Mapping Kobol

When writing a novel about events that span an entire planet, it helps to have a solid concept of where everything is so you can keep it straight.  A map was needed.

I knew I'd have to draw one, so I pored over the latter season one/early season two episodes of BSG, looking for space shots of Kobol.  They were all of the same shot, displaying the same portions of the same continents:

With a sufficiently large screenshot of Kobol, I opened up Photoshop Elements and tweaked the hues to try and make the landmasses stand out.  Then I traced over them:

Obviously, that only gives me about a third of the planet.  Since I would need a full Mercator-type map of the planet, I needed to distort the lines I traced and then BS stuff on the other side of the world.  I don't have any intermediate versions of Kobol, so here's the final map (click it for a huge version):

(The actual nations themselves are in the bolder colors; the territories allocated to the nations by the gods later on are more pale.)

Mountains, desert, islands ... much of it based on the shot of Kobol from the show.  Only three continents to worry about with names I took from ancient Greek maps I found online and elsewhere: Galatia (the primary continent and home to the original Twelve Tribes), Scythia in the south and Illyria on the other side.  Most of the cities, oceans, seas, mountain ranges, etc., also came from those old maps.

Also, note "Theonpolis" in the northwestern part of Galatia, within the Capricorn nation.  If you speak Greek, you may have already figured it out, but "Theonpolis" means "City of the Gods."  Why did I locate the City of the Gods there?  Well, Chief Tyrol had a line in one of those Kobol-centric episodes where he mentioned the ruins being located in the north-northwestern part of the continent.  Plus, since the camera seems to focus on that part of the planet, it made sense.  (And that's about where Vancouver kind of is, too.)

Lastly, just a thing of interest, I made this time zone map of Kobol, too, since I occasionally needed to know what time of day it would be when events were transpiring elsewhere.  (The shape of the continents changed after I made this time zone map.)

(In case you're wondering, I've redacted some of the place names on these maps to preserve a measure of surprise.)

I made other maps for other parts of the book, but this is the first one I did for the first portion of LoK.