ggplot of Dymaxion/Airocean (icosahedral) map projection

Question

I think R. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map is one of the most beautiful map projections ever devised:

I was playing with the neat projections in mapproj, which works great with ggplot, but it doesn't look like there are any projections for this. Is there a nice ggplot way to do this?

Answer 1

One of the few grid systems which uses Fuller's Dymaxion, but as a whole sphere and not cut up, is Prof Kevin Sahr's excellent DGGRID software, see previous discussion at:

Discrete Global Grid in R

The closest I've found to code which can produce Fuller's Dymaxion is at:

http://emergentweirdness.blogspot.com/2012/03/dymaxion-conversion.html

But nothing that provides both the conversion to the projection + the cutout template!

Answer 2

I'm afraid it won't plot the projections, but my package dggridR wraps DGGRID to project points on to the Fuller projections. You may find this useful if you were interested in spatial analysis more than just plotting. Though the package does provide facilities for plotting the resultant hexagons/triangles of the Fuller projection back onto a more standard projection.