@Der-Kuenstler said in Huge maps:
@CWO-Marc Thank you for these insights and links - very helpful!
My pleasure. I’ve had a fondness for big military plotting tables ever since I saw the original 1970s movie Midway, which actually has two such tables: a relatively small one on Yamamoto’s flagship, and a huge one filling a whole room in Nimitz’s headquarters in Hawaii. Both tables use neat little ship-shaped labeled blocks to denote the position of vessels, and flat markers to depict aircraft. There are some funny continuity errors, if you look carefully, where the positions of the ships change from shot to shot within the same scene. My favourite one is the scene where Nimitz asks Spruance – who’s just placed the three American carrier markers near Hawaii – how he plans to position his forces at Midway; as Spruance thinks, the film cuts to a close-up of the three markers, which aren’t in the same configuration as we saw in the long shot. I credit that movie as the source of my eventual interest in A&A maps and sculpts.
“Sink the Bismark” also has a nice plotting table and makes good use of it. Both movies might be worth your looking at as reference sources for table design. Midway’s big table takes the interesting approach of not having fully straight sides; it’s indented in the areas where there’s empty ocean with no nearby land, to allow easier access to the other parts without having to reach over lots of empty space. That’s a bit radical for an A&A map, but in principle some of the southernmost sea zones of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic could be deleted to make room for table indentations.