exactly which direction the poles are in relation to your position. Using the image below as a reference, the poles are North and South (along the X axis,) East and West (along the Y axis,) Up and Down (along the Z axis,) and Center, which is the point where all three axes intersect.

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So, let's say that a character is at the location marked P. His Wayfinder's Compass will somehow be able to indicate which direction the seven poles are in relation to his position. With those, he can figure out (by doing a lot of math, no doubt,) his coordinates, as well as which ways is "up" and "down," at least in navigational terms. (Given the way gravity works on these planes and their size, up and down can be a matter of perspective a lot of the time, so instruments that give you definite directions are kind of essential.)

Yet I need a means for my characters to discuss their locations and headings without leaving the readers utterly mystified. This is where I really need some help. I think I might have a system, but there are two issues. First, I need to be sure that my idea for the Wayfinder's Compass actually works in terms of someone getting their bearings by knowing the direction of the seven poles. There's no point in coming up with this whole compass system if it wouldn't actually work for navigating these planes. So, I need confirmation on that. I can tell you that the people using a Wayfinder's Compass are usually aware of the size of these planes. They have a diameter of 20 billion kilometers and are perfect spheres. (Still figuring out how they determined this, but that's another topic entirely.) Would that information, plus the directions of the poles, be enough information for someone to determine his coordinates?

Second, I need some terminology for my characters to use that makes sense to the readers. Terms like north, south, east, west, up, and down are easy enough to grasp, but how to I have my characters say they're facing both north and a certain angle up or down in relation to the X,Y axes? I know they could just say, "We're bearing north and up thirty-seven degrees," but I feel like that lacks a certain flare to it and might still be confusing.

Presently, my thinking is that on the X,Y axes, the cardinal directions are the same as a conventional compass rose. (North: 0° = 360°, East: 90°, South: 180°, West: 270°) The Z axis has two points of simply called "Up" (0° = 360°) and "Down" (180°.) When characters describe specific degrees on the up-down Z axis, they don't use terms like "north" or "south." Instead, 45° is "Upward" while 135° is "Downward." Thus, going north on a 45° angle is going "Upward North" while going north and down at a 135° angle is "Downward North." The same applies to all the other cardinal and intercardinal points on the compass, i.e. "Upward South," "Downward East," "Upward Northwest," "Downward Southeast," etc.

As for the points of 22.5° and 67.5° on the Z axis, the equivalents of North-Northeast and East-Northeast on a horizontal compass rose, the terms "High" and "Low" are used. So, going north at a 22.5° is going "High Upward North." Going north at a 67.5° angle is going "Low Upward North." The same applies to the points of 112.5° and 157.5° from "Up" on the Z axis, which would be the equivalents of East-Southeast and South-Southeast on a horizontal compass rose. Thus, going North on a 112.5° angle is "High Downward North" and going North on a 157.4° angle is "Low Downward North."

I've gotten some positive feedback on this system on another forum, but I wanted to see if folks on other forums thought it worked. Having a few people on one site say it does really isn't a sure way to know if it would work for most of my readers, after all. And, once again, I'm trying to get confirmation from multiple sources that a compass pointing to fixed points on the perimeter of a sphere would actually work for navigation. If the Wayfinder's Compass can't do that, I need to figure out some other way for my characters to tell which way they're going.

A second aspect to this system that I want to confirm is the use of a changing frequency to indicate how far people are from the center pole of these planes. Since I want my characters to be able to determine their range from the center without having to do a ton of math (especially when they're pressed for time,) I figured that the cores of these planes gave off some kind of signal that could be detected by the Wayfinder's Compass. For each kilometer closer or further away from the core, the frequency would increase or decrease by 1 Hz.

