Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Terrain Maps for the Third World War in Germany 1958

When I first started considering playing out battles of the third world war set in 1958 (or there about), one of my first thoughts was that West Germany probably looked a bit different in 1958, than it did in say... 1982.  Where in the heck would I get maps depicting the roads and extent of development around 1958?

After some searching, I discovered that 1:25,000 military maps of Germany, both West and East, were available online from Brigham Young University at: https://lib.byu.edu/collections/german-maps/  You'll have to play around with the interface, but all of the maps are available for download.

These will allow me to make terrain as detailed as I might want or need for my games.  In experimenting with scaling and cropping maps to match my table size in scale, I've come to realize that my generic modular terrain can't replicate the actual German road and terrain network with a high degree of accuracy.  The road networks were simply too dense, and the topography in some areas, too complex.

In the end, I'll probably make a fair number of new terrain panels to replicate places of particular interest, and otherwise just live with some compromises between my existing terrain and reality.  

2 comments:

  1. This link may be preferable to the one in the post above:
    https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/GermanyMaps/search

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  2. Cool idea, hope its not to much work for you.

    ReplyDelete