A faithful subsample is a subsample of the current state. The current state cannot be established without a full scan, because you cannot assume that the data has not changed.
As to a solution, just make a subsample and save it in a separate data table. You can use that separate table for development. No reason to be skimpy, a reasonable large (100k) subset will probably be fine.
To specify a rotation, you need both the axis of rotation, and the angle. Just the angle alone is ill-defined.