What's going on with that little green thing in the bottom right, between Morocco and Algeria?
Does it indicate a de facto independent local group?
The R-QBAM main thread
- Thread starter Tanystropheus42
- Start date
Does it indicate a de facto independent local group?
I believe it was from the 1931 map I used as a base, and it was just unclaimed territory... I'll also try working on Africa some when I get a chance.
Well, uh, that was surprisingly easy. North-Western Canada apparently wasn't as messy as I thought it would be, and I was able to power through it in a little over a week. Hell, I managed to finish Yukon in a single day (I was on a roll last Friday). I actually had most of this patch finished by last Sunday, but the Mackenzie River delta is horrible, and took several days of work and a lot of uncertain tweaking till I produced something that's good enough. Seriously, the area looks like this, a mess of (probably literally) fractal lakes and river channels. In the end I just had to ignore a lot of the mess and simplify things considerably to prevent the whole area becoming a uniform mass of black pixels.
With this patch done, I'm actually beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel - there's only one Canada patch left, covering the Queen Elizabeth Islands in the Canadian far north, then it's finally done. It's taken me half a year, but I've nearly finished Canada. Pinch me.
We won't get to the final Canada patch for a bit though, as there are some other jobs that need finishing first. Next up is a patch that adds Uruguay and the final Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. It doesn't seem that big at first glance, but I'll also be using this patch as an excuse to double check and go over the rest of Brazil before I properly finish it, as there are one or two areas I'm not entirely happy with. After that, Greenland 2, finishing Greenland and Denmark by extension, followed by a smaller patch adding north-east Argentina. Once that's done I get to belatedly finish Canada, before adding another Chunk of Argentina then heading back up north to add Alaska.
A few replies, then we'll get to the next patch;
I've probably said this before, but just in case I haven't, I'm not showing insurgencies on the political map. Trying to show them would be a tonne more work on top of what I already need to do, and would clutter up the map to boot. For this reason both the often-overlapping spheres of influence among Mexican cartels or the ongoing Haitian gang war are not shown. I should also reiterate that the map is set on the 1st January 2022, because the R-QBAM has genuinely taken so long to complete that the de-facto political map is now two years out of date. Meaning that even if I added them, insurgencies wouldn't be up-to-date anyway.
Nice. I'm always pleased to see other people taking what I've done and building on it. Historical patches in particular I've always found especially useful, so good work.
Just to confirm, as the guy that made the 1929 map, that's the edge of the Saharan territories France didn't quite control coloured in non-state green. On the other hand, by 1936 they may have extended direct control over the area if this map is anything to go by.
Patch 111 - Oh, Canada 11 (Finishing the Canadian mainland);
- Added the remainder of the mainland territories of the Northwest Territories.
- Added Yukon.
With this patch done, I'm actually beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel - there's only one Canada patch left, covering the Queen Elizabeth Islands in the Canadian far north, then it's finally done. It's taken me half a year, but I've nearly finished Canada. Pinch me.
We won't get to the final Canada patch for a bit though, as there are some other jobs that need finishing first. Next up is a patch that adds Uruguay and the final Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. It doesn't seem that big at first glance, but I'll also be using this patch as an excuse to double check and go over the rest of Brazil before I properly finish it, as there are one or two areas I'm not entirely happy with. After that, Greenland 2, finishing Greenland and Denmark by extension, followed by a smaller patch adding north-east Argentina. Once that's done I get to belatedly finish Canada, before adding another Chunk of Argentina then heading back up north to add Alaska.
A few replies, then we'll get to the next patch;
I've probably said this before, but just in case I haven't, I'm not showing insurgencies on the political map. Trying to show them would be a tonne more work on top of what I already need to do, and would clutter up the map to boot. For this reason both the often-overlapping spheres of influence among Mexican cartels or the ongoing Haitian gang war are not shown. I should also reiterate that the map is set on the 1st January 2022, because the R-QBAM has genuinely taken so long to complete that the de-facto political map is now two years out of date. Meaning that even if I added them, insurgencies wouldn't be up-to-date anyway.
