I have run into something of a brick wall with my spherical terrain implementation (again!).
I may have gotten myself into a situation that can't actually be resolved here, I'm still trying to figure out what the problem is exactly, and I'm hoping someone here can shed at least a little light on what's going on.
Basically, I have got a very large planet rendering in T3D by dividing it up using a quad tree, and rendering only nodes close to the player. For the purposes of this argument, the player is close to the surface of the planet, and has moved 10,000 meters into the next "zone", and so I want to render the next set of nodes. This is what gnuplot shows:

This is correct. P1 (pink) are the original nodes, at the players starting position, these are now no longer needed, as the player has moved on to P2(green) which is now rendering. So far so good.
The problem is that I need to implement a floating origin system, I can't have the player walking all around the planet, since there will be all kinds of precision issues. So, I reset the player back to the origin, and I now need to move the P2 nodes back along the same vector that I moved the player back (let's assume it's 10,000 units along the x axis for now).
Now, the player should be at the origin, and the p2 nodes should be rendering as if they were in their original position, but they have been moved back 10,000 units.
The X axis is indeed correct, but for some reason, the nodes are in the wrong positions in the Y and Z axes. Each time I increase the distance by 10,000 units, this error increases, causing the nodes position to be completely incorrect.
This is the best image I have of what's happening. This is after just one movement by 10,000 units:

These two groups of nodes should be in exactly the same place, but as can be seen, the second set of green nodes is offset along the z axis.
I have tried all manner of solutions, from changing the positions in the spherical terrain code, changing them in preprenderimage, scaling and rotating, using rodrigues rotation formula, and adding an offset to the z axes to try to compensate for the shift.
Nothing seems to work.
I have confirmed that when I move the nodes by 10,000 units, then move them back by 10,000 units, they are *exactly* the same, which means that what ever is happening is not some random occurrence, for some reason there is an offset being added to the y and z axes of these nodes when I change their x values.
I suspect that the fact that the nodes are on a curve (being part of a spherical terrain surface) must be the issue.
It could also be to do with the local coordinates of the nodes, they are between -1 and +1, could this be an issue?
Another thing that I just thought of is some kind of an issue caused by the scale of the actual world object, in the mission editor.
Does anyone have any advice on where I could continue looking?