I've always been fascinated with maps, and I grew up in a hilly region where it was easy to relate the map symbols with features on the ground. Learned map and compass in Boy Scouts.
troglodyte wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:02 pm
Shoot, out here I can stand on a can of tuna and see Amarillo.
That's what I found in Saudi Arabia. The topo maps were often mostly blank, only a couple elevation lines waving across them, some straight lines for road, and some dots for towns. I worked at the GPS Joint Program Office just after Desert Storm, and there were anecdotes from DS about troops more or less driving and coordinating using the limited GPS available then. Most of the maps of that region back then were based on very old surveys and didn't have a lot of the features that had been built over time. I did some desert driving, some at night and my Garmin 40 GPS was much appreciated. It had a tiny screen that did not have any map features, just a course line and a little trail of bread crumps to show me how well I was following it. That was handy when I had to detour around soft sand or a pit or some big rock formation sticking up out of the desert.
