Ok Joe. Thanks for the explanation.

You could do the same thing in GIMP, using Select all, and then shrink the selection by 2 pixels and do a Crop to selection.

Oh you won't get any practical help until after 20 June, when I hand everything over for MD ;)

But after that I have breathing space to be more generous.

Hi Everyone! :D

In this week's Live Mapping session tomorrow (Thursday 24 June) Ralf will be giving us a rundown of how to build our own star ships using the Starship Deckplan issue of the 2007 Cartographer's Annual.

(No Cosmographer required!)

All are welcome to come along and join in with questions and suggestions :)

Thanks Daisho :)

If you think of more, be sure to add them as a new comment or I might not see them.

@ArgoForg - On point 3, you can use Resize Drawing Area in the File menu right now if that is still an issue for a map you are working on.

Ok. I think that will probably be a bit too small to look good.

I've trimmed it to work as a symbol, but I'm not sure it will look all that great on a background that is different to the one it began its life on, but if it works it works, and if not, it doesn't.

And there I was thinking it might be some kind of colour thing...

Try playing with the colour of the grass and soil. I think the grass is a bit too blue, and both the grass and the soil are a bit too colourful. That's not the same as too pale. The colour is just a bit too intense.

I don't think the badges would look silly without a station name, unless this wasn't the only station in existence.

The resources required to build such a thing would make it unlikely that there would be more than one.

The first thing would be to consider the power that created this monster - and it would really have to be a large and powerful country, or even a united world. On a smaller scale (and as an example) Ocean vessels from the UK always have an "HMS" prefix, which is the acronym for His/Her Majesty's Ship. So you have HMS Victory, HMS Intrepid, etc. SS used by America stands for Sailing Ship.

After the political/royal prefix the name itself can be anything at all. Ocean vessels of the past were usually named with rather impressive names like Victory, Intrepid, Explorer, etc. I'm not sure why that should be, but they certainly sound a lot more serious than a ship called Lucy, or Sue, or Georgina. And that's the other thing! Most ships are for some reason either impressive or female, and referred to usually in the third person as "She". Well, they are in the UK ;)

If you are having trouble with names here is a handy random generator you could use.

The other thing to remember about names is that after a while they do one of two things. No matter how impressive sounding a name is, or how average they are, with something like this the fame of the name can go either way. Even if you call it HMCS Freddie, if the station becomes famous for doing great and wonderful things it will likely be known affectionately as "The Freddie". If there is a lot of evil done in it's name it will probably lose it's actual name and just be known as any kind of expletive word with "The" tacked onto the front end.

This is unofficially known as Transparency Acne, and is an artefact caused by the rendering engine when it fails to recognise pixels in the upper sheet that happen to be exactly the same colour as the underlying pixels.

This causes little virtual holes (holes) in the upper sheet, and effects are applied around the edge of each of these holes. In this example the bevel is being applied, resulting in this pitted effect.

Add a new sheet just underneath the upper sheet and copy the the polygons from the upper sheet onto it, then hide everything except the new sheet and use the Change Properties tool to make the new polygons on the underlying sheet a solid fill and some colour that you can be fairly sure isn't included in the texture. Colour 227 is a good one.

Hi Everyone :)

In this week's Live Mapping session (Thursday 8 July) Ralf has invited us all to: "...get (at least) our feet wet with the latest Annual issue..."

All are welcome to come along and watch - maybe comment and ask questions if you want to know more.

Just click the video link above and follow the bottom right hand corner link to the YouTube page to book a reminder (it vanishes pretty fast so be quick with that second click).