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So, this projection actually won and award because it allegedly reflects most accurately both the relative sizes of the continents and the distances between them, and it accomplishes that by angling continents away from one another.  But ... wait a minute, that's what would actually happen on an FE, where the Southern "Hemisphere" would in fact angle away more than on a globe.  But, then, lo and behold, you still have the same problem here that you attribute to FE, since the distance between Santiago and Auckland is much greater than that between Santiago and LA.  In point of fact, it's well docuмented that there are some extremely quick jet streams near Antarctica that can increase air speed by several hundred MPH.

Speaking of projections, this here presents some very solid evidence in favor of FE.  Let's look at an Azimuthal Equidistant Projection centered on the so-called "South Pole".




You'll notice that as you get farther from the center point, they tend to get stretched wider, so most of the Northern "Hemisphere" becomes practically unrecognizable, where North America and Asia look nothing whatsoever like the continent shapes we're used to on Mercator.

But now let's look at an Azimuthal Equidistant centered on the North Pole.



So, apart from Antarctica, somehow South America, Africa, and Australia still retain their very familiar shapes.  How can you have that narrow Southern tip of South America, since you'd expect it to widen dramatically?  Africa you'd expect to look like a square, with the Southern half as wide as the Northern.

And yet ... everything except Antarctica is completely recognizable.

Well, that's because this actually reflects much closer to reality.  If it didn't, you'd see much more distortion.

Well, you might say, South America, Africa, and Australia are much bigger than they should be.  Not so fast.  Gall-Peters produced a projection which they claim accurately represents the actual sizes of the continents, whereas the Mercator, they say, significantly shrunk those continents due to its having been Norther-Hemisphere centric or focused.



Continent sizes are in fact really close to what's on that Azimuthal North Pole Equidistant map above.

So, for the accurate "ball" model, we're at the mercy of the government agencies, and even they admit that they stitched together various linear paths of satellites, and you can see signs of this on the Google Earth model.