While looking at another issue, I noticed something weird happening with Outer Rim.

The default distance between Aquilo and Secretas is 80k and from Secretas to SSEdge, it is another 20k.
This happens to be the exact distance from Aquilo to SSedge.

Adding Outer Rim, these distances are not touched, meaning Secretas is still effectively on the path from Aquilo to SSedge, with an equivalent shortest path of 100k via Secretas or directly.
The path Aquilo -> Paracelsin -> SSedge is 50k + 100k: a much much longer distance.

RSC moves Secretas much much closer to Aquilo (distance of only 18k) and removes the connection Secretas–SSedge.
It also re-draws the connections Aquilo–Paracelsin–SSedge with a length of 8k and 65k, resp: Now the shortest path Aquilo to SSedge is 73k via Paracelsin.

Now the problem:
RSCompat re-introduces the connection Secretas–SSedge with a length of 20k. That means the shortest path Aquilo->SSedge is via Secretas with a total length of only 38k. This is only about a third of the original distance Aquilo–SSedge.
At the same time the path Secretas–Aquilo–Paracelsin is only 26k, much shorter than the re-introduced direct route Secretas–Paracelsin of 70k.

All this seems very strange to me. I have no idea how these things are supposed to be balanced, but his feels broken.

I'm usually good with numbers, but I think I need images to properly visualize this problem (or just load up each scenario to see the numbers).

Something that shows me how the planets appear on the map, and the lengths for each of their connections, under each circumstance (planets by themselves, Outer Rim w/o RSCompat, and with both Outer Rim and RSCompat), side-by-side, would really help.

(I can look into this and the other issue with OMNI after work, in about 3hrs)

[edit: this post was with RSC 2.2.6, RSCompat 1.0.14, Outer Rim 0.3.3]

Distances in multiples of 1000km. Shortest distance Aquilo–SSedge highlighted in white.

Outer Rim alone already breaks the Triangle Inequality: Secretas is at the same time along the shortest distance Paracelsin–SSEdge as well as along the shortest distance Aquilo–SSEdge.
From what I understand, RSC has the triangle inequality as a core part of its redrawing algorithm. Re-adding original Outer Rim connections afterwards then makes everything just weird.

...wow, these numbers are all over the place.

I'm gonna need a minute to unpack all of this, but there seems to be an issue in basically every single image, not even the minimal modlist of just Secretas/Paracelsin is safe from inconsistencies, like how is Secretas-SSE only twice the length of Secretas-Frozeta, despite appearing just as long (if not longer than) the Aquilo-SSE connection. Same problem on the lower side, Aquilo-Paracelsin appears practically the same length as Paracelsin-SSE, despite being half the length numerically.

Everything involving RSC, I don't know if it's because the original numbers were wrong to begin with, so everything it recalculates ends up being wrong, or if any of the route lengths are being recalculated differently due to redrawn_connections_length_multiplier being applied by another mod.

Maybe AnotherZach (Secretas) and Frontrider (Outer Rim) will have opinions on these numbers …

Hold on a moment. With the new update to RSC suddenly everything is different. I might have to re-create that image with updated connections and numbers …

Hm, I honestly have to wonder if anybody's ever looked into the exact numbers until now, maybe they just deepcopied another route without really checking the lengths, or they just made up the numbers on the spot without worrying about the inconsistencies between other route lengths.

I think the only time routes are brought up, it's to either add them, remove them, or otherwise make them more visually appealing (using something like Cosmic Social Distancing to push planets apart, but only visually).

On the gameplay side of things, I'm not sure if any of us had considered the exact numbers until now (I certainly hadn't looked at them before). It does appear to be relatively minor thing, but this does have gameplay impact on spaceship pathing, even though it's not a very obvious gameplay impact; things will still generally work, regardless of the exact numbers.

On top of that, RSCompat is only one of many potential solutions to the "visually messy starmap" problem, with Organized Solar System and Interstellar Travel being two other possible solutions, both of which probably handle the length problem in their own ways (or maybe they don't; I wouldn't know since I don't use them lol)

[RSC 2.2.7, RSCompat 1.0.14, Outer Rim 0.3.3]

Somehow the factor 4.8 appears in the connection Aquilo–SSEdge (and Paracelsin–SSEdge), but only when Compat is active? In the earlier distance calculations it was no there …

WTF Why did the Outer Rim + RSCompat one change so dramatically? Was the factor always there, but just not calculated until now, as part of the new RSC logic? I'm pretty sure I don't mess with factors at all, so I'm not entirely sure why that happens... although I might have applied something else in attempt to preserve all of Outer Rim's connections to the SSE?

The new logic somehow also created a Fulgora connection to the SSE, which is just crazy, though I can kinda see why that happens...

Something feels weird about this factor of 4.8 for the SSEdge and no factor for anything else. As it stands, RSC reduces pretty much all the distances among the Outer Rim planets by roughly 4 or 5. I expect their default distances have been applied relative to the scale of the Aquilo–SSEdge distance.
Furthermore, the distance between (vanilla) inner planets and Aquilo are reduced by roughly 25%, which is a significant margin.

Is there any chance that this factor can be applied based on radial distance from the sun? Not sure if Compat is the better place to do that or if RSC should try to do this by default.

You might have to try testing again with the latest latest version of RSC (v2.3.1), that fixes the rescaling calculations for the Outer Rim + RSCompat case, at the very least

Is there any chance that this factor can be applied based on radial distance from the sun?

I don't think that is something for RSC to do, since those should be optional fields that can be defined by other mods. But you mean, the farther out from the sun, the higher their redrawn_connections_length_multiplier should be? I can play around with that and see, though this is likely to cause longer routes in general (especially with something like Asteroid Belt, which pushes a lot of stuff even further out)

That being said, I'm not sure I want to make any changes to these values just yet, not until the planet mod authors or Outer Rim dev have a chance to look at this from their ends (anything I do might override their changes)