Europe, 1/1/1936
Nice. I'm always pleased to see other people taking what I've done and building on it. Historical patches in particular I've always found especially useful, so good work.
Just to confirm, as the guy that made the 1929 map, that's the edge of the Saharan territories France didn't quite control coloured in non-state green. On the other hand, by 1936 they may have extended direct control over the area if this map is anything to go by.
Patch 111 - Oh, Canada 11 (Finishing the Canadian mainland);
- Added the remainder of the mainland territories of the Northwest Territories.
- Added Yukon.
Another new country has been added, Uruguay, while Brazil, a nation I've been slowly progressing through over many months, has finally been finished (blame Canada for holding things up). I also went back and tweaked a few little things; bits of Bahia, a Bolivian lake or two, some Ecuadorian mountain glaciers and shortening the Mackenzie river back up in Canada. Regarding Brazil overall, I'm still not entirely happy with the rivers of the Amazon basin, but I'm not in the mood to make substantial changes right now, so I'll leave them as-is and come back to it later.
Oh, and I stumbled on another glaring mistake with the QBAM, as every version I've checked (including the most up-to-date version I'm aware of on @Sharklord1 's DA account) is missing the Salto Grande Reservoir on the border between Uruguay and Argentina. Considering its size, that's a fairly notable omission.
Don't expect the next patch any time soon, as next up is Greenland 2, to finish off Denmark, followed shortly by the first major chunk of Argentina.
Patch 112 - Uruguay and Brazil
- Added Uruguay
- Added Rio Grande do Sul, finishing Brazil
- Made a few minor changes, none that important/notable.
Oh, and I stumbled on another glaring mistake with the QBAM, as every version I've checked (including the most up-to-date version I'm aware of on @Sharklord1 's DA account) is missing the Salto Grande Reservoir on the border between Uruguay and Argentina. Considering its size, that's a fairly notable omission.
Don't expect the next patch any time soon, as next up is Greenland 2, to finish off Denmark, followed shortly by the first major chunk of Argentina.
Patch 112 - Uruguay and Brazil
- Added Uruguay
- Added Rio Grande do Sul, finishing Brazil
- Made a few minor changes, none that important/notable.
Minor nitpick: Crimea is designated as a republic by Russia, and should be marked as such on the map.
(If said autonomy being utterly nominal like most of the other republics)
(If said autonomy being utterly nominal like most of the other republics)
@Tanystropheus42
Been watching this thread for a while and just want to say this is superb work and is so much easier to work with than the Q-Bam . Having tinkered with the R-Qbam a good bit now my only gripe is that the inclusion of so many modern reservoirs makes creating accurate historical maps more complicated.
Been watching this thread for a while and just want to say this is superb work and is so much easier to work with than the Q-Bam . Having tinkered with the R-Qbam a good bit now my only gripe is that the inclusion of so many modern reservoirs makes creating accurate historical maps more complicated.
I think there will be a patch with reservoirs and construction dates written next to them, eventually
I'm not really sure how on Earth I managed to get the second half of Greenland done in a week and a half. I thought this would be a three-week job at minimum. I guess I just had a really good week last week.
All that progress came in spite of both Greenland's gnarly geography (I'm beginning to sound like a broken record I know, but damn the ice ages) and some incredibly spotty, inconsistent and often downright contradictory primary sources covering northern and northeastern Greenland. Shout-out to @Altaic for pointing out just how inaccurate some seemingly reputable sources actually are a couple of months ago, as when I hit the problem in earnest early last week I was somewhat prepared for it. You'll be pleased to know that after quite a lot of cross-referencing and double-checking, I'm pretty sure I have the correct geography nailed down, and even better I suspect I know why such a discrepancy exists in the first place.
