Making an Axis and Allies coffee table for xmas gift. Need your help with maps!

And on a related point: if you look at an online map of the world and place a rectangular sheet of paper on it so that one of its long edges lies on the equator (alternately covering, for purposes of comparison, the bottom half and the top half), you’ll notice that most of the world’s land masses are in the northern hemisphere.  All of North America, all of Europe, virtually all of Asia, and much of Africa are located there.  The main land masses in the southern hemisphere are South America, the lower part of Africa, Australia, and Antarctica; the rest of the southern hemisphere is mainly water, which means that for A&A map purposes it’s mostly wasted space.  Oceania, a.k.a. the Pacific Islands, including Australia and New Zealand, did see significant action in WWII, so its inclusion on an A&A map is quite relavant…but by the same token Antarctica is a land mass that’s traditionally (and with good reason) omitted from A&A maps.

A little bit of an update on the table. It’s coming along well, withe the fist part being complete. The custom made legs and the drawers are complete, and we have the bottom frame complete. The table is currently free standing, and we will need to build and add the top pieces next. I have taken some pictures and will probably wait to post them until I have a complete product. Looking good!

What did you get? Where did you get them?
You mean value as in attack & defence?

This may sound like an improbable source, but another idea would be for you to go to some local dollar stores and look around.  Back when I was making myself a dice tower, I discovered that some dollar store chains sell (among all the miscellaneous stuff they have in stock) some plain unpainted rectangular wooden trays of various sizes, made of very thin wood.  Their designs could not be simpler – a bottom and four sides glued together, all made of flat wooden pieces – and they’re cheap in both price and appearance, but they’re about the right size for what you have in mind and they would probably look quite nice if you applied some dark wood stain to them.  And because they’re so inexpensive, picking up as many as you need for your table would be very affordable.  It would also be easy to customize them by, for example, subdividing the larger models into sections by cutting some balsa wood sticks (or other types of woods) to suitable sizes and gluing them inside the trays before you stain them.

I know a producer in Germany, who could deliver a mixture of white dashed and continous lines decals (s. picture). One decal consists of 23 white lines, each of 125 mm length and 0,75mm width, where each decal is EUR 3,50. A direct shipping from the producer to the U.S. would be very expensive, it is about EUR 35,-. If you are interested in, I can order the decals and send it to you personally. This will cause shipping costs of roundabout EUR 10 (depending on the weight…).

The decal is a digital print, that is, you have to cut out the lines. More pleasant would be a screen print, then each line is spearated from the others as a distinct decal in the printing process.

The producer also offers an individual development of decals, but I don’t know how much this is in EUR or $. If you are interested in I will ask.

Web: www.ds-design.de, english and german language

white dashed lines.jpg

@General:

I love the level of detail to the map, have you considered using the Star of India from the British Raj for UK Pacific territories?

Glad you liked the custom map.  No, the idea of giving the British Pacific territories distinct roundels hadn’t occurred to me.  It’s a concept that has potential advantages, for instance because it would highlight Britain’s two-income situation in Global, but on the other hand I like having a single British roundel for the whole world because it highlights the extent of the British Empire.  (A grade-school child back in the1930s or so allegedly wrote in an assignment that “The sun never sets on the British Empire because the sun sets in the west and the Empire is in the east.”)

I use Photoshop Elements.  Its not the best but it works.