Chalker Continental Composites

[dchalker]

Greetings cartographers,

It is my pleasure to introduce the Chalker Continental series of composites.

First the Chalker-Peters, featuring:

-The Peters projection
-The Chalker-Denoyer modification (Bering antimeridian, cut off and replace everything below 60°S with an azimuthal inset, aligned with meridian.)

Chalker-Peters

chalkerpeters.jpg (96.75 KiB) Viewed 21160 times

The Chalker-Denoyer method is a flexible process that can be applied to other projections. For example:

Chalker-azimuthal

doublechalker.jpg (76.89 KiB) Viewed 21160 times

I am not a cartographer. My original intention was video game design, but I saw the potential for wider applications so I am investigating publication of the standard in a more formal capacity. For now, enjoy this preview!

[dchalker]

Just a few more examples of the Chalker transformation:

Chalker-Lagrange

chalkernicolosi.jpg (153.98 KiB) Viewed 21131 times

Chalker-Cox

chalkercox.png (449.35 KiB) Viewed 21135 times

[Milo]

Wow! An inset! Because nobody's ever thought of that before!

And you included watermarks in your maps, because you're worried that... people are going to steal your maps? Are you seriously going to try to patent/copyright the concept of including Antarctica as an inset in maps and try to charge money for it?

[Atarimaster]

And you included watermarks in your maps, because you're worried that... people are going to steal your maps?

Probably not, that’s what images generated by the Geocart demo version look like.

I would have put it more nicely, but I have to agree with you on the matter: Using an inset is in no way a "new projection" or a "transformation" that is worth to be named. At best, you can name the specific arrangement; and yes, it has happened before that specific arrangements were called "a new projection" by its authors. Nevertheless, I reject this idea.

[dchalker]

Again, I made this in the context of video game design to solve a specific problem. I see wider applications, so I have described a specific transformation method applicable to a wide variety of projections to produce maps with superior presentation of Antarctica. Could be good for games, artistic maps, novelty cups, etc. Maybe other things I'm not even considering. If you don't see applications, don't use it.

Perhaps the result is not "a" projection, but a composite of two. So? Gott, Goldberg and Vanderbei is not "a" projection. I'm not here to bicker about jargon with technical folks, just presenting a useful (and novel) method if anybody wants to use it. And yes, there's novelty. Insets are nothing new, but I've looked and can't find anyone using this particular transformation at all, much less consistently across maps to achieve the variety of results shown above.

The watermarks are from the Geocart software. As I said, I'm not a cartographer, I just downloaded the demo yesterday to throw these examples together.

[Milo]

Again, I made this in the context of video game design to solve a specific problem.

I don't know what kind of video game you're working on, but most video games I know of either (A) have tile-based maps that they want you to move around on, and so would suffer greatly from the map being discontiguous, or (B) have territory-based maps with arbitrary borders, and so don't really care much what projection you're using.

[dchalker]

I am making a Civ-style game. Sort of. There's more to it than that, but I know what I'm doing. This shows how the teleports work.

Map003.png (370.24 KiB) Viewed 21084 times

[daan]

I don’t think we need to be soul-crushing in our responses.

Part of this idea has cropped up in specific maps for a very long time: You can see Renaissance maps that use polar insets to compensate for the primary map’s (such as Mercator’s 1569 map describing the Mercator projection). Mercator does not eliminate Antarctica from the main map. Usually the mapmaker does not remove the polar regions even when using insets, but there have been occasions when they did. See, for example, National Geographics’s longstanding use of the van der Grinten projection from the 1920s until the late 1980s. They did not use precisely this technique of carving out exactly the portion that appears as the inset. You can see an example of precisely this technique in Waterman’s butterfly projection. I know there many earlier examples, but my library is packed up and I can’t recall off the top of my head.

Hence, it would not be proper to claim credit by naming the technique for yourself. I do think it makes sense to recognize it as a sort of formalized arrangement. It would not be terribly difficult to add it as an “interruption” type in Geocart do it automatically. (Difficulties in putting out new revisions to Geocart courtesy Apple notwithstanding.

Welcome to the forums, and apologies for the bites.
— daan

[quadibloc]

Wow! An inset! Because nobody's ever thought of that before!

And you included watermarks in your maps, because you're worried that... people are going to steal your maps? Are you seriously going to try to patent/copyright the concept of including Antarctica as an inset in maps and try to charge money for it?

I thought the watermark text was there because he drew those maps with a trial copy of some map drawing software? I was going to introduce him to the free program G-Projector that he could use.
EDIT: And indeed that's why it was there, the program being something called "Geocart". Oh, wait; that's the fine cartographic software provided by the wonderful Daniel Strebe, who created this site that hosts these forums.

I don’t think we need to be soul-crushing in our responses.

Indeed, given that the first projection he chose to show as being improved by the Chalker transformation was the Peters projection, I thought that it was obvious that his presentation of this transformation as a brilliant cartographic innovation on his part was clearly intended as a joke, presented with tongue in cheek.
I mean, if he were engaged in a serious attempt at plagiarism, clearly he would have used projections with which this had already been used. So he would have led off with the Chalker-Mercator, instead of concluding with it, and then followed up with the Chalker-Denoyer-Geppert Semi-Elliptical.
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ ... 1861661692

[Milo]

I was going to introduce him to the free program G-Projector that he could use.

G.Projector is good at showing the basic forms of many projections, but it doesn't have the sort of customizability to create arbitrary interruptions/insets, unless you do your own postprocessing in an image editing program (which is going to handle some things poorly, like borders).