The missing piece of the puzzle was a series of maps of the high Arctic produced by the US Department of Defense back in the 60's, digitised here. This map in particular plotting the far northeast of Greenland was particularly useful, not only by providing a visualisation of the area that isn't horrendously destroyed by projection warping, but because it's also annotated. At multiple locations on the map, some form of this disclaimer appears; "Arctic Institute of North America Project Nord (Control Data Corp.) indicates position discrepancies in excess of 11 nautical miles (Nov/68)". There is some variation in punctuation, and a few areas apparently aren't as off from where they should be as others, but this is an otherwise pretty clear warning that though the shapes of the land were about right, the actual positions were dead wrong. When you're as far north as the top of Greenland, a discrepancy of 11 nautical miles can be as much as two degrees of longitude away from where a feature should be, a problem confounded by map distortion once a dataset is reprojected.
If I had to guess, I'd say these problems are due to the harsh and difficult nature of the terrain making accurate field mapping difficult, in addition to many methods for triangulating a position on the ground not working so well so close to the pole, leading to an awful lot of misalignment. I think this inherent inaccuracy in even the best hisotrical maps is why so many sources are wrong - at some point in the 80's or 90's, somebody digitised a physical map to produce a new coastline shapefile without realising that the map they were using as a source was itself wrong, resulting in a tonne of datasets where the land is off from where it should be. Perhaps the best example is google maps (see the example linked here), where stretches of ocean are included as if they were land and tracts of land are omitted as if they were ocean. This dataset covering ice sheets of the world is another good example - just zoom in on northern Greenland and notice how the coasts and ice layer doesn't line up with the basemap.
The earliest versions of the 8K-BAM suffer from this rather badly, which is a shame as I've been using a reprojected 8K-BAM for years as a primary source when drawing on coasts. All the way back at the beginning of the thread I asked one of the creators of the 8K-BAM @Drex for his sources, and got this map based on 2015 ESA data back as a response. That map is, alas, just flat out wrong. Basically the entire coastline of northern Greenland is shifted west by a degree of latitude or more, and the shift isn't even consistent, with some areas being more off than others. Several fjords and straits are filled in as land (e.g. Victoria fjord), while large bites have been taken out of the land (e.g., from the Mylius-Erichsen Land peninsula). It's a complete mess, and it was apparently copied verbatim for the 8K-BAM. I think those problems have been patched in more recent versions, but the versions I have, including a lot of the hisorical and geographical resources, are all rather badly flawed.
But here's the thing. As well as pointing out its own inaccuracies, the DoD map tries to rectify the problem somewhat by listing the real coordinates of a few key locations, places where genuinely accurate measurements were able to be taken. For example, for the weather station that would become Station Nord (the furthest north permanently manned station on Greenland and the second furthers north permanently occupied place in the word) the map has this to say; "A reliable geodetic positional determination of the weather station is 81°36'09''N, 16°40'12''W.". The map provides a handful of real fixed points to compare against which was invaluable when deciding which datasets to use as sources and which are wrong.
After a lot of double-checking, I realised that several datasets lined up with each other and the old coordinates listed on the DoD map. It appears that satellite mapping has solved the old cartographic inaccuracies and producing decent basemaps that aling with the handful of good coordinates listed in the DoD map, but that not every dataset got the memo, with quite a few still using traces from the flawed old physical maps.
This NASA map lies up, though some of the datasets I have toggled on in that link apparently don't. The source for that coastline layer is listed as openstreetmap, and while I spent way too long trying to overlay a graticule on openstreetmap to confirm things visually without success, I eventually resorted to manually selecting various points and checking their coordinates which seemed to confirm that it lined up too. A lot of the layers helpfully provided for the R-QBAM project by @Rac98 here including the administrative and topographic layers line up as well. I was particularly pleased to learn that the Robinson webmap I've been linking to passes the test with flying colours and lines up with the others, as does the ESA 2020 land-cover data I've been using as an overlay (description here, downloadable here). Unfortunately the ESA dataset alas doesn't extend further north than 82.75°N, so I spent another day or so digging up sources that showed ice caps that far north and that lined up with the correct maps. I eventually found a collection of GIS layers covering Greenland downloadable here, and was very happy to see that ice sheets and base geography lined up with the 2020 ESA data once I ported them all into QGIS.
