Talk:Juggernaut achievement

Comments

support - for the record. -- relet

I think we need to get a firm limit of ratio. Say a maximum of 1.1m traveled for 1m of straight line distance. I don't know that the actual ratio should be, only that we need a limit to have a definitive definition of what meets the requirement and what doesn't. Otherwise support --aperfectring 18:11, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

support - Neat idea, could lead to some interesting adventures. Should air or ocean travel be permitted? -- Phyzome 18:54, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Absolutely! If you can manage to go in a straight line from your home to a suitable vessel to the point, you have arranged things well. You'd have to get someone else to place the vehicle in the right spot for you. And flying an airplane or paddling a kayak any distance in a dead straight line is a challenge unto itself. -Robyn 16:40, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

needs work I say this only because I agree with aperfectring that it needs a limit. I'd suggest putting in an example calculation. With that done, I would class this as 'difficult but hilarious' and give it my full support. Explain the name. -Robyn 23:48, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I have suggested a ratio of 1:20 for now.. we can change that if it becomes too easy. I have also added the introductory line from wikipedia as an explanation of the term. -- relet 09:20, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Ahh, so it's the maximum deviation from the straight line. Is there an easy way to determine that from a GPS tracklog, or would you have to eye it? I bet someone could write an app. All you need is an icon. support -Robyn 17:15, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

I have been thinking about that. It is pretty easy to determine it afterwards, by drawing a few lines on the map. And while planning beforehand, you can determine a reasonable route to take... it might just be tricky to know how far you currently are from your line. If you have a track/follow mode on your GPS, you could probably store a simple two point track to display, which is a straight line. -- relet 19:08, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

If there are roads you can determine a reasonable route. I was thinking more of forests. I might be able to use my aviation GPS for this, because it has the concept of a track you are supposed to be on. For a ribbon icon I was thinking of a bee (for beeline), an eighteen-wheeler truck (because somewhere they are called juggernauts, I think in England), or an actual Indian juggernaut. Apparently there's also an X-Man called Juggernaut, too. -Robyn 19:53, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

On my old GPS, I didn't have tracks, but was able to write a script that generated a series of POIs along a track.. I could just follow the stars back then. Oh, and finally you could try to hone your orienteering skills with compass and map.

I have looked for a juggernaut on xkcd without success, but maybe I'll be able to find a bee. If not, I'll just ask ilpadre to draw.. an 18-wheeled Indian bee-man perhaps. :D -- relet 08:52, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

needs work. I fully support the idea of the achievement, although - living in a both mountainous and overcivilized area - I definitely will have some difficulties to go in a more or less straight line without potentially even dangerous trespassing. However, there is one issue I have with the achievement as it is proposed now, and that's that it requires to reveal your exact place of residence to the general public. I have no problems revealing an approximate place (like rounded down to 0.01°), but any inaccuracy in the starting coordinates will significantly change the reference line in the first part. Neither I would object to sending the tracklog to other geohashers on request for a check. I'm not sure how to deal with this. Maybe drop the requirements for the starting point and just let the user choose it freely? Of course the user would have to really start at that point. --Ekorren 12:56, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

• Good point, Ekorren. How could we overcome it. Start at a freely-chosen point within one kilometre of your residence/office/hotel/other traditional starting point? That makes it easier to achieve, less of a lucky-location gamble, and puts a new element of planning into the skill. Does it make it too easy for people who live in cities with straight roads? -Robyn 16:37, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea, and won't be a game-breaker. -- relet 17:06, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Robyn, ekorren - can you agree with the changes? -- relet 11:29, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Awesome. Roll it out. Textbook example of a good achievement creation process. -Robyn 14:16, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

More or less. I would still prefer to let the user choose the point where (s)he starts on the expedition freely. With the relative limit, the achievement is probably easier to gain on longer trips anyway, so choosing a close location to the hash won't help much. What I really dislike at the moment is the wording "If you are worried about...". Better make that "If you don't want to". Not wanting to reveal your exact address to the general public should not need a reason, whatever it may be. Noone should feel obliged to even think about what worries him/her with it. --Ekorren 14:34, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Freely choosing wouldn't work - as you could just "begin" your expedition at a point 100m straight down the road from a geohash. But I've changed the wording. And if the achievement really becomes easier on longer trips, that might even give the better stories, but I still doubt that it changes much in difficulty... It will be differently difficult. -- relet 14:56, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm fine with the wording now, thanks. --Ekorren 17:09, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Btw: The issue above was the actual reason why I never published the Compass rose achievement I had worked out long ago - it would require to define a fixed point as your home coordinates and I didn't want to push people into revealing them if they might regret that later. You know, the wiki never forgets. --Ekorren 17:09, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Example distance calculation

About the distance I believe increasing overall distance indeed does lower difficulty. There are obstacles that can't be overcome but need to be circumvented - like railway lines, motorways, rivers, factories or cliffs. Those make it impossible to get below some minimum deviation.

I did an example check, using some random point as a base and following straight lines from there. Actually I used the grid lines on my topographic map as reference lines (they are random enough in this case), starting from the grid line intersection at the Hölderlinturm museum in Tübingen (which is the only one in the inner city).

