Leend - first try

[waldronate]

Africa is shaped how it is due to the way that rifts carried the continent around. Rifts have a nasty habit of splitting into three lines roughly 120 degrees apart (it's a low energy configuration for dynamics on a sphere) and the Atlantic side shows a few of those from when the Atlantic rifted apart Africa and the Americas. On the west side of Africa is a lovely triple junction that's still active. The Red Sea is one arm, the Great Rift valley is another, and the third has more or less failed (which is very common during rifting because once two of them break, it takes more energy to make the third one break further than to just have it stop).

There is software out there that can fractalize a shape. Old Guy's better coastlines tutorial gives a nice monofractal result. Using any of the fairly recent Wilbur tutorials and a little bit of image editor work might get you a result like the one shown below (pardon the artifacts; it was a quick job). Wilbur is a Windows program, but that's the way life turns out sometimes.

One of the problems with a huge landmass like that is that physics will just give you a desert in the interior starting at less than a few thousand kilometers. Water just won't make it in that far. The deep interior of Pangea, for example (a continent a tenth the size shown here), seemed to be one of the worst deserts ever recorded with much of the rainfall that did penetrate much into the interior coming back as huge floods. It made a good proving ground for harsh-condition life forms, though.

Software development discussions usually end up in the "Software Discussions" or "General Discussions" main areas. But they do regularly turn up in the oddest places...