10 ms·
The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Mapped the World
- chippy 9y agoI remember a talk from a map librarian who said that the Soviets didn't just copy western maps, as they often had more detail and unique elements that the western maps didn't have. One thing, for example was the heights of bridges, and widths of roads. You might want to jump straight into the examples: https://redatlasbook.com/cityplans https://redatlasbook.com/cityplans Flash is needed though...
- Top19 9y agoMakes sense about the bridges and roads thing. You need to know that for tanks. Even today in Germany you’ll see tiny bridges crossing a stream, a sign right by that says “this bridge rated for 70,000 pounds” (so can hold multiple tanks at once).
- fnj 9y agoMultiple? A Main Battle Tank such as the German Leopard 2 weighs 62,300 kg (137, 347 lb). Even a puny WW2 Sherman medium tank weighed in the neighborhood of 70,000 lb.
- sspiff 9y agoAn M4 Sherman weighed about 35 tons when including fuel, crew and ammunition. So technically, it could hold two, though it would be a risky endeavor.
- brndnmtthws 9y agoA lot of bridges everywhere are marked with their capacity. I don't think it's necessarily for the purpose of tanks.
- hoppelhase 9y agoI think he relates to the bridge signs of the NATO. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Load_Classification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Load_Classification
- brndnmtthws 9y agoInteresting, never knew about this.
- xorcist 9y agoIs that literally true? I would have expected Germans to rate their bridges in tons, not pounds/pfund.
- hoppelhase 9y agoI live in Germany and have never seen a sign using pounds, only tons.
- avar 9y agoRead the German Wikipedia article on the subject which shows German signs in short tons (non-metric unit): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militärische_Lastenklasse https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militärische_Lastenklasse
- dom0 9y agoThe class numbers only roughly correspond to weight, so you could just as well consider them metric tons (1000 kg).
- avar 9y agoYou definitely can't consider them metric tons. If the bridge you're about to cross has a maximum advertised load of 120 sh tn and you consider it safe to drive your 120 m tn vehicle over the bridge on the basis of that you're going to be putting a 132.3 m tn load on the bridge, or roughly 10% more than it's rated for.
- dom0 9y agoAs I said above, these signs do not show a literal maximum weight. They show a load class.
- avar 9y agoRight, I was overly simplifying. I meant to say a 120 sh ton MLC-calculated weight, not a vehicle that's exactly 120 tons since as the article goes into the class needs to take into account axle count etc. What I don't understand is your claim that "you could just as well consider them metric tons". These are short tons with caveats, i.e. the eventual number depends on more than just the raw weight, but the raw weight is one aspect of the calculation. So if you were to make that calculation on the basis of metric instead of lbs how aren't you going to introduce something like a 10% error in the MLC you come up with?
- dom0 9y agoThose are MLC (Military Load Classification) signs.
- arcbyte 9y agoMake no mistake, we have that as well. Worldwide: https://www.sddc.army.mil/sites/TEA/Functions/SpecialAssistant/Pages/IRRIS.aspx https://www.sddc.army.mil/sites/TEA/Functions/SpecialAssista...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vxNsr 9y agoIs anyone else getting a non-secure warning from chrome?
- cesarb 9y agoAccording to qualys (https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.sddc.army.mil https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.sddc.army...), that site uses an untrusted certificate.
- astura 9y agoYou see that because the DoD uses their own root certificates for sites intended for internal use that browsers don't trust by default: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/147606/why-would-someone-like-the-dod-prefer-to-use-its-own-root-certificates https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/147606/why-woul... If you were afflicted with the military and were planning on using these sites on your own hardware regularly, you'd install their certificates: https://iase.disa.mil/pki-pke/Pages/tools.aspx https://iase.disa.mil/pki-pke/Pages/tools.aspx
- hoppelhase 9y agoI once talked to a guy working in the local government responsible for all-things-roads in a town in Germany. He showed me some maps and building plans of bridges and told me that these maps/plans were actually highly classified in the cold war. Makes sense to me that the soviets collected everything.
