The R-QBAM main thread

Il

l get to making it as soon as possible.
I thnik it's fairly safe to assume at this point that the Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine are past their peak in terms of territorial extent, so it might make more sense to make a patch of that moment in time than trying to nail down the constantly moving (and liquid) target of an up-to-date version
 
When I tried to go to sleep last night, all I saw was fjords. Just putting that out there. But yes, after much work, Norway is finally done. First, some replies;

Btw. now we can do Austria-Hungary.
A near proper 1914 map can be made; we just need Greece to finish off Bulgaria's coastal borders at that time.

I was going to do the inevitable 1914 map myself (I've already got a WIP coming along nicely), but it'll only be posed once I've finished European Russia, which shouldn't take too long (the current schedule is Greece, then Iceland and the Faroe Islands followed by European Russia (in about a dozen bite-sized chunks), then the Caucasus, Turkey, and a push on down into the Middle East).

Is it insensitive of me to make a patch for the Russian invasion?

I wouldn't call it insensitive, perhaps ... inadvisable. A current front-lines patch for the Russo-Ukrainian war could get very current-politics very quickly, and then there's the issue others have mentioned concerning the shifting frontlines which I fully agree with. If you really want to do a patch, go for it, but bear in mind that any patch would be outdated immediately. IMO it's not really worth it while the war is still active.

And now the patch;


Patch 29 - Norway;
- Added Norway (damn fjords)
- Added the Orkney and Shetland Islands, finishing Scotland (about half way through Norway, I needed some respite).
- Further lakes patches all over the place, mostly removing superfluous lakes in Poland, Germany, Belarus, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Spain among others.

1653686458685.png
 
When I tried to go to sleep last night, all I saw was fjords. Just putting that out there. But yes, after much work, Norway is finally done. First, some replies;




I was going to do the inevitable 1914 map myself (I've already got a WIP coming along nicely), but it'll only be posed once I've finished European Russia, which shouldn't take too long (the current schedule is Greece, then Iceland and the Faroe Islands followed by European Russia (in about a dozen bite-sized chunks), then the Caucasus, Turkey, and a push on down into the Middle East).



I wouldn't call it insensitive, perhaps ... inadvisable. A current front-lines patch for the Russo-Ukrainian war could get very current-politics very quickly, and then there's the issue others have mentioned concerning the shifting frontlines which I fully agree with. If you really want to do a patch, go for it, but bear in mind that any patch would be outdated immediately. IMO it's not really worth it while the war is still active.

And now the patch;


Patch 29 - Norway;
- Added Norway (damn fjords)
- Added the Orkney and Shetland Islands, finishing Scotland (about half way through Norway, I needed some respite).
- Further lakes patches all over the place, mostly removing superfluous lakes in Poland, Germany, Belarus, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Spain among others.

View attachment 745122
Well kudos to you for completing Norway, now it only remains two of the three-handed beast, Canada, and Chile
 
Congrats on finishing Norway.
Well kudos to you for completing Norway, now it only remains two of the three-handed beast, Canada, and Chile
Ahem. Antarctica.

Don't forget Greenland. And anyway, Norway isn't technically finished yet, as Svalbard, Jan Mayern and Bouvet Island are still missing, not to mention the ... nebulous nature of Antarctic claims (as far as I understand things it's basically schrodinger's territorial claims while the Antarctic Treaty remains in force; everyone involved agrees to act as if no claims are valid while not officially renouncing them).

On the subject, Antarctica is actually mostly done, and has been for months. Hell, this whole project started last October as an effort to make an improved Antarctica for the vanila QBAM, before I decided that the entire basemap needed revising. I have the coastal layer finalised, along with the claimed boundaries, but attempts to add further detail foundered a couple months back. I've found a good source for nunataks and ice sheets on land and permanent ice shelves in the surrounding ocean, but I couldn't get it into a workable format as the data is a GIS file and as it turns out, I suck at GIS.

Actually, I'll use this opportunity to put out an open request, if anyone reading this is half-good at using GIS and doesn't mind helping out, PM me and I'll send on the relevant data to be converted to a format I can actually use. If anyone feels up for it, it would be a massive help.


And now the patch. It was just going to be Greece, but then I realised that it's basically impossible to finish Greece properly without doing the Turkish Aegean coast as well. Next up, Iceland, then a couple of weeks or so grinding out European Russia piecemeal.

Patch 30 - The Aegean;
- Added Greece.
- Added western-most Turkey, including the Aegean coast and the sea of Marmara.
- Mildly patched the Turco-Bulgarian border.

