Thread: Surroundings of a fallen empire

So, I began sketching a new map… I’ll be posting the progress here

First I made a rough sketch of the continent I’ll be drawing. I intend it to cover most of a hemisphere, so the mountains and rivers and all that will be shrunk to more realistic sizes. I'm not sure on the orientation, but I think it'll be this way.


Then I spent a long time trying to decide what kind of projection to use. In the end I chose one I liked the look of, and it is for hemispheres so it suits this project. Being a cartography noob, I thought it looked easy to draw as well. It was hard…
But I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I only have the non-inked grid so far, but I’ll show it. Here it is:


Now some backstory. Basically this is a planet that was hit by a massive meteor, which caused the spin to change and lock it to always show the same side to it’s sun. It’s got a really strong magnetic field to protect it from the constant radiation, and it’s probably a bit further away from the sun than the Earth is. There are some civilizations in the dusk/dawn areas. I’ll be mapping the dayside, since the nightside is uncharted. It also makes a more interesting map, as the nightside would be pitch black

If anyone else wants to draw this kind of projection (is it called Wulff net? I think so) by hand, I came up with two equations to determine at what points the longitudes intersect the equator. There’s probably a better way, as this one requires you to draw the arcs freehand, but if no one finds it helpful it might at least be amusing how weirdly I did this. The equations are:

(r-36y)/9=x
(1/21)x=y

where r is the radius of the map and x the distance from the center to the first intersection. The distance to the next is then x+y, to the third it’s x+2y, and so on. Also note that it only works in maps where the lines are 10 degrees apart. I tried to make a general version, but… failed. Could make another try if anyone is interested.

Anyway, that was just a side note. Probably useless. Next I’ll start drawing the actual map

Thanks for looking!