Comment by chippiewill
11 hours ago
In the UK there's a standard grid used for local-only mapping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey_National_Grid
It's a transverse mercator projection rather than a mercator as you might often see because it minimises distortion over the UK as a whole which means that the distortion is as you move away from the meridian, rather than as you move away from the equator (with a regular mercator I think all points have the grid aligned with true North)
This grid is setup such that it's origin is not on the prime meridian (at Greenwich), but 2deg west so only points on the line 2deg west are aligned with true north.
One of the advantages of doing this seemingly weird projection is that you can treat "local" maps (for some definition of local) as flat rectangular grids without introducing a lot of errors: drawing straight lines between two points, measuring the distance / angle between them, etc., just by dealing with a flat piece of paper. VERY convenient, but the farther you are from the center of the projection, the higher the errors that are introduced.
In short, you can treat the local geometry as Euclidean.
Or, to put it simply, the shape of the Earth can be considered flat for local mapping purposes.
If grid north and true north are the same everywhere, it would be proof the entire Earth is flat.
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