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Re:H3: A Hexagonal Hierarchical Geospatial Indexing System by dvanduzer on Friday January 12, 2018 @04:13PM (#16136352)
See sibling post for links, but the short answer: you can use 12 pentagons, strategically interspersed. Like a (soccer) football.

edit: Oops, that only explains the tiling. For explanations of how the hierarchy descends, Dr. Sahr produced some GIFs that give a little bit of an overview of how the resolutions overlay: http://webpages.sou.edu/~sahrk/dgg/images/topogif/topogif.ht...

Re:H3: A Hexagonal Hierarchical Geospatial Indexing System by scdoshi on Friday January 12, 2018 @05:32PM (#16136936)
Thanks for that link.

Also found this which goes into some more detailed comparison with rectangular grids:

https://github.com/uber/h3/blob/master/docs/doxyfiles/usecas...