If you can't beat 'em...

[camwyn]

then rummage around the local stores until you find a way to join 'em.

Translation: I've been trying to keep the map of VicMage.Asia straight in my head, and it hasn't been working very well because I haven't been able to figure out where the equator and the prime meridian are in relation to the general vicinity of China. So I went to Staples today, and I can report that the Staples in Parsippany on U.S. Highway 46 does not have globes. . .

Getting an idea where I"m going with this? Good.

Next up was GOING to be Toys Ya* Us, on the grounds that they might have 'em as a concession to educational crap, but before I got into the car I looked across the parking lot. Lo! K-Mart!

Fifteen minutes of looking later (the season transition is hard on any retail setting, especially one where most of the people probably don't give a rat's ass any more because they're working minimum wage for a Chapter 11 employer), I had not only a lovely 12-inch globe, but a bottle of bluey-silvery nail polish that very nearly matches the colour of the oceans on this globe.

I will admit I am feeling horribly guilty about the idea of mutilating a perfectly good globe. I think my brain files it as an Educational Device of Accurate Information, rather the same category as a reference book, and is extending the protection offered to books to the globe as a result. It won't work, though. Tonight I'm getting an awl or something and boring holes through 0'0" and 0'180"**, then re-mounting the globe, then painting over anything that's now under water. True, the map will still be inaccurate due to geological shifting and such, but at least I'll have an idea of where things are in relation to each other. And I won't accidentally dress denizens of islands that ought to feel like Key West in, yanno, snow leopard furs or something.

*If I remember correctly, and there is no guarantee that I do, the backwards R that appears in the Cyrillic alphabet represents the sound 'ya'.

**I may have the second one wrong. The place where Longitude 180 crosses the equator.

Comments

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Any chance you could take pictures when you're done? I'm having a HELL of a time visualizing VicMageWorld at all, Asia or otherwise.

[camwyn]

I'll give it a try. It won't be properly accurate, I can guarantee you that; cadhla's told me about the difficulties of properly mapping that world. I'll do what I can with what I know, and if I can get a good X-Acto knife I MAY try moving the British Isles so they're squished together with Greenland properly. But I'm starting by rotating the globe and . . . aw, CRIPES, the nail polish matches the colour they use for mainland China even better than it does the water! *sigh* I gotta stop at CVS tonight and get new polish. Anyway, yeah. Once I get at least something done I'll take some pics.

Man, I hope the axial tilt is the same as our world.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Re: longitudinal/latitudinal notation:

It's all about circles, really. Longitude is measured in degrees east and west of Greenwich, England. Now, if you've moved the British Isles over by Greenland, that's a significant chunk of water to have moved the Prime Meridian (0° Longitude) by, not to mention the notion that you have to decide if the Empire is still puissant enough in this world to be the ones to make that call.

Anyway, back to circles: if you'll recall Ye Olde Geometry, there are three hundred sixty degrees (360°) to a circle. Longitude goes to +/- 180° East and West of Greenwich, whereas latitude (the parallels) goes in concentric circles, centered on the polar axis -- what this means on your Great Circle is four quadrants of 90° each, and which quadrisphere you're in is determined by the equator (0° latitude) and the 0°/180° line (Prime Meridian/International Date Line).

What they didn't teach us in ninth grade, but you learn pretty damn quick if you want to learn to sail, is this: if you're dealing with a big enough circle, like a Great Circle, one degree is pretty farking huge, so it needs to be split up into sixty minutes ('), each of which can, if needful, be split into sixty seconds ("). Indeed, one nautical mile is defined as one-sixtieth of one degree of longitude as measured at the equator. NB that nautical miles (nmi) != statue miles (mi), although at 1.1508 statute miles to the nautical mile, they may be considered equivalent for rough calculations.

Anyway, you may want to consider how people in your VicMage.China would navigate and mark their maps, as this is all at its base founded on Babylonian principles (360° being one of their holiest numbers, as you can divide a ridiculous number of ways without getting remainders), which your Chinese cartographers may or may not give a fig about.

But really, all I meant to say was that the IDL, she is at 180°0'0" Longitude, not 0'180" (which you should hopefully realise Makes No Sense after all my blather).

Oh, and ° is the HTML-fu for 'a degree symbol,' while I'm being hopelessly pedantic. Then again, you tend to pay as much attention to detail as I do, so you're hopefully not offended by my droning on...

-- Lorrie

Well, lessee.

[camwyn]

England, she ain't mine to touch. England, Roma, Mongolia, India, Atlantis, etc. - all of these are cadhla's babies, the original stomping grounds of the game. I don't get to decide whether England has the power to say 'this is where the line goes' or not. Mind you, whether they have that power or not doesn't matter in China, because none of the Sons of Heaven, nor the First Under Heaven rulers that came between the Sons, nor the current Lord Protector gives a rat's ass about England's map notation.

As far as the Empire of the Ten Thousand Islands is concerned, south is up and west-east distances begin from the sacred altar to Heaven on Mount Tai. Since my poor brain would rather not bleed out my ears and die, they'll be using a 360-degree system as well. The most common geographical unit of distance is the li, equal to 1760 feet as we know them in our world. Nautical measure takes precedence over land-based measure, owing to the fact that, yanno, the Empire is probably more ocean than land. They do use terms like 'foot' and 'inch' for smaller distances, but the Hakka 'foot' measure equates to nine of our inches. (This is based on our world's Han 'foot'. It helps to control the facial tic when I read about legendary eight-foot-tall generals, knowing that they are using a significantly smaller measure that simply translates as 'foot'.) The most common unit of weight is the catty, equivalent to 1.3 pounds...

