Geeze Gildar. That is intense. After reading that reply I bet your the only person who may be able to explain to me (in normal public school talk) how a sextant works. I looked it up once on stratics...it talked about the planet Sosaria actually being shaped like a doughnut. I pulled up the sextant and um...yeah, was lost. Heh.
Oh, sorry, yeah...the HCI and DCI right. Sorry. I'm probably off topic.
Others explained how real sextants work... I'll try to explain how they work in UO.
I find it easier to think of Sosaria as a grid tilted 45 degrees clockwise where if you walk off of one side, you get teleported to the other side.
When you use a sextant, it tells you where you are in that grid, but with confusing values instead of a simply X and Y for an immersion effect.
So if (#,#) = (Latitude,Longitude)...
(0,0) is located at Lord British's throne (in Britannia)
(180,0) is located exactly half-way across the world traveling due north or south
(0,180) is located exactly half-way across the world traveling due east or west
Everything else in-between is relative to those values.
ie. (0,90) is exactly half-way between (0,0) and (0,180).
Each degree is also split into 60 minutes (8' = 8 minutes), so you can go to 10o 0' east all the way up to 10o 59' east (though since you can't move partial-tile distances, you might not actually be able to stop at ether of those; a single tile spans approximately 4 minutes [distance, not time])
For Malas, Ilshenar, and The Lost Lands, you cannot travel far enough to actually do a full loop around the grid, you get stopped before you get far enough (either from a void or a mountain).
Things are a bit crazier for Tokuno, because you can actually make a full loop, but you don't get the full 360 degrees of travel. The distance of travel in Britannia and Tokuno that makes up "1 degree" is the same, but there is less surface area in Tokuno.