1654015272765.png
 
Actually, I'll use this opportunity to put out an open request, if anyone reading this is half-good at using GIS and doesn't mind helping out, PM me and I'll send on the relevant data to be converted to a format I can actually use. If anyone feels up for it, it would be a massive help.
I have some basics of GIS, I can give it a shot if you send me the layers.
 
Actually, I'll use this opportunity to put out an open request, if anyone reading this is half-good at using GIS and doesn't mind helping out, PM me and I'll send on the relevant data to be converted to a format I can actually use. If anyone feels up for it, it would be a massive help.
Hey, I might be able to help at some extent on this, i've playing a lot with river and topography files on QGIS althrough I'm also little too newbie on that regard

Another matter, what is the total size in pixels that this project is taking? If you want I can try to assemble a layer of coordinates to help as a reference (I'm kinda have experience on that type of stuff)
 
Is there any chance of a border pool in the future? I find the utility of QBAM is rather reliant on it, at least for me. I have a hard time visualizing borders without it.
 
Is there any chance of a border pool in the future? I find the utility of QBAM is rather reliant on it, at least for me. I have a hard time visualizing borders without it.
I suspect one of the primary purposes of making this map so similar to the QBAM is that converting the enormous backlog of historical QBAMs to R-QBAM will be a lot simpler than it would've been to conver them to, say, EqualX
 
I have some basics of GIS, I can give it a shot if you send me the layers.
Hey, I might be able to help at some extent on this, i've playing a lot with river and topography files on QGIS althrough I'm also little too newbie on that regard

Another matter, what is the total size in pixels that this project is taking? If you want I can try to assemble a layer of coordinates to help as a reference (I'm kinda have experience on that type of stuff)

On second thoughts it's probably best to just put the dataset up here. It's a good idea to share sources publicly after all.

The info is a series of datasets from the British Antarctic Survey, showing everything from bedrock topography to Antarctic historical sites, but what's most useful here are the datasets showing coastlines, ice sheets, ice shelves and rock outcrops. All the data is visualised pretty neatly here, where you can play around, enabling and disabling the various layers. Said layers are each available for download separately here.

If either of you (or anyone else who wants to take a stab at it for that matter) can do a better job making the data usable than I did, then that would be massively helpful for the project. As I said earlier, progress on Antarctica stalled when I couldn't figure out a way to get those layers into a format I can actually use.

I'm not really that fussy on getting the data exactly lined up. Reprojecting it into an equirectangular map about 5000 pixels in width is good enough for me. Plugging that into G-Projector and reprojecting into Robinson should give me the necessary new Antarctic layers, so I can both double check what I've already done and add the missing details.

If you want to be more specific, the map is 4974 pixels across (exactly the same width as the old QBAM), centred on the 10th meridian east. I'm not concerned about how quickly it gets done - there are other things I can do in the meantime if for whatever reason it takes a while. And yes, anyone who helps will be credited for their work when this is all over.

I suspect one of the primary purposes of making this map so similar to the QBAM is that converting the enormous backlog of historical QBAMs to R-QBAM will be a lot simpler than it would've been to conver them to, say, EqualX

That is indeed one of the main reasons I'm trying to hew as closely to the QBAM as possible - it makes transferring over old reference maps so much easier. Also, Robinson looks nice.

As I said in the opening post, on a global scale the QBAM is systemically wrong, but on a regional scale it can be pretty good - just look at the last patch, where plenty of the Greek islands were ported over from the QBAM verbatim or with only minor patches.
 
Not much to say here really. I got all the replies out of the way yesterday after all. Anyway, I got Iceland done, a bit quicker than I was expecting to. There are two interesting pieces of trivia to be aware of regarding Iceland. Firstly, its southernmost point, the single-pixel island of Surtsey, was formed by a volcanic eruption in November 1963. Before then it didn't exist, a useful bit of knowledge of historical patches. The other notable point is rather related - Iceland's northernmost point, the tiny island of Kolbeinsey. While it was originally attested in 1616, the island has shrunk substantially over the centuries thanks to natural erosion, to the point that it is widely expected to permanently disappear beneath the waves within the next decade or so. It was last attested in 2020, and Wikipedia says that it's likely still there, so I'm including it, but it may need to be removed at some point in the next few years. Trivia aside ...

Patch 31 - the North Atlantic;
- Added Iceland.
- Added the Faroe Islands.
- Added Jan Mayern.
- Added a handful of tiny Scottish islands; Rockall, North Rona and Sule Skerry.