Since these planes have a 10 billion km radius, I decided that the frequency of the signal would be 1 Hz at the edge. Thus, it would be 10 GHz at the center. So, a character could tell exactly how far he was from the core simply by the number of Hz the signal is. That would not give him any other coordinates, however, just his range from the center. The directions of the six other poles would be necessary to figure out the rest. Whatever this signal is (I'm calling it the Cosmic Pulse at the moment,) it is not affected by any physical matter or forces, so the changes in frequency are consistent no matter what. The only thing the signal does is affect some kind of detection mechanism in a Wayfinder's Compass.

So, do my ideas hold up? Do you think a reader would be able to follow them with minimal amount of exposition? Let me know what you think!

Keep moving forward!

Patrick Leigh​

 

The seven poles are fixed in their positions. They don't shift around, like the poles of our magnetic field do. So, if you drew lines between them, you'd have a perfect set of X,Y,Z axes with the center pole being the origin point of each axis.

 

I think an explanation would be useful, just so I'm sure I'm doing it right. I need this system to be pretty solid, since navigating these planes correctly is imperative. In one of my other threads, I went into detail about the scale of these places and the recurring structure they tend to follow. There are some regions where my characters DO NOT want to end up. In fact, I'm planning a short story where my protagonist, Perdita Nightshade, goes into a cave with a portal to the Plane of Earth while exploring a deserted island. She takes out her Wayfinder's Compass to determine which part of the Plane of Earth she's entered and realizes she's about 9 billion kilometres from the Core. That's almost to the outer edge of the Plane of Earth, which is were the biggest, baddest Abominations are found. I think she's going to refer to the instant where she saw the readings on her Wayfinder's Compass as, "the most butt-puckering moment of my life."

 

I’m thinking she’s exploring the island, finds a cave, goes inside, finds an opening to a side passage that her Wayfinder’s Compass determines is actually an earth portal, and goes through it to determine where it leads on the Plane of Earth. Once she is in far enough, she activates the compass again, and can tell by the angles that she’s closer to one of the outer poles than she should be. She does the math and can’t believe the results, so she checks the frequency of the Cosmic Pulse. It confirms she’s really deep into eldritch territory. After that, she backs out of the earth portal very slowly and quietly. Not sure what else to do with the idea, so far; I just know it’s going to be a really scary moment for her.

 

Firstly, none of these planes are empty. They are:

The Plane of Earth - Big ball of rock with tunnels going through it
The Plane of Water - Big ball of water with vortexes and air pockets in it
The Plane of Air - A big ball of air with lots of clouds and occasional floating islands and dwarf planets floating around in it
The Plane of Fire - Still figuring this one out, but it's probably not a place most people like to go
The Plane of Mirrors - Similar to the Plane of Air in that it's a big ball of gas, but there are countless mirror portals floating in it
The World Tree - Still figuring this out, but I'm thinking it's another ball of gas but with some kind of giant, tree-like thing spreading its branches all over the place

There are going to be two more, but I haven't figured them out just yet.

As for the compass system itself, it came about partly by explorers noticing that certain materials would tug in specific directions and using that the make the original Wayfinder's Compasses, partly through the observation that portals to specific galaxies were generally clustered together in specific directions (i.e., portals to the "north" galaxy were always opposite of the Core from portals to the "south" galaxy,) and partly in reference to certain scriptural passages in holy texts with lines like, "And the Elves came from the Cosmic North" or something to that effect. Thus, the pole which would lead you toward the portals to the galaxy occupied by the Elves was deemed the North Cosmic Pole, the pole that would lead you to the galaxy occupied by the Orcs was dubbed the South Cosmic Pole, the pole that would lead you to the galaxy occupied by the Faeries was called the "West Cosmic Pole" and so on. (The Upper and Lower Cosmic Poles were therefore given their designations once the East and West Cosmic Poles were designated.)

As to your point about the system being invented by more modern scientists, that's largely a result of the Dwarves. In my setting, they're really big on mathematics and geometry. Platonic solids, for example, are considered divine polyhedrons. The Dwarves developed stuff like Algebra, Calculus, Trigonometry, etc., thousands of years before the current era in my story setting. (Which, by the way, is a flintlock fantasy heavily inspired by the 18th century, the Golden Age of Piracy, and the First Industrial Revolution.)