Once I'd figured out which sources are more trustworthy than others, I got to mapping, which proved difficult, painful and time-consuming, however I somehow got it all done quickly. I think I got sucked in by the challenge Greenland presented, and once I'd figured out the dataset problems I had gotten so much done that it made sense to keep up the good pace and push on to completion.
Major note, my suspicions that the effects of global warming are visible in the R-QBAM were bang on the money. The 2020 ESA data shows the fronts of several glaciers further inland than other older datasets, a fact confirmed by comparing the areas in question with the 60's DoD maps linked to previously and some even earlier maps from the 50's here. The Q-Greenland GIS data I've already linked to also provides layers showing the retreat of several glaciers between 2001 and 2021, corroborating the ESA data and painting a depressing picture. Hell, the Petermann Glacier in the far north near Ellesmere island has receded inland far enough to add about 30 pixels of new sea and coastline.
Long story short, when I expand the 1914 map to cover Greenland, I'll have to do a patch for Greenland's pre-industrial coastline. Typical.
On another note, while making this I ended up doing quite a lot of reading around Greenland and Arctic exploration at the turn of the 20th century. I find it darkly amusing just how blindly nationalist some of the 19th and early 20th century explorers got when naming new geographical features they discovered. Anyone want to guess the nationality of the man who named Ile-de-France?; What about Germania Land (complete with the Cape Bismark)?; Or how about the Roosevelt mountains and Independence Fjord?. And that's what happened when they weren't naming places after themselves, for example Nares Land, Peary Land, or after minor Danish royals (the Danish royal family being the Danish royal family, there are a lot of King Christan and King Frederick Lands) and many more I won't bother to list here.
Also, I can't not mention it now that I've learned it, but there's a place in the far north of Greenland called Antarctic Bay. At first when I saw the name on a map I suspected some century-old trolling from a bored explorer, until I learned on further reading that the bay was named after a 19th century polar exploration ship that saw use in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, so it at least makes some sense.
Final point, one of Greenland's islands was only discovered as late as 1993.
With all that out of the way, on to ...
Patch 113 - Greenland 2
- Added The remaining two thirds of Greenland, finishing Denmark.
- Mildly tweaked several other arctic island groups, namely Iceland, Svalbard, Novaya Zemlya and the Franz Joseph archipelago.
- Moved Rockall.
All that progress came in spite of both Greenland's gnarly geography (I'm beginning to sound like a broken record I know, but damn the ice ages) and some incredibly spotty, inconsistent and often downright contradictory primary sources covering northern and northeastern Greenland. Shout-out to @Altaic for pointing out just how inaccurate some seemingly reputable sources actually are a couple of months ago, as when I hit the problem in earnest early last week I was somewhat prepared for it. You'll be pleased to know that after quite a lot of cross-referencing and double-checking, I'm pretty sure I have the correct geography nailed down, and even better I suspect I know why such a discrepancy exists in the first place.
The missing piece of the puzzle was a series of maps of the high Arctic produced by the US Department of Defense back in the 60's, digitised here. This map in particular plotting the far northeast of Greenland was particularly useful, not only by providing a visualisation of the area that isn't horrendously destroyed by projection warping, but because it's also annotated. At multiple locations on the map, some form of this disclaimer appears; "Arctic Institute of North America Project Nord (Control Data Corp.) indicates position discrepancies in excess of 11 nautical miles (Nov/68)". There is some variation in punctuation, and a few areas apparently aren't as off from where they should be as others, but this is an otherwise pretty clear warning that though the shapes of the land were about right, the actual positions were dead wrong. When you're as far north as the top of Greenland, a discrepancy of 11 nautical miles can be as much as two degrees of longitude away from where a feature should be, a problem confounded by map distortion once a dataset is reprojected.
