• ysjet@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Actually, fun fact, the entire point of the Mercator projection is that it DOES maintain shapes/angles, just not scale. It’s a nautical map, it’s for sailing. That’s why when you look at a mercator map and a globe, the countries look about the same, just potentially different sizes- because that’s literally the point of it.

    • Hugin@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Not exactly it distorts shapes a lot. However if you pick point A on a coast and point B on a different coast the angle of the line is the heading you should sail to go from point A to point B.

      So yeah very useful as a nautical map if you want to navigate from place to place. Not accurate in shape though.