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Here'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 htt

Here'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 ago
First 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 ago
  Why 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.
  - chiph 9y ago
    Well, they wouldn't have trusted US maps. After all, their own commercial maps had intentional inaccuracies on them.[0] But also it would have put the map-making organization out of work. [0] 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...
    - jdavis703 9y ago
      So then send a spy in to buy the maps, and validate that important landmarks and military bases are in the "correct" places.
      - rangibaby 9y ago
        That's not as easy as it sounds, especially in those days. I'm trying to think of a job or activity that involves scoping out military bases, keeping detailed records of their locations AND getting them home without getting caught at any step in the process. Even today taking a photo of the wrong building in the wrong country can get you into deadly trouble. Even if your agent is successful, how do you know that he is not misleading you? You now have to risk losing another agent doing the same thing again, just to make sure. Even if your agents don't get caught, they may have come to the attention of and be secretly monitored by the local intelligence services, just to see what they are up to. Lastly, is confirming the specific location of a base worth losing one or more spies over when knowing the general area is already "good enough"? Your bombers can confirm the location with their eyes (I know of at least one USSR aircraft design with windows on the bottom of the cockpit for exactly this purpose), and your nuclear warhead doesn't really care which side of the road an airport is on.
        chiph 9y ago
        > Even if your agents don't get caught, they may have come to the attention of and be secretly monitored by the local intelligence services, just to see what they are up to. Or your agent may have been "turned" by the opposition and they're feeding incorrect information back to you.
samstave 9y ago
Heh... I made a bunch of wallpapers out of edited versions of this map a few years ago... I can't find them on Imgur mobile (shittiest mobile view of my thousands of pics up there) But I'll find on desktop and find them...
rangibaby 9y ago
> spy into any local gas station to buy an accurate, well drawn, and easy to read road map? How do you know that it is accurate?
- eru 9y ago
  At least it will be accurate where normal people usually drive--otherwise those normal people would complain.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Before GPS, it was mostly the topology that mattered to motorists, but the military probably wanted accurate coordinates on everything.
    - eru 9y ago
      True! Of course topology includes getting the petrol station on the right side of the road. I even heard of some maps with a 'sliding scale' that eg has the city centre larger. You can't even do that on a flat piece of paper without serious distortions in your coordinates.
- Stratoscope 9y ago
  Good point: the gas station road map probably has trap streets on it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street If we couldn't catch the spies for spying, at least we could catch them for copyright violation.
kafkaesq 9y ago
Given how far off from the city centers many of those place names were -- look where they put Саннивейл, Маунтин-Вью, and good lord, Сан-Хосе, for example - it's good to know that when the Red Dawn[1]-style invasion finally came, their paratroopers would have been horribly confused at where they landed. Thinking they were about to land on the roof of the Blue Cube, but getting ambushed in a parking of some Fry's or Denny's instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn
- trhway 9y ago
  i wonder what navigation system North Korea is using/planning to use for its ballistic missiles. Commercial GPS signal with fallback on good old star-based plus inertial?
  - rangibaby 9y ago
    GPS has a "speed limit" for that reason: > In GPS technology, the term "COCOM Limits" also refers to a limit placed on GPS tracking devices that disables tracking when the device calculates that it is moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft).[2] This was intended to prevent the use of GPS in intercontinental ballistic missile-like applications. /EDIT SEE BELOW
    - trhway 9y ago
      commercially available GPS receivers do normally implement the limits. This is why i said "commercial GPS signal" as the signal itself doesn't have any such limit, and anyone can make their own receiver without such speed/altitude limits and with higher accuracy than typical commercial receiver.
      - rangibaby 9y ago
        I had that thought in the back of my mind. Thanks for clarifying
  - 9y ago
bhaumik 9y ago
A bit more haunting for me on the east coast, the Pentagon: https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/detail-soviet-pentagon-1024x574.jpg https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/detail-sovi...
- phy6 9y ago
  That's pretty cool, do you suppose the water depth is in fathoms, meters, or just incorrect?
  - eru 9y ago
    Somewhat related: the 'metric inch'. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in_Soviet_Bloc_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...)
Steve44 9y ago
> This bit of randomly swapping freeway colors between brown and white seems to be a common theme. It looks to me that it's to do with contrast against the surroundings. The build up areas are brown and the roads through them are white, when the roads leave the build up area they change to brown. This contrasts against the white background giving a visual continuation of the road. The brown sections of the road are also thicker, perhaps that indicates multiple lanes or even possibly different road surfaces.