If I had to guess, I'd say these problems are due to the harsh and difficult nature of the terrain making accurate field mapping difficult, in addition to many methods for triangulating a position on the ground not working so well so close to the pole, leading to an awful lot of misalignment. I think this inherent inaccuracy in even the best hisotrical maps is why so many sources are wrong - at some point in the 80's or 90's, somebody digitised a physical map to produce a new coastline shapefile without realising that the map they were using as a source was itself wrong, resulting in a tonne of datasets where the land is off from where it should be. Perhaps the best example is google maps (see the example linked here), where stretches of ocean are included as if they were land and tracts of land are omitted as if they were ocean. This dataset covering ice sheets of the world is another good example - just zoom in on northern Greenland and notice how the coasts and ice layer doesn't line up with the basemap.
The earliest versions of the 8K-BAM suffer from this rather badly, which is a shame as I've been using a reprojected 8K-BAM for years as a primary source when drawing on coasts. All the way back at the beginning of the thread I asked one of the creators of the 8K-BAM @Drex for his sources, and got this map based on 2015 ESA data back as a response. That map is, alas, just flat out wrong. Basically the entire coastline of northern Greenland is shifted west by a degree of latitude or more, and the shift isn't even consistent, with some areas being more off than others. Several fjords and straits are filled in as land (e.g. Victoria fjord), while large bites have been taken out of the land (e.g., from the Mylius-Erichsen Land peninsula). It's a complete mess, and it was apparently copied verbatim for the 8K-BAM. I think those problems have been patched in more recent versions, but the versions I have, including a lot of the hisorical and geographical resources, are all rather badly flawed.
But here's the thing. As well as pointing out its own inaccuracies, the DoD map tries to rectify the problem somewhat by listing the real coordinates of a few key locations, places where genuinely accurate measurements were able to be taken. For example, for the weather station that would become Station Nord (the furthest north permanently manned station on Greenland and the second furthers north permanently occupied place in the word) the map has this to say; "A reliable geodetic positional determination of the weather station is 81°36'09''N, 16°40'12''W.". The map provides a handful of real fixed points to compare against which was invaluable when deciding which datasets to use as sources and which are wrong.
After a lot of double-checking, I realised that several datasets lined up with each other and the old coordinates listed on the DoD map. It appears that satellite mapping has solved the old cartographic inaccuracies and producing decent basemaps that aling with the handful of good coordinates listed in the DoD map, but that not every dataset got the memo, with quite a few still using traces from the flawed old physical maps.
This NASA map lies up, though some of the datasets I have toggled on in that link apparently don't. The source for that coastline layer is listed as openstreetmap, and while I spent way too long trying to overlay a graticule on openstreetmap to confirm things visually without success, I eventually resorted to manually selecting various points and checking their coordinates which seemed to confirm that it lined up too. A lot of the layers helpfully provided for the R-QBAM project by @Rac98 here including the administrative and topographic layers line up as well. I was particularly pleased to learn that the Robinson webmap I've been linking to passes the test with flying colours and lines up with the others, as does the ESA 2020 land-cover data I've been using as an overlay (description here, downloadable here). Unfortunately the ESA dataset alas doesn't extend further north than 82.75°N, so I spent another day or so digging up sources that showed ice caps that far north and that lined up with the correct maps. I eventually found a collection of GIS layers covering Greenland downloadable here, and was very happy to see that ice sheets and base geography lined up with the 2020 ESA data once I ported them all into QGIS.
Once I'd figured out which sources are more trustworthy than others, I got to mapping, which proved difficult, painful and time-consuming, however I somehow got it all done quickly. I think I got sucked in by the challenge Greenland presented, and once I'd figured out the dataset problems I had gotten so much done that it made sense to keep up the good pace and push on to completion.
