Post by Video Nasty in 6-mile Hex Atlas of Earth comments

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Hello Thomas!

I am in love with your maps, they have already proved most effective in my sessions. I have a confession and a request. I have a deep love of the age of sail and plan to form a 17th century game hopefully using your maps. However, I would love to model sailing across the oceans in their entirety and not just coastal sections or certain seas. Indeed, smaller islands like the Tonga-Kermadec ridge, the Galapagos, and Pitcairn islands would be a small but wonderful additions. Would you consider creating 6-mile hex maps for the sections of the globe you have not already covered? I (perhaps naively) think it would not be too hard, given the obvious simplicity of the majority of the terrain and the fact that you could make the maps quite large by the same token, reducing the number needed to cover the oceans.

It would make me so very happy to move a little model ship across the Atlantic in front of my players. And the possibility of scale naval chases and engagements is even better! I do hope you can.

Kind regards,

-Ethan

idraluna-archives148 days ago(+1)(-1)

Many thanks for the kind words – really glad you’ve been enjoying the maps. I will definitely take a crack at some 6-mile ocean maps. For the Pacific I may have to tinker a bit to avoid projection issues. Making sure small islands show up may take some finagling but I’ll see what I can do!

Video Nasty148 days ago (7 edits)

Amazing! Thank you very much! If it's alright, can they be in your original colored hex style like the rest of the 6-mile earth maps for consistency sake?

On an only slightly related note I was wondering to myself (and now this does seem like a completely separate task) but with hypsographical data it might be possible to create a map of the ocean with the colour of each hex corresponding to the maximum depth of the water column.

Something like 5 shades of blue, getting progressively darker as the maximum depth shifts from neretic (200m), twilight (1000m), midnight (4000m), abyssal (6000m), and hadal (11000m). It would be amazing and useful for aquatic rpgs to see the continental shelf, the drop-off, the abyssal plain, undersea mountain ranges, seamounts, abyssal trenches and the like.

I don't know if you have space on your backburner for such a task, but I do know that https://www.gebco.net/ have very accurate open-source bathymetric data available!

idraluna-archives142 days ago

The 6-mile folder has been updated with some ocean maps – hopefully an adequate starting point for your age of sail campaign. You’ll definitely need to double-check that the desired islands are present & probably should manually label some of the smaller atolls in the Pacific. I also wasn’t sure of your desired scope, but I set up the map coverage for minimal overlap so that one could move off one map and onto the next without too much fudging of distances.

Color-coding hexes by water depth is definitely doable, though building it into this script would take some effort. I find that for maps like these they complicate the visualization a bit since color is already used to denote biome on land, but I definitely see the utility (and arguably depth is loosely analogous to biome in aquatic environments). Will definitely add it to my low-priority to-do list.

Video Nasty142 days ago(+1)

Outstanding! I did not expect a result so quickly! These are excellent, supplemented with your originals for key areas like Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope this has coverage of essentially every sailed area in that period. Thank you so much!

I agree that blue shading could make the maps look messy. However, with the right subtly of shading I think it could work to convey the difference of depth without look too drastic.

itch.io

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