> Would the US u2 overflight maps of the USSR be broadly similar? I'm not trying for whataboutery, it's the comparison of interest: how well an you account for

> Would the US u2 overflight maps of the USSR be broadly similar? I'm not trying for whataboutery, it's the comparison of interest: how well an you account for place names and features from what's available? The Russians had access to a lot of information, OS maps for instance. There was a Wired article about these maps from years ago that talked a bit about the differences: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/: > The US military made maps during the Cold War too, of course, but the two superpowers had different mapping strategies that reflected their different military strengths, says Geoff Forbes, who served in the US Army as a Russian voice interceptor during the Cold War and is now director of mapping at Land Info, a Colorado company that stocks Soviet military maps. “The US military’s air superiority made mapping at medium scales adequate for most areas of the globe,” Forbes says. As a result, he says, the US military rarely made maps more detailed than 1:250,000, and generally only did so for areas of special strategic interest. “The Soviets, on the other hand, were the global leaders in tank technology,” Forbes says. After suffering horrific losses during the Nazi ground invasion in WWII, the Soviets had built up the world’s most powerful army. Maneuvering that army required large-scale maps, and lots of them, to cover smaller areas in more detail. “One to 50,000 scale is globally considered among the military to be the tactical scale for ground forces,” Forbes says. “These maps were created so that if and when the Soviet military was on the ground in any given place, they would have the info they needed to get from point A to point B.”