Vintage AAA Materials?

[Kauri]

If the Earth was flat would this make our map puzzling easier? (Dumb questions deserve dumb answers.)

Off-topic:

Questions that seem dumb may actually be deeper than the asker anticipated. Feel free to ignore the below answer if you're not mathematically inclined, or if you already know all this...

A flat Earth, or a round Earth, or really any shaped Earth that is a 2-dimensional manifold (possibly with boundary) in the sense of geometry/topology, such as a torus or a "dog saddle" shape, locally "looks like" Euclidean 2-space. I.e., for any sufficiently small subset of a surface that's a manifold, there's a continuous map, whose inverse is also continuous, between a subset of a flat surface and this subset of the original surface. (This map is called a homeomorphism, if you're curious.)

However, the sphere and the plane are not isometric (isometric means that this homeomorphism map also preserves angles and distances). The standard Mercator projection (sometimes called stereographic projection) between the sphere and the plane is conformal, so it preserves angles and directions, but it does not preserve distances, which is where one major difficulty in mapping the globe comes from.

(Yes I've been answering too many mathematics homework questions recently. But I thought your question was actually quite interesting and definitely worth answering from a mathematical point of view. )

End of digression...