As I am working on improving the handling of splays in my cave converter tool, I wanted to get the opinions of other surveyors as to what options are actually useful. Previously the cave converter automatically converted splays to LRUD dimensions for survey legs, removing the splays as it did so. This was because I came to DistoX surveying from traditional instruments where I typically only measured LRUD at stations. So my initial thoughts on splays were that they were just a way to measure these passage dimensions at each station. As I progressed in knowledge I came to realise the value of splays for marking key points to assist in sketching the shapes of chambers and interesting bends and shapes in passages, to mark side passages and key formations or other features. So I changed the converter to only remove the splays when just LRUD measurements were found at a station. This removed the masses of splays for long sections of simple passage, but retained them at interesting points where more splays were measured. Another few years on, and I am finally moving this LRUD generation code from the PocketTopo file parser into the general survey utility classes. So it will be possible to generate LRUD data from splays for any survey from any format read in. This is where my current questions arise. Which of the following options do people think are genuinely useful: 1) Remove all splays from the output survey file. 2) Keep all splays and also generate LRUD data for legs with stations which have splays. 3) Remove splays which are used to generate a passage dimension (one of LRUD), but keep the rest of the splays. 4) Remove splays when generating LRUD data only when there are no splays at a station other than those used to generate the LRUD data.
Anything I missed? Feedback welcome. For anyone who is not familiar with my Cave Converter, the homepage for the tool is: http://wscc.darkgem.com/caveconverter/ Footleg