I'm glad you pointed out the Doppler effect movement would have on the readings for the Cosmic Pulse. I overlooked that when researching frequencies. The Cosmic Pulse is not, however, going to be an electromagnetic wave. It's some kind of Arcane energy the Core of the Transitory Planes emits. I figured since gravity can work differently on these planes, it wouldn't be that big of a stretch to think that the frequency of a magical energy wave would go down as it spread out. The reason I decided the Cosmic Pulse was necessary is because the Transitory Planes each have the same diameter: 20 billion kilometres. This, combined with the fact that some of them are made of stone, water, or fire, is why using landmarks to navigate the Transitory Planes is not usually a reliable method.

(Granted, my characters are usually staying within a 100,000 km radius of the Cores, since that's where most of the portals to the galaxies they live in are clustered, but not all portals connect to those inner regions of the Transitory Planes.)

Even if I'm not going into a tremendous amount of detail about this stuff in the narration or dialogue of the books I'm planning, I still need to have a good sense of how my characters can navigate these places with their Wayfinder's Compasses. I'm not content to hand-wave the details and say that it just works "because magic," especially since Arcane Magic is going to be very science based. It doesn't break the laws of physics, but it does let you bend them. You can't turn someone into a frog with Arcane Magic, but you can manipulate temperature, momentum, light, electricity, etc., and the more you understand about how the laws of physics work, the more precise your Arcane Spells become. Since the Cosmic Compass and the Cosmic Pulse are both Arcane in nature, having this stuff figured out is kind of important for me. Plus, I suspect some people would just find it cool to read about the details even if it's just in some kind of lore book about the story setting and not in the actual stories themselves.

 

The way people orient themselves is with the Wayfinder's Compass. It doesn't just point to the XY plane (north,south,east,west,) it also indicates the Z plane (up,down.) Alternatively, they can use a particular type of spell to get their bearings. Without either of those, it is very easy to get hopelessly lost on the Transitory Planes. I'm thinking the ancient ancestors of the various races might have had an innate ability to sense the directions of the Cosmic Poles, but that ability has mostly been lost by subsequent generations. Now, you either need a spell or a device like a Wayfinder's Compass to get your bearings.

As to the Cosmic Pulse, you're point about a crystal that vibrates in response to it is actually the main thing I'm considering, actually. If the Cosmic Pulse itself isn't what changes in frequency, then the resonance of the crystal in the Wayfinder's Compass is what changes in frequency. Either way, the frequency is 1 Hz at the edge of the Transitory Planes and 10 GHz at the very center of the Core. (Not that anyone with a Wayfinder's Compass has actually reached either of those points, but they've figured out those are the limits of the frequency range through various experiments and other research.)

Regarding what happens when you get to the edge of the Transitory Planes, the answer is... I don't have an answer to that, yet. My current thinking is that you if you reach the end and try to go past it, you'll just end up on the opposite side of the same plane. That is, if you try to go past the East Cosmic Pole, you end up at the West Cosmic Pole and vice versa. The only way to leave these planes is through portals. But, again, nobody has actually been able to confirm if this is the case. The further from the Core you go on any Transitory Plane, the more Lovecraftian the creatures get. (See my post on the regions at this convenient link.)

The point is that, with the right device or spell, you can determine what they XYZ axes of the Transitory Planes are, the directions of the different poles, and your distance from the Core. That will give you your coordinates and your heading. I'm just trying to make sure that this could actually work since I'm against simply hand-waving the explanation and saying something like, "It works because magic." Plus, it's just fun to consider the ramifications of what one or two small changes to a law of physics or the way technology works would be. In this case, it's a compass that lets you navigate the inside of a sphere. A really, really, really big sphere. (Seriously, 20 billion km is beyond the orbit of Neptune, but not quite to the hypothesized distance of the heliosheath.)