Solve one thing, find two more things that need to be redone.  Such is coding.

So the good news is, the Perlin Noise works, and you can see that terrain.  (What are you are seeing is a single color from the high-orbit color texture, accenuated by the local perlin noise height mapping.  So that works)  The bad news is, evidently I never finished the plantary location system.  So as you can see, I'm at the pole (North pole if you care).  Through a lot of thought, I know what needs to be done to solve the seam issue, one simple and one more annoying but accurate.  In ANYCASE, the REAL remaining issue before anything can be really solved is the location system needs to be updated for planets.  The inherant problem for doing a video game on such a massive scale is the number space really doesn't allow for it.  One way to get around it is you have different "spaces" that only care about so much accuracy.  (ie. Solar system space, deep space, plantary space, ship space, building space, etc.).  The way I handle it in deep space is in overlapping sectors.  So just like you have level "boundries", I have sectors with their limits.  When you traverse to close to the edge, the engine seemlessly moves everything over to the new sector without skipping a beat.  Those that are too far away (read 100+ miles), don't make the "cut" and are left in the old sector boundries, while everyone close by gets transported to the new sector.  In a space battle, you won't care if someone just "disappears" because if they are 100 miles away, they are too far away for you care about.  Long distance big things (such as cities) for navigation can still be tracked in deep space coordinates rather than sector coordinates, and if there is some inaccuracy, you'll never see it.  By the time you are close enough to care, the city will be in your sector anyway and therefore be tracked more accurately on sector coordinates.

Ok, so what does this have to do with planets?  Well, in high orbit, I didn't have to worry about orientation.  It knew where you were in relation to the center of the planet, and so I wrote code that only showed you that side in fine detail.  Ok, that all works.  The problem is, in low orbit, it generally makes sense to have the ground below you.  Which means no matter what, the ground is towards negative Y. That was the mentality with the old terrain system.  it was also layed in in grid form, and I never solved those problems so I brushed it under the rug to be handled later.  Well, it's later.  With going to a triangle based terrain system, rather than a grid one, I keep getting hit by grid limitations in the system.  So the location system for planets does need an overhaul so it knows what to display as ground (and when to "stop" you because you hit it).  However, even as I type this, I wonder if I should just do away with negative Y being ground and be done with it.  Regardless of the choice, the old style plantary reference location system has to be done away with.  It's not accurate to what I currently need and it's playing havok with displaying the terrain.  Regardless of which answer I choose, the location system needs an overhaul.