Chapter 286: Mapping the Territory

Chapter 286: Mapping the Territory

George lay on the grass, idly swinging a foxtail grass between his teeth, surrounded by a few soldiers like himself, lazily basking in the sun.

The sunlight was a bit dazzling. Squinting his eyes, George watched several figures bustling about in the distance.

“Hey! Tom, what’s with the higher-ups? It’s just a map, do they really need to make such a fuss?”

“George!”

Before George could finish, a loud roar came from afar.

Hearing this voice, the soldiers sprung up from the ground like clockwork, quickly standing at attention.

“Caught you slacking off again, you rascals!”

Their sergeant, Makarov, thundered angrily from behind them.

George and his comrades stood rigidly, eyes fixed forward, silently lamenting their bad luck at being caught red-handed by the sergeant.

The sergeant marched up to them, scolding loudly, “Don’t you understand? This isn’t Alda or Baylding, but Emden, previously a territory of the Kent family. Who knows if some fanatics loyal to the usurper might suddenly appear. What then?”

Makarov gave them a harsh reprimand.

“In such a place, vigilance is paramount. If even a single hair of the lord’s precious students is harmed, you’ll answer to me, and I’ll answer to Captain Bryce. Got it?”

“Yes!” George and his comrades responded loudly, their voices tinged with a hint of distress.

“Each of you will write a report tonight!”

“Yes!” They replied, their voices filled with a sense of doom.

The “precious students” Makarov mentioned were the figures busily working in the distance, all from Weiss Academy.

A week ago, their platoon leader was transferred to the staff headquarters, and the new platoon leader, previously working at the staff headquarters, took over—a part of Schroeder’s rotational system. Each staff officer was required to periodically work with frontline units, gaining practical combat and operational experience to avoid the pitfall of being armchair strategists.

“Was it the lord who taught you this?”

“Yes, the lord personally taught us trigonometry. Count Grayman knows so much!” The students all looked up in admiration.

However, Makarov and the others had no idea what trigonometry was. “Uh... but why do you need to measure this so-called ‘horizontal distance’?”

“This is the ‘orthographic projection’ method taught by the lord. For instance...”

The student with the notebook enthusiastically explained the principles of mapmaking to the soldiers.

“If you place an object directly under a light source, the shadow it casts on the ground is its orthographic projection. The maps we are drawing use this method to project features like mountains, rivers, houses, roads, fields, and forests onto a horizontal plane, which is represented by a piece of paper. Hence, these maps are also known as ‘planimetric maps.’”

George scratched his head, “I haven’t seen you guys flying up to see the projection, though.”

The student laughed, “Of course, we can’t fly up there. We rely on measuring and drawing bit by bit using these reference points.”

He pointed around, and the soldiers understood what the ‘reference points’ meant—these were the poles erected on the ground, adorned with conspicuous flags.

“To draw a planimetric map, we first plot these reference points on the paper. Then, based on these points, we meticulously map out the areas between them...”

After listening to the students for a while, Makarov and George were still confused. Many terms were beyond their understanding.

They had seen the maps drawn by the students, which were unfamiliar. Unlike the picturesque maps they were used to, which depicted mountains, rivers, and buildings vividly and were easy to understand, these new maps had a sense of seriousness, rigidity, and complexity. The usual illustrative drawings were replaced with symbols, squares, straight lines, and irregular curves (apparently called ‘contour lines’). However, according to the students, these new maps were far more accurate than the old ones.

...

Before the sun set, the soldiers escorted the students back to their barracks, carrying a plethora of surveying tools, including theodolites, leveling instruments, right angle viewers, planks, tripods, and other strange devices.

After dinner, they received new orders from the camp: to temporarily suspend the surveying work. The first and second battalions were to commence a feint attack on Bayland Castle the next day. It was merely a diversion to apply sufficient pressure on the Kent family and attract the attention of the enemy forces near Fort Bidou.

The joint forces defending Fort Bidou were barely holding on...

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