Impressive topo & orthophotos of Belgium

[McAuliffe]

Seems that finally Western Europe is catching up with putting at disposal orthophoto's and on-line topo maps. Here are some links for Belgium:

The northern part (=Flanders) can be viewed from the sky and includes also low scale topomaps.You need Bill's browser though.

Orthophotos of Flanders

You can look up location by city, street and even housenumber (click ).

A green dot will then appear on the general map. Click on magnifying icon and keep map centered around green dot until you're at...1/5.000 or so. Automatically orthophoto will appear. If you wish, you can switch topolayer on to see the topomap as a transparent over the picture. (click )

For the less developed part of Belgium, (yes, the Walloons )we do not have yet this toy, but there is another neat site, showing topomaps from back to 1879 and even some older ones . If you're lucky you can find some maps of 1924 on 1/20.000 scale, which should reflect pretty much the pre-war era. Again, MSIE gives most stable results. You need also to download a couple of plug-ins: MrSid and DjVu.

The Cartographic Patrimonium of Wallonia

Only French version is available, but site is pretty much self explanatory. Look up the location in the index. A scanned version of some vintage map will show. Maps of various dates are available for the same place, however no recent ones! Good you don't need them.

You can open a separate frame to enlarge the display. Some of these maps are very interesting and due to the high resolution you can zoom in very close to study the details.

Hope it is of any help for those that still design scenarios for WETO.

[simovitch]

There is alot of good stuff at these sites, thanks McAuliffe. I'm going to bookmark it in anticipation of CMX2.

Also UC Berkeley has most of the 1944 1:50000 maps of France and Belgium in storage. One of these days I need to call in there and make some copies.