digi_owl 9y ago

First 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 ago
Why 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.
- chiph 9y ago
  Well, they wouldn't have trusted US maps. After all, their own commercial maps had intentional inaccuracies on them.[0] But also it would have put the map-making organization out of work. [0] 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...
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    So then send a spy in to buy the maps, and validate that important landmarks and military bases are in the "correct" places.
    - rangibaby 9y ago
      That's not as easy as it sounds, especially in those days. I'm trying to think of a job or activity that involves scoping out military bases, keeping detailed records of their locations AND getting them home without getting caught at any step in the process. Even today taking a photo of the wrong building in the wrong country can get you into deadly trouble. Even if your agent is successful, how do you know that he is not misleading you? You now have to risk losing another agent doing the same thing again, just to make sure. Even if your agents don't get caught, they may have come to the attention of and be secretly monitored by the local intelligence services, just to see what they are up to. Lastly, is confirming the specific location of a base worth losing one or more spies over when knowing the general area is already "good enough"? Your bombers can confirm the location with their eyes (I know of at least one USSR aircraft design with windows on the bottom of the cockpit for exactly this purpose), and your nuclear warhead doesn't really care which side of the road an airport is on.
      - chiph 9y ago
        > Even if your agents don't get caught, they may have come to the attention of and be secretly monitored by the local intelligence services, just to see what they are up to. Or your agent may have been "turned" by the opposition and they're feeding incorrect information back to you.

samstave 9y ago

Heh... I made a bunch of wallpapers out of edited versions of this map a few years ago... I can't find them on Imgur mobile (shittiest mobile view of my thousands of pics up there) But I'll find on desktop and find them...

rangibaby 9y ago

> spy into any local gas station to buy an accurate, well drawn, and easy to read road map? How do you know that it is accurate?

eru 9y ago
At least it will be accurate where normal people usually drive--otherwise those normal people would complain.
- mikeash 9y ago
  Before GPS, it was mostly the topology that mattered to motorists, but the military probably wanted accurate coordinates on everything.
  - eru 9y ago
    True! Of course topology includes getting the petrol station on the right side of the road. I even heard of some maps with a 'sliding scale' that eg has the city centre larger. You can't even do that on a flat piece of paper without serious distortions in your coordinates.
Stratoscope 9y ago
Good point: the gas station road map probably has trap streets on it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street If we couldn't catch the spies for spying, at least we could catch them for copyright violation.

kafkaesq 9y ago

Given how far off from the city centers many of those place names were -- look where they put Саннивейл, Маунтин-Вью, and good lord, Сан-Хосе, for example - it's good to know that when the Red Dawn[1]-style invasion finally came, their paratroopers would have been horribly confused at where they landed. Thinking they were about to land on the roof of the Blue Cube, but getting ambushed in a parking of some Fry's or Denny's instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn

trhway 9y ago
i wonder what navigation system North Korea is using/planning to use for its ballistic missiles. Commercial GPS signal with fallback on good old star-based plus inertial?
- rangibaby 9y ago
  GPS has a "speed limit" for that reason: > In GPS technology, the term "COCOM Limits" also refers to a limit placed on GPS tracking devices that disables tracking when the device calculates that it is moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft).[2] This was intended to prevent the use of GPS in intercontinental ballistic missile-like applications. /EDIT SEE BELOW
  - trhway 9y ago
    commercially available GPS receivers do normally implement the limits. This is why i said "commercial GPS signal" as the signal itself doesn't have any such limit, and anyone can make their own receiver without such speed/altitude limits and with higher accuracy than typical commercial receiver.
    - rangibaby 9y ago
      I had that thought in the back of my mind. Thanks for clarifying
- 9y ago

bhaumik 9y ago

A bit more haunting for me on the east coast, the Pentagon: https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/detail-soviet-pentagon-1024x574.jpg https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/detail-sovi...

phy6 9y ago
That's pretty cool, do you suppose the water depth is in fathoms, meters, or just incorrect?
- eru 9y ago
  Somewhat related: the 'metric inch'. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in_Soviet_Bloc_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...)

Steve44 9y ago

> This bit of randomly swapping freeway colors between brown and white seems to be a common theme. It looks to me that it's to do with contrast against the surroundings. The build up areas are brown and the roads through them are white, when the roads leave the build up area they change to brown. This contrasts against the white background giving a visual continuation of the road. The brown sections of the road are also thicker, perhaps that indicates multiple lanes or even possibly different road surfaces.