1654171931337.png
 
the map is 4974 pixels across (exactly the same width as the old QBAM), centred on the 10th meridian east
Well, just clarifying this doubt of mine, in QBAM the size of the entire image is 4974 pixels, so in this account the border and the "extra space" are being counted together, the map itself (without any border) is 4970 pixels in equator line;
An Robison's projection with this size would make the map (only the map) is 4970x2534 pixels, if you count the "extra space" that G.Projector puts the entire image it is 5068x2534 (49 extra pixels on each side);
But if the size of the map itself is 4974 pixels so it would be 4974x2536 for map or if counting the extra space it's 5072x2536 the whole image.
In both sizes the map is completely symmetrical (which I personally like), which the original QBAM wasn't in terms of height (2515 pixels minus the edges).
Anyway, I'm asking this again because these 4 pixels will make a big difference in terms of the dashed lines of the coordinates that I'm going to set up here.

One last thing, I loved your Antartica data source, it's really quite complete, I put one of them in QGIS and at the moment I just have to understand how I do to cut the polygon there in the border of the map to avoid that projection end up looking buggy
 
Well, just clarifying this doubt of mine, in QBAM the size of the entire image is 4974 pixels, so in this account the border and the "extra space" are being counted together, the map itself (without any border) is 4970 pixels in equator line;
An Robison's projection with this size would make the map (only the map) is 4970x2534 pixels, if you count the "extra space" that G.Projector puts the entire image it is 5068x2534 (49 extra pixels on each side);
But if the size of the map itself is 4974 pixels so it would be 4974x2536 for map or if counting the extra space it's 5072x2536 the whole image.
In both sizes the map is completely symmetrical (which I personally like), which the original QBAM wasn't in terms of height (2515 pixels minus the edges).
Anyway, I'm asking this again because these 4 pixels will make a big difference in terms of the dashed lines of the coordinates that I'm going to set up here.

One last thing, I loved your Antartica data source, it's really quite complete, I put one of them in QGIS and at the moment I just have to understand how I do to cut the polygon there in the border of the map to avoid that projection end up looking buggy

Apologies for the mildly delayed response, I had a busy weekend IRL.

To answer your question, the discrepancy is because I'm an idiot who doesn't double check things.

You are right that the QBAM is actually 4972 pixels across, with the main map being 4970 pixels across plus an external border that adds two more pixels to the total tally. The problem is that when I started this project back in October last year, when I was looking up how big the QBAM was I opened up the most recent QBAM I could dig up (Drex's copy with the latest patches) and checked how wide it was in pixels. That version, crucially, has two extra pixels of blank space on either side of the border that I didn't realise were there, because as stated above, I'm an idiot who doesn't double check things like that.

Upshot is when I made the first R-QBAM, I set the new total width at 4974 pixels (4972 without borders), without realising that that was a smidge larger than the original QBAM. By now, I've done enough work on the map that the new width of 4974 is effectively locked in, but that isn't too much of a problem. I have a few other resources that use the 4972 pixel measurement, but I never finished them, so it's not a big problem to start over. As an aside, the width I'm putting into G.Projector to get the right size is 5070 pixels, in case that helps.

And yes, that Antarctica source is a good one. I'm just annoyed I wasn't able to make anything from it myself. Actually, while you're at it, could you produce another layer for the bedrock topography dataset? It could be useful for future deglaciated Antarctica scenarios now I come to think about it.

Oh, and the first chunk of Russia is coming along well. I should have a patch out tomorrow.
 
It begins. Russia will be a big job, and not one I'm expecting to finish soon. The plan now is to grind through European Russia in about a dozen chunks over the next month or so, then push on down through the Caucasus and on into the Middle East.

Patch 32 - Russia 1;
- Added Murmansk
- Added Karelia (showing de-jure autonomy)
- Added Leningrad
- Added St Petersburg

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Good luck on your cartographic ultramarathon.

Thanks. The trick I've found is to spend at least half an hour a day on the project. While on some days I feel particularly productive and spend an hour or more on it, sticking to that means I always get at least some progress done every day. On the subject, I've had a productive day. Have eight more Russian oblasts.

Patch 33 - Russia 2;
- Added Pskov
- Added Novgorod
- Added Tver
- Added Smolensk
- Added Bryansk
- Added Kaluga
- Added Moscow (the oblast)
- Added Moscow (the city)
- Added Rybinsk Reservoir, because a tiny chunk of it hits the borders of Tver, and I'm a completionist.

1654684013798.png
 
It begins. Russia will be a big job, and not one I'm expecting to finish soon. The plan now is to grind through European Russia in about a dozen chunks over the next month or so, then push on down through the Caucasus and on into the Middle East.
Now why does that sound familiar? ;)
 
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