Chapter 289 Mapping
Chapter 289: Mapping the Map
Joss was lying on the grass, shaking around with a dog’s tail grass in his mouth, surrounded by a few other soldiers like him, lazily basking in the sun.
The sunlight was a bit shaky, and Jos squinted his eyes, watching a few figures in the distance as they went about their business.
“Hey..! Tom, what do you think is going on up there, it’s just a diagram, as to go through so much trouble ……”
“Joss!”
Before Joss could finish, a yell came from the distance.
Hearing this sound, several people’s bodies popped up from the ground as if they were tautly wound up, and then stood at attention.
“Caught me slacking off again, you assholes!”
The angry roar of their squad leader – Staff Sergeant Makarov – hit like a cannonball from behind.
Joss and the others kept their stance, staring straight ahead without saying a word, but in their hearts they were screaming: bad luck, being caught by the Staff Sergeant.
The sergeant turned to them and shouted, “Don’t you guys know what’s going on here? This is neither Arda nor Bairdin, but Emden, the former territory of the Kent family, and there is no guarantee that a few lunatics loyal to the usurper will suddenly appear, and then what if something really happens?”
Makarov reprimanded them severely.
“In a place like this, vigilance is the first priority, if these precious students of Lord Lord really lose a few hairs, you guys will bring your heads to me, and I will bring my head to Lord Bryce. Do you understand?”
“Yes!” Jos and his comrades answered loudly in unison.
“At night, each of you will write a check and give it to me!”
“Yes!” The response was tinged with sadness.
The so-called “precious students” that Makarov was talking about were the figures that were busy in the distance, and they were all from the Vis Academy.
A week ago, their platoon leader had been transferred to the staff, and the new platoon leader had also worked in the staff before – the officer rotation system, one of the measures Schroeder had taken, every staff officer should, according to the rules, regularly go to the front line to work in the army, so that he could gain more practical combat and work experience, so as to avoid the embarrassment of talking about the army on paper. awkwardness of the paper work.
Along with the new platoon leader came a group of students, this group of students is remarkable, according to the platoon leader’s statement, they are all the heart of Count Gleiman, Battalion Commander Bryce and Joyce battalion commander even personally have a meal with them.
The purpose of their visit was to engage in some kind of “mapping”, which simply means surveying and mapping – drawing accurate maps.
Makarov’s company was given the task by Bryce of assisting the students with the mapping.
The students were divided into small groups, and Makarov and the others followed them around, carrying tools and acting as guards.
After being caught by Makarov, Jos and the others no longer dared to slack off, and put up their spirit to guard the surrounding area, and thus unknowingly reached dusk.
Time is running out, Makarov led Jos and the others to the students, the orders from above can not be tired of the lord’s baby, it is time to lead them back to the barracks.
As they approached, they did not interrupt the students’ work, but observed.
Two students stood tall and low on the slope, each holding the end of a long bamboo pole (actually a bamboo ruler), and one holding a wooden board (inclinometer) and keeping the lower edge of the board parallel and in line with the bamboo ruler of the measurement.
On the upper side of the board was carved a series of equally spaced lines, which formed a semicircle, with the center of the circle on the side of the board facing the sky, and a straight line perpendicular to both sides of the board was carved with the center of the circle as the starting point.
In the center of the circle of the board was nailed a small nail, on which a small iron ball was suspended by a thin string. The iron ball hangs straight down to the ground by the thin string, which meets the straight line perpendicular to both sides of the board at the center of the circle, forming an angle.
Puzzled, Makarov asked, “What are you doing here? Is this surveying?” A student, concentrating on something in his notebook, heard Makarov’s voice and only then noticed someone approaching.
He turned his attention to Makarov and the others and smiled coyly.
“Sergeant, we’re measuring the horizontal distance between two points.”
Joss asked, “Horizontal distance?”
“Yes. You see it’s a slope, and the direct measurement with this bamboo ruler is the slant distance, and we then get the angle of inclination – the angle between the bamboo ruler and the horizontal ground – with this inclinometer, and those short lines that make up the semicircle are the scale that marks the size of the angle, and by using the slant distance and the angle of inclination we can calculate the horizontal distance.”
“That’s amazing, will that do it?”
“Yes! That’s math.” The student suddenly became exuberant, “Lord Lord is right, math is the key to understanding everything in the world.”
“Did Lord Lord teach you guys that?”
“Yes, the trigonometry piece was taught to us by Lord Lord himself. Count Greiman knows so much!” Speaking of this, several students made faces of adoration.
However, Makarov and the others didn’t know to what trigonometric functions, “Uh…… why do we need to measure this so-called [horizontal distance]?”
“This is the [Orthographic Projection] method that Lord Lord taught us. As an example ……”
The student with the notebook danced with his hands, explaining the principles of maps to the big-headed soldiers.
“You put something right below a light source, and the shadow of that thing on the ground is its orthographic projection. The map we’re going to make uses this method to project some mountains and rivers, houses and roads, fields and forests on the ground onto a horizontal plane, which is replaced by a piece of paper, so this kind of map is also called a flat topographic map.”
Jos scratched his head, “I didn’t see you guys fly to the sky to see the projection.”
The student laughed, “Of course we can’t fly to the sky to see it, we have to measure and draw it bit by bit with the help of those map root points.”
He pointed around, and the soldiers understood what the so-called [Tugen Points] were, it was a long pole erected on the ground with a striking flag tied to it.
“When drawing a floor plan you have to draw the map root points on top of the drawing, and then based on these map root points, the blocks between the points are mapped in detail ……”
After listening to the students for half a day, Makarov and Jos and the others were still in the clouds and could not understand many of the terms.
They have seen the other side has drawn the map, very unfamiliar, it is very different from the maps they have seen before in the officers, those maps they have seen before are like a painting, the mountains, rivers, buildings on it are very graphic, at a glance, but the accuracy of those maps is rather pitiful, after looking at it, they can only have a general understanding of the geographic information displayed on it.
And the maps drawn by the students, how to say, the whole map gives people the feeling – serious, hard …… and bad, all kinds of image drawings are gone, instead of an unknown meaning of the symbols, squares, straight lines and irregular curves ( It seems to be called something like contour lines), but according to the students, the accuracy of the maps they drew far exceeded that of the old maps.
……
Before the sun set, the soldiers escorted the students back to the barracks, carrying a large number of mapping tools, such as right-angle levels, slot levels, right-angles, tablets, tripods, and other strange instruments.
After dinner, they received a new order from battalion headquarters: to suspend the mapping work, and the 1st and 2nd battalions were to begin an attack on Fort Byram tomorrow – a feint, though, and in any case the Kents had to be put under enough pressure to draw the attention of the enemy near Fort Biddle.
The Union troops defending Fort Biddle are not going to last much longer ……
(End of chapter)