alt Hacker NewsYeah, that's my thoughts as well. The answer is literally in the article:
> Mercator useful for sailing
This is the only correct answer, and everything else is unscientific nonsense. It hasn't been replaced because... it just hasn't. Mercator + knots + nautical miles is a system that is extremely useful for navigation. Since we aren't sailing ships around a whole lot anymore, a lot of teachers forget to mention the relationship between the three. I imagine that was more common knowledge back in the day.
That being said, I do like the new proposed projection for how we use maps today. I think another useful tool would simply be overlay maps.
Replies
Mercator is also useful for tiled maps, which is why web Mercator is a standard. The tiles always have nice north/south and east/west bounds and there is no difference in rendering depending on longitude or latitude. For software maps the better approach, as done by Google, is just to postprocess the Mercator tiles into a sphere at rendering time if the user is zoomed out enough.
Why not just use KM? We should reduce the number of units of measure in 2026.
> Mercator useful for sailing+
It is also used by the military (or at least NATO). They use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_...
While most of that system is a way to tag coordinates that are "simpler" than just latitude and longitude to a position, it's underlying system is also the Mercator projection. And some properties of Mercator, e.g. that it is angle-correct. So you can use UTM e.g. in Elint for direction finding.
It's not distance or area correct, but for normal infantry this is meaningless, since this only shows on large scales, but not the slow scales of infantry.