When a laser scanner is mounted on a moving platform and combined with a GNSS receiver and inertial navigation system, it is capable of producing millions of geo-referenced points which can then be used to create near-3D models. The development of processing algorithms for these point clouds has largely been the focus of the research community to date. However, given an arbitrary known static object positioned at a specific distance away from a mobile mapping system (MMS) the resolution of the resulting point cloud that will describe that object is unknown. This is the underlying limit of point cloud processing algorithms. We are in the process of developing a method for determining the quantitative resolution of point clouds collected by a MMS with respect to known objects at specified distances. Our previous work has demonstrated our initial investigations into the effect that a scanner position, configuration and operating speed has on scan lines - both in profile spacing and scan line orientation at varying vehicle speeds. This paper focuses on the combined effect on profiles of both vertical and horizontal rotations of the scanner, explores in greater detail the effect on scan line orientation caused by vehicle motion and also incorporates point spacing as a function of range into our model. As with our previous work, we will develop a system to calculate this information and then verify our equations and analysis by comparing our simulated data to the point cloud data collected by our XP-1 mobile mapping system
