[pidge]

Incidentally, there’s actually a map projection where all “great circle” routes (shortest paths on a sphere, ie missile paths) are straight lines. It’s called the gnomonic projection, and it could have been used to illustrate the Russian-overflight issue more clearly.

Although it’s limited to only showing half of a sphere at a time, so it doesn’t solve the problem of illustrating a southern around-the-world route. An azimuthal equidistant projection centered at the launch site or target would work for that.

[cousin_it]

The existence of the gnomonic projection isn't very surprising, as it's just the perspective projection used by all artists to go from a spherical field of view to a flat plane. That way it's also easy to understand why it can't handle more than half of the sphere.

[jacobolus]

To the grandparent poster: A gnomonic projection is not the most useful for these particular maps, because the distances are so long that distortion starts getting out of control.

Better would be some kind of azimuthal projection centered on North Korea (azimuthal equidistant perhaps), with other segments (those not including NK as an endpoint) drawn as the appropriate great circle arcs.