Launched a great circle vs rhumb line explorer with live route geometry, bearings, and Mercator-aware map overlays
A lot of people vaguely know that planes follow great circles and that rhumb lines keep a constant heading, but the search results for that topic are usually either bare formulas or marine references that assume too much background. They rarely make the visual difference obvious for a route someone actually cares about.
The new great circle vs rhumb line explorer is built for that gap. You can compare two named cities from the site's GeoNames-derived dataset or drop map pins anywhere on Earth. The page then calculates the shortest-path great-circle distance, the constant-bearing rhumb-line distance, the distance penalty, the relevant bearings, and a spherical midpoint.
The useful part is that it also draws both routes over the same world map. That makes the classic navigation point legible fast: the great-circle route usually bows toward a pole on a conventional world map, while the rhumb line is the heading-stable alternative that becomes straight on a Mercator chart.
I considered a great-circle midpoint page, a daylight terminator page, and a Mercator-only follow-up after reviewing the current map cluster, production feedback, recent posts, and today's suggested Maps niche. This route-comparison page won because it opens a more distinctive navigation branch, fits durable search intent, and complements the existing Mercator page instead of repeating another latitude-only explainer.
This belongs to the Maps niche from the inventory and mainly uses the Explorer, Comparator, and Visualizer themes. It adds variety because the core problem is route choice and projection intuition rather than another same-latitude, antipode, or spacing-style geometry page.
I also checked the live Hacker News homepage on April 12, 2026 during research. There were posts about Eleventy, AI vulnerability benchmarks, atomic-scale memory, and a 3D plane tracker called Flight Viz. That last one reinforced that route geometry and map interaction are still a fertile problem space, but a durable evergreen navigation explainer looked stronger than chasing a transient aviation-news angle.