Quote:
Originally Posted by YellowFin
NASA combined forces with several other organizations and scanned the earth with satellites and ships and they offer (for free) bathymetric data with 30 arcsecond (~1 km at the equator) resolution of the whole world.
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Hi Yellowfin, in the past I had read about bathymetric data offered by NASA. All I could find from them is
this page. Bathymetric maps you can download from there have a max resolution of 10800x10800 sq. pixels, each covering an area of 90 deg of latitude x 90 degrees of longitude, i.e. 120 pixels per degree or, as you put it, 1 pixel per 30 arcseconds.
Unfortunately, that's exactly the resolution of SHIII's height maps, so data shared by NASA doesn't add much to what we already have in stock game.
EDIT: talking about vertical resolution, NASA bathymetric maps are greyscale images. A gray value/depth scale is not provided, but it is likely that white pixels on them are equal to a depth of 0 m, while the black colour should represent the deepest point on Earth (i.e. the Mariana Trench = ca. 10,994m u.s.l.). There are 256 shades of gray in a grayscale image. Assuming that tones of gray are equally spaced on those maps, each tone would cover a bathymetric range of ca. 43m (10,994/256).
Talking about a WWII sub simulation, such a depth resoltution would be way too much for the deepest points (which we would never visit), and not enough for the shallowest waters around land masses. A few days ago, Kendras has posted a
depth scale as used in SHIII. If you look at it, you will notice that -as it is logical- map colors denoting shallow waters cover a much narrower depth range than the ones used for deep waters.