DrPraetor wrote:Pardon me if I'm spacing on the geometry, but shouldn't the surface of the earth be approximated by 20 triangles (like an icosahedron - a 20-sided die) and not with 22?
Mord wrote:
Two of them are overlapped by others - it works out to 20 faces. Not sure why it was set up that way, but the geometry works.
Both good points. The base maps I've been leaning towards for planetary cartography are Buckminister-Fuller/Dymaxion Projections; and Dymaxion maps often have chevrons cutpasta'd around to keep landmasses or watermasses contiguous.
FrankTrollman wrote:Stahlseele wrote:So, each hex is how big?
Several hundred miles across?
Unless I'm counting wrong, each of those hexagons is about thirty four thousand square kilometers.
-Username17
You're probably right (I hadn't calculated the areas initially); I've narrowed it down to a Dymaxion triangle edge being 7,048.89 km if that helps any (
triangle edges have unstated irrational metric length of 7,048.89 km (unlike Cahill-Keyes facet edges of 10,000 km)).
Thanks to
this I figured out that I was scaling my step 1 hexes too small. Also that the step 2 hexes sub-divide by 12 into 6 mile step 3 hexes; which themselves subdivide into hexes about the size of a Chessex mondomat for the step 4 hex; and the step 5 hex would be a 5' hex.
The idea of being able to have a consistent scaling system seems really appealing, even if the Dymaxion projection is
utter trash compared to the Cahill-Keyes projection. Unfortunately, the Dymaxion projection serves better for hex-based maps; while the Cahill-Keyes maps are
better for squared grid use.
Blicero wrote:How is this a dying earth hexmap? Isn't the conceit of the dying earth stories that they take place in the crazy far future where modern geography is no longer accurate?
Changing this maps tectonic overlay is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. Pretty much since I made my first planet w/ the 2e Worldbuilder's Guide.
The thing is, even Jack Vance wasn't clear how far in the future the timeline was. The only real evidence that the world geography isn't far enough changed that that is a single location (the
Scamander River) in the narration of Cudgel the Clever's later leg of his voyages in
Lens of the Overworld.
The problem with the Scamander leg of the trek from LotOW is that it feels far too long for what seem like a sub 20km distance (at least a couple of days pass in the narrative). So Vance might have simply been inadvertedly poaching the Illiad for riverine nomeclature, and DE's Scamander is an continental watershed river like the Yang Ze or the Nile. Alternately, he may have thought that the Scamander from the Illiad was a much longer river than it is.
Right now I'm focusing on being able to make a hexmap of Earth. Making it more post-post-apocalyptic will involve of overlaying existing dymaxion maps of infrastructure, population centres, biomes, and human migration from my hewworld folder. The case Gene Keys makes for Dymaxion maps having high distortion has proven to be somewhat true, lower quality maps tend to be more distorted.
Stahlseele wrote:@Frank
Thanks.
And now i find myself asking:
What good is a hexmap at that scale?
Really useful if the campaign involves intercontinental travel more than once a play session, you like to use gridded paper for calculating combat, and travel across hundreds of miles can occur by air or land craft in narrative seconds.
(Un)fortunately, the
largest high definition satellite image has 2km pixels, which means that the "world map" can support "some mile" hexes at its smallest resolution. Now 4x4 pixels is going to be tiny, but 6 mile hexes on a "world" map is certainly going to make integration with more detailed hex steps in sub-maps a bit easier.