Add design document

[VeckoTheGecko]

I've translated our meeting notes to a document ./design-doc.md . Please use GitHub's review functionality to discuss anything that needs to be clarified before merging.

• Closes Creating a Design Document #187

[VeckoTheGecko]

See here for the rendered markdown file: https://github.com/OceanParcels/virtualship/blob/design-doc/design-doc.md

[erikvansebille]

Very nice write-up @VeckoTheGecko; some small comments and suggestions below

[erikvansebille]

Do we need to be explicit that we won't check whether a ship track crosses land between Waypoints (as that will be very difficult to implement)?

[j-atkins]

Further, is it important to be consistent with "validate" vs. "verify" phrasing? The design doc uses "validate" but the methods for running these checks in the code use "verify".

[VeckoTheGecko]

(as that will be very difficult to implement)?

How so? Couldn't we (at some point in the future) just include a download of a world coastlines shapefile and then do a line intersect with the coastlines? I don't think this would be too difficult to implement.

Though, separate topic entirely, we need to decide what the ship trajectory looks while travelling. I assume at the moment its just an interpolation in lon/lat space and that the ship isn't navigating via great circle distance (which I think would be more realistic).

"validate" vs. "verify" phrasing? The design doc uses "validate" but the methods for running these checks in the code use "verify".

Yes, I think its important to be consistent. I'll update

[j-atkins]

Thanks for writing this up! Looks very good, just a couple of small additional comments from me.

[j-atkins]

Further, is it important to be consistent with "validate" vs. "verify" phrasing? The design doc uses "validate" but the methods for running these checks in the code use "verify".

[VeckoTheGecko]

I've implemented the review feedback. I think #194 (comment) is the main thing to resolve before we can merge.