Hmmm. If I'm going to avoid placing major population density in deserts, for instance, guess I'd better figure rough climate now. Zann says in his factbook page:
Mountainous/evergreen forest in the north, plains/deciduous forest in the middle of the continent, desert in the south. Lilac Island is mostly tropical, with a volcanic mountain in the middle.
Climate:
Many terrains come with many climates
Elevation Extremes:
17,488 feet - 0 feet
Usually I work with a given generated world, and take what it gives me. Here, nothing even says where in latitude we are, nor the extent of the landmass in latitude and longitude. Sooooo, I start with the given size,
Area:
10,239,701 km square (6,632,655 miles square)
Hmm - that's troublesome. That conversion factor is for distance, not area. 6.6 million miles is about 10.6 million km. 6.6 million square miles, which Zann agreed was his intent, is more like 17,178,498 sq km. I'll go with that.
I used to do all kinds of gyrations and approximations to figure land area. This is easier: I reduced all the land mass of Zannannia to black on white water, and deleted the separate nation up north. Filled in the lakes, since they usually count in a nation's area. I squared the file to an even 1500x1500 pixels, to help me think in round numbers.
The PhotoPlus histogram for distribution of colors across this B&W picture looks like so:
Apparently the Gimp and PhotoShop have something similar.
Left being the cursor over the left end of the spectrum, black, and right being the white end. PhotoPlus reports that as 143766 black and 605844 white, for a total of 749,610. I quote this in all its halting process, because I have to rediscover how this works every time... THat's with the histogram set for RGB. If I make the land pure blue, and the sea black, the histogram seems to read (referencing the blue channel) 201,948 for black, and 48052 for blue, for a total of 250,000. Yeah, that's how -- stick with one channel. Not sure why the histogram refers to 250,000 pixels total, when the canvas is 1500x1500=2,250,000 . <shrug> What I need is the proportion, and that I now have: Zanannia is 48052/250000 of the whole. 19.22% ? Squint at the picture... yeah, I'll buy that.
Now, I'm going to do some rounding here, so 20% is plenty good enough. So if 20% is 6.6 million square miles, then my 2,250,000 pixels is 33.2 million sq miles. Square root of that is 5759, so that's how many miles to the 1500 pixel side of my square canvas (see why I squared it?) So a scale bar is going to be based on .2605 pixels to the mile. If I'm measuring in PhotoPlus, I'll need it the other way around -- 3.839.miles to the pixel. The nation is about 1030 pixels north-south - call that 3955 miles.
For the sake of the argument, we'll say the planet is earth-sized -- 24,860 miles in circumference through the poles. 12,430 miles is 180 degrees of latitude, so the nation stretches about 1030 pixels or 57 degrees N-S. Also we'll assume the same axial tilt as earth, so the equivalent of tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are at 23.5 degrees N and S. Those are the drier latitudes, all else equal. If Zann wants deserts somewhere in the south, we could straddle the equator.
Those mountains on the Niropa-Dectarium border are tall enough to give a bit of rain-shadow dryness, if prevailing winds are NW-SE, or SE-NW. Let's say most winds are out of the NW at that point, and that the C of Dectarium is at 23.5 S. So the southern tip of the mainland would be at 270 pixels ( ~15 degrees) further south, or 38.5 South. That'd put the northern end of the nation at about 18.5 N. Call that Cape Town to Timbuctu.
An alternative would be to stretch it from 23.5-15 = 8.5 degrees N to 65.5 N. Call it from mid-Nigeria up to mid-Norway. That might stick the Malkakhian S.S.R farther north than they might want, or it might be just the ticket. Zann - is that country the property of a human player, who might care about his latitude?
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