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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2025
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I suggest a better map projection.
Globe. Or interactively rotating orthographic (aka digital globe). Sorry, there is no flat solution. You either have to do a ridiculous amount of slicing (Dymaxion, Waterman Butterfly) or just end up with a projection that distorts other parts of the world and isn't much better than Mercator with arbitrary poles. Yes, some preserve scale better than Mercator but none do great circles consistently well.
The gnomonic projection renders all great circles as straight lines. Though of course that doesn't show the entire earth at once, so it's kinda cheating.
But yeah, you can't map a 3D object onto a 2D plane without distorting it in some way, you just need to pick the distortions that interfere the least with what you're using the map for. As they say, all maps are wrong, some maps are useful.
You get it! Mercator is great unless it's shaping one's idea of the world as a whole, which is of course best done with a globe. Cutting a square out of it whose side length is up to cca 10° of longitude will always result in a near-perfect and useful map (unless you are near the pole, then the covered area is just too tiny to be useful).