- gordeh 9y agoWired did an article on this topic: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/
- bastawhiz 9y ago> This is the never-before-told story of the world’s most comprehensive mapping endeavour Is it? Arguably, the mapping efforts of Google and others have reached further and collected more and more accurate data (street view, lidar, etc.).
- gwern 9y agoIt's probably the most comprehensive in terms of personnel and man-hours; those other mapping efforts are highly automated, but the descriptions of these maps imply a lot of people on the ground making them so detailed, since for a lot of the map details I don't see how you could reasonably get them from looking at a satellite map or a few public records. (Or perhaps they simply mean most comprehensive as in up to that point in time, which is a legitimate amount of hyperbole such an endeavour.)
- baybal2 9y agoCheck Amap, they have coloured 3d maps of all global cities with photo textures. http://www.navibiz.com.cn/e/NewsFocus/nf-123-02.html http://www.navibiz.com.cn/e/NewsFocus/nf-123-02.html
- eru 9y agoInteresting. For what it's worth: Google Earth (and Google Maps) have 3d buildings and vegetation etc now, too. (But I wonder whether it's based on new data, or they just use machine learning to guess the 3d shapes from the 2d data they already had.)
- baybal2 9y agoin case of autonavi, their 3d maps are human modeled and textured just like a giant 3d game
- AlotOfReading 9y agoAs astonishingly accurate as Google's maps are, they lack a lot of resolution and data for under-developed regions like Oceania and Central Asia. The quality of the Soviet mapping projects were such that they're still competitive with a lot of the commercial offerings today for the more remote regions of the planet.
- zobzu 9y agoMeanwhile, the SR71 made pictures
- Stratoscope 9y agoHere's a Soviet map of the San Francisco Bay Area: https://i.imgur.com/BxDJC6f.jpg https://i.imgur.com/BxDJC6f.jpg (direct link) https://imgur.com/a/FiEGm https://imgur.com/a/FiEGm (Imgur page in case the above doesn't work) The map appears to date from the early 1970s: Highway 280 is there but appears to have Cañada Road routing from before the ridge freeway was finished. Or I could be misreading that part of the map and it is from later, maybe the 1980s? It's interesting how many inaccuracies there are. Living in Menlo Park, I checked a few local landmarks. Palo Alto Airport is in the right place, but where is San Carlos Airport? They seem to have moved it across the street from Facebook! And note the airport near where 280 and Highway 92 cross. The map is also very hard to read. Look at Highway 101. Unlike 280, it's mostly in white, but if you follow it through Redwood City just north of Woodside Road (Highway 84), it looks like 101 is routed along Veterans Boulevard - which was bypassed years before this map was made. If you look again, there is a brown stretch that is close to the actual freeway alignment. Then follow 280 down into Los Altos, where it changes from brown to white as it approaches Cupertino and into San Jose. This bit of randomly swapping freeway colors between brown and white seems to be a common theme. Many of the local streets are recognizable but have a very approximate hand-drawn look to them. I'll be curious to hear what anyone else notices in their neighborhood. This is easily the most interesting, and worst quality, map of the Bay Area I've seen. I wonder why it has so many little things wrong, when they could have simply sent a spy into any local gas station to buy an accurate, well drawn, and easy to read road map?
- digi_owl 9y agoFirst of, direct links to imgur seems to just reroute to the imgur page these days. Secondly, i suspect the inaccuracies comes from using satellite photos to draw the maps.
- Yetanfou 9y agoWhy would they have used satellite photos when they could just have taken out a subscription to National Geographic and get all the maps they wanted, or bought a Rand McNally road atlas, or a stack of Michelin maps or... well, you get it: there was no shortage of maps of 'the free west' at their disposal. Where satellite photos came into play it would have been to fill in the blanks left by those maps: things which showed up on satellite photos but were missing on recent maps were clearly of interest.
- CharlesDodgson 9y agoThis site has some great links: https://sovietmaps.com/resources https://sovietmaps.com/resources
- MichaelMoser123 9y agoHowever civilian maps were deliberately obfuscated in the Soviet Union. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-maps-were-faked-for-50-years.html?mcubz=0 http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-m...