Not sure about Google but on Bing Maps they were definitely messing around with fake images.

Some of the airbases showed some fields where the actual jet bunkers are, and if you zoomed out you could see it was just a copy/paste of a field nearby. Total fakery.

They have stopped doing that since, probably because there is no point with the amount of imagery available today.

And yeah countries like China messing with their map datum is weird. And so easy to compensate that it serves no military purpose.

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Theodores 2 days ago | parent [-]

> And yeah countries like China messing with their map datum is weird. And so easy to compensate that it serves no military purpose.

They have bought into mangled maps and it would be a challenge to update everything for simple lat/lon. It would be easier to get every car in China to drive on the left, for them to change their railway gauge to 7' 1/4" or to move to the Swatch Internet Time standard. Think of all the title deeds, utility maps and everything that you need surveyors for.

As for military purpose, have you ever done any work with the military? Even though every army plays a good ballistics game, they tend not to be mathematicians. I would not want it to be tested, but my hunch is the mangled maps would work extremely well, even though their foes have had decades to do their own map making.

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wkat4242 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> As for military purpose, have you ever done any work with the military?

Haha no, I can't stand them and their hierarchies.

But yeah that was my point, the enemy has their own maps, with their own datums anyway.

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AnthonyMouse 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Think of all the title deeds, utility maps and everything that you need surveyors for.

All you need for this is to know whether the existing number corresponds to the old system or the new system and a piece of code that can convert from one to the other.

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snypher 2 days ago | parent [-]

Well, the old number is 35 feet south of a medium sized pine tree and the new number is 45.1234567, if you can solve for the code we can put Esri out of business.

	▲	wkat4242 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		But that's not how this works. China's map datum uses the same principle, it's just shifted somewhat.