Maps & Navigation
Skills first — satellites second
GPS is fragile: batteries die, screens crack, signals bounce off canyons and vanish under heavy tree cover — and in a real disruption the constellation itself may not be on your side. The skills in this section need a ten-dollar baseplate compass and the sky. People crossed continents with less. Learn them before you need them.
Map packs: what ships now, what comes later
This section ships its skills today and documents its map-data tiers honestly. The heavier digital-map layers are later media-pack work — when they arrive they will simply appear here. Nothing below is a promise of features that pretend to exist.
The three tiers
Tier 1 — Paper & compass Bundled now
- Adds: map reading, taking and following bearings, declination handling, orienting a map to the terrain.
- Celestial fallback for days without any map at all.
- Knots to rig tarps, lines, and loads.
- Works from a printed page in a plastic sleeve.
Tier 2 — State raster packs Arrives with the media pack
- Adds: offline topographic map images of your home state as local tile files.
- Scrollable and zoomable in the browser, fully file://-native.
- Roughly 1–5 GB per state depending on detail level.
- Ships when the map-tile portion of the media pack lands.
Tier 3 — Server vector streaming Needs network mode
- Adds: smooth full-detail vector maps streamed from your own home server.
- Nation-scale coverage plus USGS topo quads, served locally.
- Largest footprint (tens of gigabytes) — lives on the storage drive, not the USB stick.
- Only reachable when BreakGlass runs in server mode at home.
Phones count too
A phone with maps stored before you leave is a legitimate navigation tool — it just should never be your only one. Two free apps do this well and both work with every radio off:
- OsmAnd — downloads country or state vector maps; works offline including search and routing.
- Organic Maps — same idea, simpler interface; offline search and turn-by-turn.
The rule either way: download the region while you still have Wi-Fi, carry a power bank, and keep the compass skills above sharp for the moment the screen goes dark.