Is the Map Flat, or is it Round?

[FLS]

According to the internet the curvature is about 8 inches per mile so 512 miles would be about 340 ft.

[wil3ur]

If you fly a 163 up as high as you can get it and look down, the world starts to look like a little circle.

[Skuzzy]

It is flat.

[Bizman]

[pembquist]

HiTech please get us some drill rigs, I want to look at the animals down there.

[FLS]

It's turtles all the way down.

[mikeWe9a]

How much would a flat square be curved, on Earth, if is was 512x512 miles? Would you even be able to notice? Besides, this is a WW2 game, and we don't have weapons that can reach out far enough for it to make any difference. All the speed calculations are done for you, and as pointed out, they are pretty dang accurate. Would having any more precision by knowing the precise terrain curvature give you opportunities in the game that you don't already have?

A degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles (69 miles, 112 km), so if you were standing at the center of the grid, the closest edge would be curving away (down) by about 3 1/2 degrees, and the farthest corner by about 5 degrees.

Mike

Edit - also, the Earth isn't a perfect sphere - it bulges at the equator due to centrifugal force (the spin) and  a very small bit because of the moon.  As a result, the curvature would not be identical in all directions.  As a tidbit found while looking up some of this, although Mount Everest's peak is the highest point above sea level, Mount Chimborazo in Equador actually reaches farther from the center of the Earth due to the bulge at the Equator.

[ccvi]

Its neither flat nor round, but it has zero dimensions. It's a point. Proof: Create a map which is placed at the north or south pole. North is "up" all over the map. The whole map is located at that one place set by the editor. The whole map exists in a single point.

[Greebo]

The plane of the terrain is essentially flat rather than curved. However the sun, moon and stars rotate around that flat plane in 3D, so that when the moon sets it then travels around below the flat land until it reappears on the opposite horizon. Likely this is because making the surface match the curvature of the earth would greatly increase the CPU load needed to position everything in space as well as having to calculate other planes' individual gravity vectors and so on. All this extra CPU work would slow the game down and not improve it in any measurable way.

[Mongoose]

It is flat.

Thank you for chiming in with the authoritative answer.