Okay, first let me say that I like the Xenonauts geoscape form a playability standpoint. Way easier to manage than the old x-com geoscape, and it looks pretty cool too. And I like the game, so forgive me if I sound a little negative here, this is just a bothersome issue to me, and I wanted to voice my opinion and see if anything can be done.
I feel like something is provably wrong with the radar distance calculations and aircraft travel speeds. I am not a map scholar, nor a radar expert, and I encourage you to correct me if I'm horribly wrong, but this is what I'm seeing, and it seems wrong to me. All of my distance calculations were done using Google Earth.
I feel like the radar distances and travel speeds have not been corrected to take account for the whatever map projection was used to create the geoscape for the game.
Example:
Place a base in the middle of Africa. The radar covers a distance from the southern tip of Africa to the northern shore of Poland. This gives the radar detection circle a diameter of ~6,000 miles (~10,000 km). WOW! That's huge! Awesome! We've got some great radar systems here!
So unless Google Earth is playing tricks on me, that means my base in the middle of Alaska with a range of 6,000 miles should be able to cover All of North and Central America, Russia, China, and even Europe (across the north pole! It's not as far as you think). Let's try it!
Hmm, in the game, my Alaska radar station covers... a tiny corner of Russia, a chunk of Canada, and a tiny bit of the west coast of the US. That's... interesting. That's not even close to 6,000 miles. It's more like... maybe 1,500 - 2,500 miles? Now, this is probably more realistic, mind you - if we really had 6000 mile radar coverage, we could pretty much cover the entire planet with 2 radar stations. (The earth is only ~12,000 miles pole-to-pole). That would be silly. But I feel that the wild inconsistency between radar ranges in the two locations is equally silly.
Travel speed suffers from similar issues.
Example:
Distance from UK to Japan: ~5,900 miles
Distance from UK to southern tip of Africa: ~6,200 miles
Try making a base in the UK and dispatching one F-17 to the southern tip of Africa and another to Japan. They don't make it (not enough fuel), but the one going to Africa almost gets there when it has to turn back, and the one bound for Japan is just over halfway. Yet they should be traveling similar distances at similar speeds. Again, I feel like something is wrong.
I know 95% of you probably don't even care. Maybe it's just something map projection nerds care about, I don't know. But I want to save EARTH from aliens. And with the landmass distances being all wonky, it feels less like Earth to me. It's like a weird, bizarro-earth. Really. It's not Earth. Want me to prove it to you? Go find Antarctica in the game. Oh, that's right, IT'S GONE. That's actually an issue worthy of a separate post, but I'll leave it alone for now.
Is there anything that can be done to adjust for these inconsistencies, or is it simply too hard and/or too late to do anything?
If not, can we at least rescue Antarctica from the great Abyss?
Fair enough. I think it would be cool if the radar circles were a bit distorted to account for the actual map distances, but I can see where people who don't understand what's going on would see that as ugly. Besides, I suppose if you changed it, you'd have to deal with droves of people who don't understand what's going on asking questions about the wacky radar circles in the forums, instead of just dealing with one idiot (me) complaining about the inaccuracy of the map. I still say you should bring back Antarctica though. In X-Com, I always liked the decision of whether or not to put a base there. No people to protect, but I'd always be suspicious that the aliens were hiding there, away from all the prying eyes, so I'd routinely send ships over to Antarctica to search for alien bases, and sometimes I'd even put up a little radar outpost base there to make sure the aliens weren't hiding from me out in the icy wasteland.