As a railfan and a graphic designer, the first thing I check out when in a new town with public transit is their transit map. You can tell a lot about a city by how they represent themselves on a transit map, and I myself have designed more maps than I can count. What's the map of your city look like? Do you have a personal favourite you think is really unknown? Any maps that you just want to rant about because of how terrible it is?

My personal favourite transit map is Constantine Konovalov's Paris Metro Map, I just love how effortlessly it weaves the lines throughout the Peripherique, and how it's not afraid to break its own established rules on angles and circles. Honorable mentions go to the London Tube and Rail map (an absolute classic), and the Mexico City Metro, which assigns a unique symbol to every station for the benefit of passengers who can't read or write.

Also, designers, feel free to share your transit diagrams! I miss r/transitdiagrams a lot and would love to see your work, fictional, redesign or otherwise!

I enjoy a few weather tools. For example, I enjoy
blitzortung that shows live lightning. Currently, you can see a long chain of lighting through eastern Germany and up through Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

This is expected, since we’ve had very warm weather for a while, and it’s supposed to change to colder weather soon.

But is there a good website that can show me easily the weather front that is currently creating all those lightning strikes? The sites I know only shows vague colors and you can perhaps implicitly see some change in pressure, wind, temperature etc, but nothing that clearly shows an east front where for example you would expect lightning soon.

This is for worldbuilding purposes. I'm not exactly a "science dude", so I'd like to get a better idea of our solar system and beyond, preferably with links to layman-friendly explanations on things like:

• distances and travel time not only having Earth as a starting point, but from any given point to another
  • if at all possible, including hypothetical alien and/or future technologies
• Earth-like planets
• locations that might be able to sustain life, and which kind of life it could sustain
• locations that, while unsuitable to carbon-based life, might receive enough energy to sustain artificial intelligence

I remember there's some kind of simulator or engine, that can run on a computer... anyone remembers the name? And would it run on an aging laptop with an i5 processor and Intel HD4400 integrated graphics?

Thanks!

EDIT: I guess I'll make this question a bit more approachable, so... what are some YouTube channels that can teach me more the basics of our solar system, nearby systems, the Milky Way, and how all of those are linked together?.

Hello everyone,

I recently moved to a new town and I'm looking forward to walking on all its streets and discover its secrets. However, it's relatively a big town and it will take me a while to do that.
I also don't like walking all that much and I'm not an outgoing person at all, so I want to gamify this a little bit to trick my monkey brain.

So, as an idea, I wondered if there was an iOS app that used the GPS on my phone (or some other trick that I can't think of) to map my route, save it, and place it on the map of the town so I can coordinate my future routes according to the places I've already visited. It's sort of like those running apps that shows you your route after you finished running, except I want it to be not about running and I want them to save the route data, preferably locally.

Thank you everyone in advance for their time.

(Only took me 2 months /s). Also this map is by no means a complete list.

Santa-pocalypse: What if santa was (a tiny bit more) realistic?

A timeline where Santa delivers his presents via quantum tunneling and due to a failure in this device, he causes a nuclear explosion when he accelerates to relativistic speeds in order to gift Children worldwide. Given nuclear fusion doesn't work like that and the Shockwave travels westward counterclockwise, I disagree with the notion this is realistic, but that's pedantry.

What the fuck: The Timeline

Someone mashed dozens of fictitious worlds and the real world at different times to make a very weird and high-effiry map.

Industrialized, colonial, imperial China

A timeline where the Ming is an expansionist empire and puppets nearly half of the world's population. Given China has been as large and populous as entire continents at times, the fact that China had so much the leadership felt they could be self-sufficient and refuse to try to expand until like, 10 years ago, I find this scenario something that could totally have happened but didn't due to disinterested leadership.

What if the new world didn't exist?

A world where columbus is right about Geography and the Americas don't exist. While I don't think it's particularly realistic, I find this scenario underrated.

A grim, dark rainbow: What if the current rightwards shift of politics doesn't stop?

What it says on the title. Not particularly realistic given the CCP and NATO apparently collapse, but I like to use this map as a stand-in for the worst-case scenario of the near-future.

The dragon in shackles: Qing China and Japan in 1932

A timeline where Qing China re-unifies China, but at large costs to their economy, independence, infrastructure and territory.

Flavo et purpura: A world in which Islam never leaves Arabia Ca 800 AD

A very detailed map with quite a few differences from what happened IRL. Far more romanized.

Spain if the re*conquista continued into North Africa

A timeline where the Spanish conquer the Western half of the Maghreb. The justificarion is that Pre-columbian empires ally themselves to other European nations to not be colonized by Spain, so the Spanish focus their imperialist efforts into neighboring Morocco. Obviously not very realistic, but the maps are cool.

Fictitious maps based on real data:

The world divided into 200 areas of equal population

What it says in the title.