I am having difficulty trying to scale the surface area of a rectangle on a sphere.
I have tried many different things and have gotten many different answers. I am doing this with a worldbuilding project, but I thought coming here would be better because it is all pertaining to math. I have a world that is the same mass as Earth but with a radius that is 0.997x smaller. The radius of Earth is 6,371 km. The radius of this sphere is 6,348.7 km. I did some wonky math to find the surface area of the planet and got 950,333,068.1 km² with a radius of 8,696 km. It needs to be 508,286,627 km² with a radius of 6,348.7 km. If you divide the areas, you get a difference of 0.53485. You divide the radii, you get a difference of 0.734.
Would I use 0.734 to scale 950,333,068.1 km² down or 0.53485?