• West. Buildings force to an immediate deviation of ~150m. Respect for crop increases to 200m after 4 km (all distances beeline). On cyclable ways a deviation of 600m would be needed after about 5 km, walking should be possible with about 300m, provided that terrain is of no concern. Motorway and Gäubahn railway can be crossed close to the line. Numbers don't increase until falling off the map after about 18 km. If you allow yourself a deviation of 1.3 km, you can just follow the convenient paved bike trail.
• South. A lack of bridges lets the deviation immediately start at 300m, which means that no distance below 6 km can be done at all, unless you find a boat to take you over the river. Further on, we're lucky that the reference line almost exactly hits the platform access tunnel at the central station, then zigzag through some residential quarter, find a bridge over the railway, climb a 20% slope and fail at a golf site (in case someone guards it) or a little bit later at the landfill. Circumventing the latter increases to 400m, so after 8 km we reach the first available point. 8 more km, and we would need to park the bike, unpack the climbing gear, or deviate by not less than 2.4 km.
• East: A river, a railway and a motorway work together to doom you into a 500m deviation on the first 2.5 km, followed by a nasty slope in the forest and crossing some fields on unpaved tracks. However, of the first 15 km you can almost always stay on actual roads without exceeding the 500m.
• North: Stairs allow 150m, roads require 300m to get to the town margin. Add in 150m vertical deviation. After 4 km a lack of bridges and respect for a nature reserve increase to 400m, shortly after that a lack of gates in a game fence to 500m. After that, a horizontally surprisingly straight track and a hopefully actually existing footpath will take a lot of breath for being much less straight vertically, but not force to increase horizontal deviation any more. Map ends after 12 km.

Summary: There usually is a minimum deviation you can't get below. In my area 500m seems to be rather typical. As a result it's usually impossible to do juggernaut expeditions shorter than about 10 km. Accepting 1 km of deviation will in many directions allow to stay on paved ways. --Ekorren 17:09, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

So maybe the deviation is too great or the starting point leeway should be "1/20th of the distance to a maximum of 1 km" or the like. -Robyn 17:25, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

It definitely isn't too easy. About the starting point: That will hardly help you, since the same considerations as above will also be valid for the destination, and you can't move that to a more convenient location. Staying below 500m requires to go off the easy trails quite a lot, use unpaved tractor trails and generally disregard terrain for significant distances. If I want to keep to the good bike trails I usually use, the minimum distance would reach a number of maybe 30 km which is about 50 km on actual ways, under perfect conditions which will never occur.

The only way to do that achievemend easily would be to take a very long trip by car, like 200 km and a 8 km deviation. Boo in advance to the one who does. --Ekorren 17:52, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm thinking of Saskatchewan roads, or driving five km to the airport and then taking off and flying 800 km in a GPS straight line. :-) You know I try not to take too much advantage of air hashing, but still. -Robyn 18:07, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Well, I don't know how Saskatchewan roads looks like, but here roads rarely were built straight after horse carriages got common. Either they connect the villages as they are located (with the villages being older than the roads) or they follow the valleys. But even if there is a long straight road it needs to go into the right direction, and there mustn't be any significant obstacle at the end. A steady zigzag along the reference line is probably more realistic... and anyway - you always need to get out of town somehow. --Ekorren 18:43, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

The achievement does not aim at you staying on the easy roads or bike trails. Nor do I think that you will be easily able to find a corridor for your car over that kind of distance. If we find that people have no trouble achieving a 1:20 deviation, we can still raise the standards. :) -- relet 20:23, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

I know that the achievement aims at overcoming difficult obstacles, but at the same time it fails to really encourage that. The point is that there usually are obstacles that must be circumvented and can not be overcome - fences, buildings, motorways, railways, whatever. This kind of minimum deviation results in a minimum distance. Almost noone will straight forward climb over mountains, bushwack through forests and swim through rivers for 20 or 40 km. Or carry the bike through such terrain over significant distances if it doesn't do any good because that damn motorway already set the deviation high enough that you can just as well stay on the available forest tracks. Setting a harder limit than 1:20 will only set the minimum distance higher and thus even less encourage to find your way through instead of around difficult terrain. About the 200 km car trip: Show me a region in Germany where the road network frequently shows gaps with a width of about 20 km or more. I know of one such place in all of Baden-Württemberg. You'll need a reference line that goes right through the middle of that to be forced to deviate more than 10 km. I'm not talking of staying on the motorway, anyway. --Ekorren 20:48, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

In my area, I believe a rule of the thumb will be:

• less than 500m: usually impossible
• 500m-1000m: usually allows to stay on forest or agricultural tracks most of the time, often includes short cross-forest parts. Nasty elevation profile unavoidable. Some directions impossible.
• >1000m: usually allows to stay on paved or well maintained gravel tracks, some hills can be circumvented. Very few directions impossible.
• >1500m: usually allows to stay on convenient paved trails, many mountains can be circumvented.
• >2500m: usually allows to stay on public roads, drivable.

The great expeditions would be such like 2km/50m with all kinds of obstacles along the way; not 50km/2km along a minor road. The former isn't possible in most regions, though. --Ekorren 21:14, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

I have no problem with this going "live." I think it will be a different kind of achievement in different areas. -Robyn 23:58, 7 July 2010 (UTC)