Behold... The Earth - Mark 2!

[ffutures]

The best local pound shop turns out to have 6" globes for a quid, this is my first crude effort at the re-aligned Earth of The Struggle For Empire; it's eventually going to be a political globe, there may be a geophysical one too if I can find the time.



Europe and Africa - Changes aren't immediately obvious, since the geometry isn't distorted much. Position of Equator and Greenland outside the Arctic circle are the most obvious changes.


The Americas - It looks tilted, the equator is much further South, Alaska is in part covered by the polar ice cap. Yes, Top Gear really can drive to the North Pole...


Australasia - Australia looks tilted and is now almost touching the equator. The area in a different colour (Japan and parts of China etc.) is a small Japanese empire I've invented for the RPG. Parts of Antarctica are now outside the Antarctic Circle and thawing.


North Pole - a little North of the Bering Strait (which is now under the ice), covers parts of Alaska and Siberia


South Pole - the ice is retreating over the continent and forming at sea (which may drop sea levels a few feet over the next few hundred years, leaving fairly desolate terrain which is currently uninhabited apart from mines etc.




These pictures probably won't be in the RPG, the globe thing is mainly a check on the maps and a fun prop for game sessions.

Comments

[gbsteve.livejournal.com]

That's great! What's happened to all that ice at the South Pole?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Actually it's probably mostly still there, covering the land mass, but slowly retreating to the North, and new icecaps will be starting to form around the new axis of rotation. The reason it looks a bit naff is that I should have done the ice forming on land and on the sea as lots of little dots, not a solid mass.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

One thing to keep in mind, is that much of the "land" in both Antarctica and Greenland is below sea level. Take the ice away and there is a lot less land in those places than looking at a current map would lead you to believe.

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

Ice sitting on land lowers the sea level. Iced-over sea doesn't affect the sea level, as the ice is floating. The world has less ice on land in Greenland and Antarctica, but more in Alaska and Siberia. The sea level depends on the balance between them.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Right - yes, sorry, for some reason I got it the wrong way round, no idea why.

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

I'm curious about how you created these.

Were these blank spheres that you painted over?

Were these world globes that you painted over?

What did you use to paint them with?

Does the finished product have a coated spray protective layer?

The reason I ask, is that I sometimes see old globes selling for as low as $5 at garage sales. I've been tempted to take one such globe apart from the stand, spray it white, and then paint over some alternative globe depiction, say one for Barsoom, or a homebrew fantasy world.

::B::

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Just a normal globe - a really cheap one which is why you can see the seams in the covering.

I painted over the continents with red acrylic paint (for the Anglo-Saxon Empire, which rules most of the world in this setting) and the seas with blue - just the ordinary paint gamers use for models etc. The reason I had to cover everything is that the labels would all be slightly crooked otherwise, and things like the equator and the lines of latitude and longitude etc. are wrong since the poles are in a slightly different place. Unfortunately I didn't have enough red so for the second coat I mixed in some white to make the pink I ended up with.

When I have it finished, and assuming it's any good, I'll probably put some sort of varnish on it.