When designing a synthetic environment terrain database format, developers face a tradeoff between physical storage, runtime performance, and data accuracy. The context of the simulation and particularly its specialized requirements heavily influence how the tradeoffs are made. One of the largest historical driving factors in how this balance has been struck has been the "domain" context. The virtual and constructive training domains drove most of the modern terrain format development. However, the requirements for live training are often significantly different. For example, the OneTESS player units allow minimal storage, require a small memory footprint, and necessitate a high degree of ground truth accuracy. The requirements satisfied by existing terrain formats fail to meet these requirements.

OneTESS requires terrain resolution far beyond anything handled by previous "high end" simulations. However, OneTESS requires far fewer terrain services than traditional virtual and constructive systems. This duality makes OneTESS's extreme representation requirements attainable - the tradeoffs between time, space, and accuracy is balanced in the context of a single, high-importance function. Furthermore, OneTESS must execute on a handheld player unit possessing highly limited resources and performance capability compared to current desktop workstations.

In this paper, we discuss the OneTESS terrain requirements and the rationale for needing its own representation. We introduce a new terrain format specifically targeting the OneTESS live training and test domains. We describe its design and implementation and report the preliminary performance benchmarks of terrain services developed for this new terrain format. We conclude with ongoing efforts and future directions.