Norman Vine writes: > Here is some *excellent* global data for a start on this > http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/ > > Here is the home page of a viewer > http://www.andesengineering.com/BlueMarbleViewer/ > > an *unsupported* beta native Win32 port lives at > http://rockfish.net/~nhv/osg/bmv_mingw.tgz > > WARNING THE COMPLETE SET OF DATA FILES IS HUGE > and will require an additional download of approx 70 MB > for the minimal installation and approx 300 meg for the > full data set, which uncompresses to ~2.0 GB > > Note this data is the same resolution as the gtopo30 DEM, 1 km pixels > at 'best' LOD, and as distributed has 5 levels of texture LOD which is > texture mapped onto an unperturbed sphere, this is suitable for distances > of >50 miles or so > > IMHO If you have got the bandwidth > and want a truly *awsome* virtual globe > This is a *must* have
That does look cool. So 1km resolution of the earth is about 2.0 GB uncompressed, which means if we wanted 1m resolution of the earth we'd be looking at about 2000 TB, or 2 of whatever the next unit up is. Assuming you can get a 120GB IDE HD for $120, you'd need to buy about 17,000 of these units to store the whole thing. And that's not taking into consideration the hardware that these drives plug into. Assuming you could plug 4 of these drives into a single PC, you'd need to also purchase about 4200 PC's. Then you'd have to network and power all of this. You'd also need to find enough space, and most importantly, you'd have to have a massive cooling system to keep everything from burning up. And you still wouldn't have nearly the resolution you'd need to do runway markings and taxiway lines and that sort of thing. Our planet still seems pretty big sometimes. :-) Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