Droning? Nonsense, dear, don't be silly.

Re: Well, lessee.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

M'kay. So, your native Chinese sailors don't give a rat's ass about England -- how much the map is or isn't skewed because England's been towed about like some wayward barge is none of your concern, go you...

But you should come up with how these people are navigating all this mess. Latitude is pretty easy to figure at sea, but longitude has traditionally been a bitch-on-wheels -- in this world.

However, where you're one up on medieval tech is this: you're working in a Mage-based campaign, and as such you have a ready and elegant solution available: all you need is a timepiece with a Time 1 rote in it. As Time 1 IIRC, gives you 'hello, I am an ultraprecise clock,' you can work longitude exactly the same way it was eventually worked out in Renaissance Europe: precision timepieces. Throw in Correspondence 1 (I think?) and you've got GPS decades before its time... although of course it'll express in the mage's own paradigm and expression of units, which means you needn't worry a bit about what cadhla is doing, as your Asian ships' locator doowockies will have been programmed by Imperial mages and will therefore output units of the Empire, and the stupid hairy round-eye barbarians will just have to live with that.

Brlgl. I keep skewing my placement on the time axis -- back here on Tellus Primus, by the Victorian era, the whole precise timepiece idea has long since been dealt with (no quartz, but the clockwork is very good): it was more of a bugbear when the explorers were all afoot. Where your alternate planet is on navigational and cartographical tech, of course, I leave to you, but the bottom line is: latitude can be worked out by anyone with an ephemeris and observational patience and tools (what're you using for sextants?). Longitude is a whole other and more complicated thing, and deserves special mention.

-- Lorrie

Re: Well, lessee.

[camwyn]

Weeeel... we're more than a few steps up on medieval tech. For one thing, the game's set in roughly 1899. For another, according to Joseph Needham's Science and Technology in China, clockwork was not as much of a problem as you might think. They've been working on navigational techniques for some time, given that they have to avoid the giant squid that're longer than, ooooh, the largest island of Japan still above the surface of the ocean. True, there are magically tricked-out ships, but most of 'em are under the direct control and command of the Dragon Throne. Other people have to make do. They all use Imperial measurements, though, including references to units of time that no longer actually exist - i.e. the clock is divided into 'glasses' based on the old length of the standard hourglass, which naturally wasn't exactly the same as a regular hour or whatever. The British Ambassador doesn't bother resetting his timepieces when he comes to the Empire; he locks the British ones in a box and takes out his Chinese set, rather than trying to compensate.

As for sextants and related items, they've been working on sighting devices since Zhang Heng got tired of fiddling with his seismograph. This has had some interesting applications in the field of artillery; they're getting very good at targeting. . .

Re: Well, lessee.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Well, 'twouldn't need to be magically tricked-out, would just need a reasonably accurate timepiece -- that's the key to longitude. I don't know how accessible low-powered magical doodads are in this universe, either -- if they're really accessible, than a thinger with a Time 1 Rote would be cheaper than all but the most lossy clockwork things.

The sighting gear is also crucial; it's how you get your latitude reading... combined with that accurate timepiece and a nice published ephemeris.

-- Lorrie

Re: Well, lessee.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

And and and!

Why limit yourself to a 360° system? C'mon, go radians, and then you can work out the Chinese name for π and really freak the roundeyes. This is an alien environment. Why be normal?

-- Lorrie

Re: Well, lessee.

[camwyn]

Because I believe very strongly in pulp survival tip number 105. My brain, like my heart, is inside my body for a REASON and needs to STAY THERE. I would rather not have it explode and ooze out my ears because I attempted an assault on advanced mathematics in addition to rewriting the Confucian Six Relationships, determining the effect of the absence of Buddhism on social status in the various provinces, running demographic analyses of semi-mobile island bound populations to determine the likely prevalent diseases and their epidemiological patterns, and creating an entire alternate civilization to THIS alternate civilization from scratch. (The second alternate is that of Sanxing Province, and is based on what little we have of archaeological evidence of ancient Sichuan Province - namely, the Sanxingdui Bronzes.) Religion, anthro, epidemiology, philosophy, culinary history YES; maths, NO.

Re: Well, lessee.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

*laugh* Pity I'm not more Sinophilic, because I'm hopelessly stuck in navigation now, thinking about things like:

Imagine a clockface with twelve cardinal directions instead of sixteen, and then you talk about 'the third dragon' instead of 'nine o'clock.' Or, 'the dragon's third wind,' which sounds perfectly reasoable in Chinese, and never mind that your heroes will snicker and think of farting.

And, having just reminded myself about radians, they're way too large to navigate by -- but the Twelve Dragons of the Winds -- OOOH! OOH! -- name them for the twelve Chinese astrological beasties! (assuming that's proper & period)

"Captain! Ainu ship approaching on the Tiger's Wind!"

Just tossing things into the air. And the thing is, you can have your twelve directions and still believe in a Babylonian circle underneath: the direction of each of them would be a 30° arc.

-- Lorrie

Hokey-dokey...

[camwyn]

...this puppy's going to email (the snugharbor.com address) before I start leaving spoilers for my future players to see. Check yer inbox. Thanks!

Future players: neener neener. *grin*