Hot-take of the day - Google maps should be in Equirectangular. I mean seriously, why is it still in Mercator? I'm sure I'm already preaching to the choir that unless you're a 16th century navigator, Mercator sucks due to horrendous size distortions it introduces near the poles. Unfortunately a pseudo-cylindrical projection (for example Robinson, Kavrayskiy VII or Equal Earth) isn't really compatible with a side-scrolling model of map and so couldn't really be used,
but there are other options besides Mercator (we do not talk about Gall-Peters). If you want to keep it simple, go with Equirectangular. Things are still distorted, but much less horribly, and at least the sizes are roughly in-line and not inflated. If you want to go fancier, then I'm sure google would have the know-how to just integrate google Earth with google maps and just correctly show everything as a globe.
I mention this for two reasons. Firstly as the whole issue was recently pointed out again by the ever-amusing xkcd
in a recent comic (
with a link to a very interesting interactive tool that allows you to visualise just how broken and distorted Mercator is by selecting new pole locations (go on, use it, try searching for your own house)). Secondly, because this has really screwed with me while trying to add Finland and Sweden to the R-QBAM. To restate how I make these patches, I have multiple versions of the old 8K-BAM (political, topographic ect), resized and reprojected into Robinson, then draw-over borders and coastlines as a separate layer. But the trace isn't perfect, mostly because shrinking and reprojecting the original maps introduces distortions that must be accounted for, and secondarily because I don't entirely trust the 8K-BAM basemap. Now, to account for this, when drawing on my own coastal layers, I'll be cross-referencing with multiple other maps of the area to make sure I'm doing things right (or at least, right enough), and one of my main sources is Google maps. And there's the problem. The northern regions of Sweden and Finland are rather unpleasantly distorted in google maps whereas the 8K-BAM in equirectangular shows a more reasonable pattern of lakes and borders, and dealing with this was extremely annoying.
And let's not even start on Siberia, that's completely wrong in the most current QBAM but actually fine in older versions, mostly due to Mercator. What I think happened is that somebody looking at google maps noticed that the northern coast of Siberia and associated islands looked kinda off and "corrected it'', without realising that it was actually google maps that was off (because Mercator), and that the original QBAM coastline was actually much closer to how the area should look in Robinson. It's a problem I noticed months ago when I started this project, and it's been bugging me ever since.
So uh, sorry about the extensive rant on map projections. By this point I was numb to Finland's horrendous lakes and coast, so the thing that really stuck out when making the latest patch was just how horrible Mercator is. Anyway yeah, I got Finland done. Took a week but I got it done. Next up, more of the Balkans.
Patch 26 - Finland;
- Added Finland (including the autonomous Aland islands).
- Added the Russian portion of the Gulf of Finland, including several small islands.
