SCAR designation calculator
SCAR was created by Murphy of the Murphy Exploration Group. Thank you!
SCAR, the Star Citizen Area Reference, names any spot on a planet or moon with a short grid reference like 12T-NF47 / C. It is built on latitude and longitude, like the UTM grid on Earth maps. Every location page on VerseGuide shows it.
As VerseGuide shows them on a location page, where north is positive: 42.55° is 42.55° N. You can paste both at once, e.g. 31.83° -150.80°.
North is up in the grids.
How a designation is built
Each part narrows the area down, from a 6° × 8° zone to a cell of 1′ × 1′ (one minute of arc). A designation can stop after any part: 12T-NF names a 30′ square, 12T-NF4 one quarter of it. Use as much as you need to say where something is.
- Zone (12): a 6° wide slice of longitude, numbered 01 to 60 eastwards from 180° W.
- Band (T): an 8° tall slice of latitude, lettered C to X from south to north between 80° S and 80° N. The 10° around each pole are A and B (south) and Y and Z (north), for the western and eastern half.
- Sector (NF): a 30′ × 30′ square in the zone: first the column (easting), then the row (northing). Odd zones use the columns A to M, even zones N to Z.
- Quadrant (4): one quarter of the sector, 15′ × 15′: 1 and 2 north, 3 and 4 south.
- Keypad (7): one ninth of the quadrant, 5′ × 5′, numbered like a phone keypad: 1 to 3 along the north edge.
- Last letter (/ C): one of 25 cells of 1′ × 1′ in the keypad, A to Z from the north-west corner. The middle cell is the digit 0.
Letters skip I and O so they cannot be read as 1 and 0.
How big is that?
| Up to | Cell | Moon, 300 km radius | Planet, 1,000 km radius |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12T | 6° × 8° | 31 km × 42 km | 105 km × 140 km |
| 12T-NF | 30′ × 30′ | 2.6 km | 8.7 km |
| 12T-NF4 | 15′ × 15′ | 1.3 km | 4.4 km |
| 12T-NF47 | 5′ × 5′ | 436 m | 1.5 km |
| 12T-NF47 / C | 1′ × 1′ | 87 m | 291 m |
North to south. East to west, cells get narrower towards the poles.
Use it in your own code
The same JavaScript this page runs, in one file for the browser or Node: scar(latitude, longitude)
with north and east positive, and scarFromXYZ(x, y, z, radiusKm) for coordinates relative to a
planet or moon (metres).
import { scar, scarFromXYZ } from './verseguide-scar.mjs'
scar(42.55, -113.73) // '12T-NF47 / G'
// on the command line
// node verseguide-scar.mjs 42.55 -113.73