Major note, my suspicions that the effects of global warming are visible in the R-QBAM were bang on the money. The 2020 ESA data shows the fronts of several glaciers further inland than other older datasets, a fact confirmed by comparing the areas in question with the 60's DoD maps linked to previously and some even earlier maps from the 50's here. The Q-Greenland GIS data I've already linked to also provides layers showing the retreat of several glaciers between 2001 and 2021, corroborating the ESA data and painting a depressing picture. Hell, the Petermann Glacier in the far north near Ellesmere island has receded inland far enough to add about 30 pixels of new sea and coastline.
Long story short, when I expand the 1914 map to cover Greenland, I'll have to do a patch for Greenland's pre-industrial coastline. Typical.
On another note, while making this I ended up doing quite a lot of reading around Greenland and Arctic exploration at the turn of the 20th century. I find it darkly amusing just how blindly nationalist some of the 19th and early 20th century explorers got when naming new geographical features they discovered. Anyone want to guess the nationality of the man who named Ile-de-France?; What about Germania Land (complete with the Cape Bismark)?; Or how about the Roosevelt mountains and Independence Fjord?. And that's what happened when they weren't naming places after themselves, for example Nares Land, Peary Land, or after minor Danish royals (the Danish royal family being the Danish royal family, there are a lot of King Christan and King Frederick Lands) and many more I won't bother to list here.
Also, I can't not mention it now that I've learned it, but there's a place in the far north of Greenland called Antarctic Bay. At first when I saw the name on a map I suspected some century-old trolling from a bored explorer, until I learned on further reading that the bay was named after a 19th century polar exploration ship that saw use in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, so it at least makes some sense.
Final point, one of Greenland's islands was only discovered as late as 1993.
With all that out of the way, on to ...
Patch 113 - Greenland 2
- Added The remaining two thirds of Greenland, finishing Denmark.
- Mildly tweaked several other arctic island groups, namely Iceland, Svalbard, Novaya Zemlya and the Franz Joseph archipelago.
- Moved Rockall.
If you are right, and I believe you are, this is the first reasonably accurate Greenland on this website, ever.
Bravo. A huge ask considering the distortion.
Well hot damn! That's the best greenland I've seen in a long time
I would've finished this on Wednesday, but I've been really uncertain about a couple of things concerning the current patch, which held up development while I figured out what to do. I kept on going back and forth over whether the Parana River was big enough to get traced out as water, and because I was uncertain on that I got uncertain on other things too. I went back and did the modifications I've been threatening to do to the Amazon basin for a while, shortening some rivers and tweaking an awful lot besides. I eventually decided to show the Parana, but I'm not entirely sure I made the right choice so this might still change. Also, I was probably a bit too generous showing lakes in Argentina, but that's a problem I'll remedy when I do the next few chunks of South America.
Next up is the final Canada patch (pinch me), followed by northwest Argentina, then Alaska, followed by southern Argentina and finishing off the Americas with Chile and Patagonia, which will include the southernmost provinces of Argentina. Honestly, it makes sense to do Patagonia in one final push, so Santa Cruz and Tierra Del Fuego will go in with Chile.
On a different note, I haven't done any replies in a while, so I may as well do them now. In no particular order ...
As always, thanks for the compliments. Greenland was an awful lot of work to finish (and finish quickly at that), but I do think the results speak for themselves.
I mean, I'm pretty sure the worlda is low-res enough that all the distortions I had to worry about don't really matter, and I was honestly surprised to find that Greenland isn't actually too bad in the vanilla QBAM.
