Quick Note on Refining Hexes

I have been playing with hex maps recently and one of the "big things" I was trying to figure out is how people "refine" them from one level of detail to the next. In the back of my mind I remembered some method that I just could not come up with anymore and today I finally found it while browsing the old AD&D "Wilderness Survival Guide" hardcover from 1986. So, as a permanent reminder to myself, here it is:

from Wilderness Survival Guide, page 106

I am not entirely convinced that this is better than the method I've been using (and I've seen others use) which keeps the orientation of the hexes. The tradeoff seems to be that things "fit better" if you change the hex orientation on each level of refinement, meaning there's less "duplictation" between neighboring large-scale hexes. In any case, I'll try both methods for a simple example and we'll see what the results look like when I get done. :-)

Edit: Obviously this only works for individual large-scale hexes. If you try to "tile" things the "surrounding" large-scale hexes will end up with a totally "uneven" number of small-scale hexes.