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 , so the vertical axis shows and the horizontal axis shows . The curves overlap closely. For large , L0 is the size of the region at the base of the ray where bending is concentrated.