I've said it before in a longer rant buried in the replies here, but when the QBAM was made all the way back in 2008, the coasts and international borders appear to have been a direct trace over a fairly accurate basemap, hence the OG QBAM Greenland isn't that bad by extension. The problems with the QBAM are twofold. Firstly, we have no idea what projection that original basemap was in, and I don't think we ever will. About a year ago I spent an afternoon outputting maps from G-Projector in every pseudo-cylindrical map projection the program can output, then porting the result to Paint.net and overlaying it on the vanilla QBAM to see if there was any alignment between the coasts and borders between the two, and came up blank. I suspect the original basemap may have been a squished, stretched or otherwise modified version of some other projection, which would explain why it looks like a standard map projection, but we can't figure out what the hell it is.
Secondly, it appears that everything else apart from coasts and international borders, such as rivers, lakes, smaller islands, administrative divisions, and the whole of Antarctica were added later by eye-balling things rather than tracing over actual sources, which introduced a tonne of warping and inaccuracies. Freehanding details works at smaller scales and if you have a good dataset to work from to form the backbone of the new map, but can lead to things being disastrously off if you try to eye-ball things in at larger scales. The quality of many of the earliest patches added (most notably 1st level administrative borders, which most later resources were based off) was a bit hit and miss, meaning that the later resources built on those in some cases pretty shoddy foundations, perpetuating the errors for well over a decade.
Even on the most recent QBAM's, Greenland doesn't really suffer from this problem, as as far as I can tell, after the publication of the original map in 2008 and the addition of first level divisions at some point before 2011, Greenland has only been patched on the QBAM once, by @Sharklord1 back in 2018, although unfortunately using a badly inaccurate basemap from wikipedia as a source for icecap coverage.
Honestly, even before the invasion Russia treated Crimea more like an occupied region, with greater restrictions than those found in the rest of the country, even if on paper it was just another Republic. My usual way of showing occupied territories is by using the main colour of the country doing the occupying, hence no trace to show on-paper autonomies like the other republics, however I get that this is an inelegant solution.
I've always been cagey about formalising my conventions for using colour on my maps into a defined colour scheme, partly because I like the flexibility that not nailing things down gives me, and partly because I don't want to contribute to standards proliferation. However, this and other problems with how colour schemes are conventionally used have led me to start brainstorming some ideas for how to improve things over the last few months, which has led me in some ... interesting directions.
I'm not making any promises, but don't be surprised if I start changing up the colour scheme in the future.
At some point when the basemap is done, I'll be producing a global 1914 blank map like the one I did for Europe, and once I've done that I'll do my best to produce another map showing when all the reservoirs were added. The problem is I'm not entirely sure how I'm gonna do that yet (its a thornier problem than you'd think), not to mention that I also need to juggle several lakes disappearing after being drained, and the problem of reservoirs sometimes enlarging or linking up smaller predecessor lakes once they start to fill. It is a job that's on the to-do list eventually, but it may take some time to get there.
Have I got a treat for you today ...
Patch 114 - Northeast Argentina
- Added Corrientes
- Added Entre Rios
- Added Formosa
- Added Chaco
- Added Santa Fe
- Added Santiago Del Estero
- Added Cordoba
Next up is the final Canada patch (pinch me), followed by northwest Argentina, then Alaska, followed by southern Argentina and finishing off the Americas with Chile and Patagonia, which will include the southernmost provinces of Argentina. Honestly, it makes sense to do Patagonia in one final push, so Santa Cruz and Tierra Del Fuego will go in with Chile.
On a different note, I haven't done any replies in a while, so I may as well do them now. In no particular order ...
As always, thanks for the compliments. Greenland was an awful lot of work to finish (and finish quickly at that), but I do think the results speak for themselves.
I mean, I'm pretty sure the worlda is low-res enough that all the distortions I had to worry about don't really matter, and I was honestly surprised to find that Greenland isn't actually too bad in the vanilla QBAM.
