Thread: My first total world *Planning / progress*

World projection nut opinion: Four parts isn't a terrible idea, so long as you can stitch them together into an equirectangular projection which in turn makes it easy to slap into NASA's g-projector in order to take a look at your world as a globe. Of course if you aren't worried about that, then its all fair game, LOL.

Originally Posted by Caerula

My world will basically be like this, divided up into the four corners: North-east, North-west, South-east, South-west (Because I dont really want to work with globes yet). The world itself, which I have name Allarya, will have mostly the same climates as us - save a few special cases - in which the closer to the equator, the hotter. It is inhabited by three sentient races, and a large amount of tribal cultures. The south is also generally a shattered land, with few large continents and many archipelago-style island chains. Each corner will be about the size as a hemisphere.

If it is flat, then it doesn't have an equator, or latitude or longitude at all. You could have some form of coordinate system (A simple Cartesian grid or polar coordinates like Discworld), but it would be much harder for the inhabitants of such a world to develop one or measure where things are using it if they don't have access to celestial navigation, which depends on the world being spherical to work. I suppose if the celestial bodies were much closer, you could manage something based on parallax but it would be far more complex. You could also possibly use celestial navigation for direction, though if the world is rotating about an axis perpendicular to the ground, you would need to know the time/date (depending on how fast it rotates). Compass based navigation would require a rather bizarre magnetic field, but then the world is already flat with is pretty bizarre.

It might be interesting to come up with something different for how people navigate. Maybe some sort of homing magic or a special class of people with a psionic direction sense, or something like that. This would rather change how maps intended for navigation look. They wouldn't have compass roses or rhumb lines, and probably wouldn't have graticules. They might show a web of magic beacons or ley lines used for navigation though.