Hex Scaling Question

[hurltim]

OK, so I'm looking to make a flat, full world map with the dimensions of 25, 344 miles by 12,672 miles pole to pole. My largest Scale hex is 144 miles face to face oriented in columns. That works out to exactly 88 hexes vertically but i don't know how many hexes it will be horizontally. This world map will be chopped up into sections for smaller scales, but i need some accuracy to draw my continents. Any ideas?

[Hai-Etlik]

That turns out fairly well for an Icosaheadral map. The edges of the triangular faces of the icosaheadron project to arcs on the sphere that at 7186.5 km Dividing by 231.75 km hexes gives almost exactly 31 hexes along an edge. (Or to be more precise, 30 hexagons, and half way through a pentagon on each end)

In cartography "scale" is the scale factor, not the size of the area covered. Maps of the whole world are "small scale" because things are drawn much smaller than "large scale" maps that show a smaller area drawn larger.

Cropping sections out of a small scale map to make large scale ones isn't a good idea. The projection suitable for one extent is not going to work for a radically different extent.

If by flat you meant a flat world, then that's really confusing because a flat world doesn't have poles.

Here's an SVG of an appropriate icosaheadral hex grid.
icos-map.svgz

[hurltim]

This is what the plan is for scale:
World: 144 mile hexes (6-24 mile hexes)
Continent: 24 miles per hex (4-6 mile hexes)
State: 6 mile per hex (6- 1mile hexes)
County: 1 mile per hex (6 880' hexes)
Ranged: 880' per hex (6 147' battle maps)

The world map may or may not have too much detail. It will get divided into continents as a hot spot on a web page. click the link and it will take you to that continent's 24 mile per hex detail map. I figure in a pinch, I can get away with one zoom out per detailed map. Eg: Make the world map a zoomed out version of the continents 24 miles per hex map. Haven't really decided yet but after seeing all of these awesome hand drawn parchment maps, I may have to rethink things a bit. I enjoy making artwork so if I need to create sets of objects for separate scales, That would be horrible

The icos map may be an avenue as well. I really like those.

I think I have my original issue figured out. Feel free to check my math:

With the flat side of the hexes facing up for columns, the "thickness" of the row is always the same so its easy to figure out.
The columns however, vary in "thickness" so I calculated the thickness of two columns and averaged them out.
d+s+.5s
166.27688+83.13844+41.56922=290.98454/2=145.49227 average column thickness.
So 25,344/145.49227=174.19 hexes wide.

That look right to you folks?