I've said it before in a longer rant buried in the replies here, but when the QBAM was made all the way back in 2008, the coasts and international borders appear to have been a direct trace over a fairly accurate basemap, hence the OG QBAM Greenland isn't that bad by extension. The problems with the QBAM are twofold. Firstly, we have no idea what projection that original basemap was in, and I don't think we ever will. About a year ago I spent an afternoon outputting maps from G-Projector in every pseudo-cylindrical map projection the program can output, then porting the result to Paint.net and overlaying it on the vanilla QBAM to see if there was any alignment between the coasts and borders between the two, and came up blank. I suspect the original basemap may have been a squished, stretched or otherwise modified version of some other projection, which would explain why it looks like a standard map projection, but we can't figure out what the hell it is.
Secondly, it appears that everything else apart from coasts and international borders, such as rivers, lakes, smaller islands, administrative divisions, and the whole of Antarctica were added later by eye-balling things rather than tracing over actual sources, which introduced a tonne of warping and inaccuracies. Freehanding details works at smaller scales and if you have a good dataset to work from to form the backbone of the new map, but can lead to things being disastrously off if you try to eye-ball things in at larger scales. The quality of many of the earliest patches added (most notably 1st level administrative borders, which most later resources were based off) was a bit hit and miss, meaning that the later resources built on those in some cases pretty shoddy foundations, perpetuating the errors for well over a decade.
Even on the most recent QBAM's, Greenland doesn't really suffer from this problem, as as far as I can tell, after the publication of the original map in 2008 and the addition of first level divisions at some point before 2011, Greenland has only been patched on the QBAM once, by @Sharklord1 back in 2018, although unfortunately using a badly inaccurate basemap from wikipedia as a source for icecap coverage.
Honestly, even before the invasion Russia treated Crimea more like an occupied region, with greater restrictions than those found in the rest of the country, even if on paper it was just another Republic. My usual way of showing occupied territories is by using the main colour of the country doing the occupying, hence no trace to show on-paper autonomies like the other republics, however I get that this is an inelegant solution.
I've always been cagey about formalising my conventions for using colour on my maps into a defined colour scheme, partly because I like the flexibility that not nailing things down gives me, and partly because I don't want to contribute to standards proliferation. However, this and other problems with how colour schemes are conventionally used have led me to start brainstorming some ideas for how to improve things over the last few months, which has led me in some ... interesting directions.
I'm not making any promises, but don't be surprised if I start changing up the colour scheme in the future.
At some point when the basemap is done, I'll be producing a global 1914 blank map like the one I did for Europe, and once I've done that I'll do my best to produce another map showing when all the reservoirs were added. The problem is I'm not entirely sure how I'm gonna do that yet (its a thornier problem than you'd think), not to mention that I also need to juggle several lakes disappearing after being drained, and the problem of reservoirs sometimes enlarging or linking up smaller predecessor lakes once they start to fill. It is a job that's on the to-do list eventually, but it may take some time to get there.
Have I got a treat for you today ...
Patch 114 - Northeast Argentina
- Added Corrientes
- Added Entre Rios
- Added Formosa
- Added Chaco
- Added Santa Fe
- Added Santiago Del Estero
- Added Cordoba
It's wide enough there to count as a pixel of water, same with many other rivers in the map (Pechora, Mackenzie, Saint Lawrence...)
@Tanystropheus42
Concerning India, there appears to be a state called "Jeypore" around modern Orissa. On the wikipedia page, it says that the kingdom was vassalized in 1777 by the British, but existed until 1947. However, I've seen some other maps have it be annexed sometime between 1798-1802. It's a pretty big Kingdom. Since you've done some research into Indian princely states for the raj patch, do you know what the situation is with this kingdom?
Here's the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeypore_Estate
Concerning India, there appears to be a state called "Jeypore" around modern Orissa. On the wikipedia page, it says that the kingdom was vassalized in 1777 by the British, but existed until 1947. However, I've seen some other maps have it be annexed sometime between 1798-1802. It's a pretty big Kingdom. Since you've done some research into Indian princely states for the raj patch, do you know what the situation is with this kingdom?
Here's the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeypore_Estate