This is a map for use in presentations and a book on Peal Harbor. It's intended to emphasize the central position of Hawaii in the Pacific. The islands suffer economically from their great distance from land, but occupy a powerful strategic position. Constraints included that it be legible when printed on a 6"x9" (152x229mm) book page and that it cover approximately the longitude range shown.
The red circles are intended to give a sense of scale. Each represents an increment of 5 days' steaming from the Pearl Harbor sea buoy at 14 knots speed of advance, which would be typical of a fast naval task force.
I'd love to hear comments and suggestions about how to make it tell the story more clearly and attractively.
For background, the basic map was drawn in Versamap, an ancient vector mapper that came already provided with (inter alia) a cleaned up version of the still more ancient CIA World Databank in five resolution steps. It's very well suited to this task because, being vector rather than polygon oriented, it is entirely unconcerned about the antiprime meridian. Of course one can patch up world-coverage polygon sets to join at 180 deg, splitting at 0 deg, but it's a pain in the neck that I prefer to avoid when not otherwise too inconvenient.
The layers generated in Versamap were output as high resolution PDFs for compositing and annotation in Photoshop. In the process i edited the modern boundary representation in the underlying data to approximate 1941 boundaries. I left off most of the Pacific islands because the seemed to clutter up the map too much, and did not add much that was of significance. The U.S.-owned islands scattered to westward from Hawaii are highlighted because of their role in screen it from easy approach.
I selected the Robinson as providing a remarkable balance between reasonably good shapes and reasonably good areas, even over this huge range of latitudes and longitudes.Again, to make it easy, I'd like to stick to projections that Versamap supports, but that covers a pretty wide range.
Attached Thumbnails
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The red circles are intended to give a sense of scale. Each represents an increment of 5 days' steaming from the Pearl Harbor sea buoy at 14 knots speed of advance, which would be typical of a fast naval task force.
I'd love to hear comments and suggestions about how to make it tell the story more clearly and attractively.
For background, the basic map was drawn in Versamap, an ancient vector mapper that came already provided with (inter alia) a cleaned up version of the still more ancient CIA World Databank in five resolution steps. It's very well suited to this task because, being vector rather than polygon oriented, it is entirely unconcerned about the antiprime meridian. Of course one can patch up world-coverage polygon sets to join at 180 deg, splitting at 0 deg, but it's a pain in the neck that I prefer to avoid when not otherwise too inconvenient.
The layers generated in Versamap were output as high resolution PDFs for compositing and annotation in Photoshop. In the process i edited the modern boundary representation in the underlying data to approximate 1941 boundaries. I left off most of the Pacific islands because the seemed to clutter up the map too much, and did not add much that was of significance. The U.S.-owned islands scattered to westward from Hawaii are highlighted because of their role in screen it from easy approach.
I selected the Robinson as providing a remarkable balance between reasonably good shapes and reasonably good areas, even over this huge range of latitudes and longitudes.Again, to make it easy, I'd like to stick to projections that Versamap supports, but that covers a pretty wide range.
Attached Thumbnails
أكثر...