Figure 4.

Solutions to the centre-line equation (3.14) for rays with uniform G varying over five orders of magnitude (10², 10³, 10⁴, 10⁵, 10⁶), and uniform intraray spacing (d=0.01), bending modulus (B=1) and base shift ϕ₀=0.01. Deflection increases with G. Inset, the five rays plotted with distances multiplied by $1/L_0=\sqrt{G/B}$, so the vertical axis shows $\sqrt{G/B}y$ and the horizontal axis shows $\sqrt{G/B}x$. The curves overlap closely. For large $\sqrt{G/B}$, L₀ is the size of the region at the base of the ray where bending is concentrated.