Minor update - made the spiral arm more "wispy", added some stars, moved a few labels about.
mearrin69: Thanks - if this looks Traveller-y, then I am definitely headed into the right direction. The universe "behind" this map is very "old school" science fiction. As for the dead region: Good question! Think of it as a Sargasso of space. Its extent or cause are unknown. Those ships that go in to find out never return. There's no "FTL radio", so there was no distress calls, no news or messages from this region that might tell us what happened.
The dotted circles emanating from Terra are each 500ly radius. The Terran colonial empire reached out to about 1000light years when the dead region appeared; Home, the capital world of the Republic, was one of the most distant human colonies. With two thirds of the human colonies in the dead region this first interstellar nation collapsed. The outlaying, younger colonies, fought among themselves and many collapsed when interstellar trade stopped and civil war spread. It took a while for new interstellar nations to rise. They do fight among themselves alot and generally have better things to do than to send ships on suicide missions towards Terra. All of the nations do maintain a few listening posts to monitor radio channels, but so far nobody has found anything. For all mankind knows, the dead region is truly and completely dead. The dead region isn't expanding or otherwise actively dangerous as long as one stays outside, so people have sort of moved on with their lives. After all, there's plenty of Milky Way left.
I like the style as well as the clarity of this map. I anticipate the next version! Thanks for sharing (and getting me thinking about a different way to map)...
Thanks guys! mearrin69, the background is still being worked on - I never draw maps as standalone projects, they're all part of worlds I build. This, my sci-fi type universe, is currently in its second iteration. I am up to about 2800 AD in the timeline, and there's so much left to do.
Next minor update: Added a legend and a whole lot of star systems. Naming them took up way more time than I had thought. The "other worlds" are "notable worlds", that is, I don't intend for this map to show each and every inhabited system, let alone every star in the galaxy. I'll see how far I can go with adding named colonies before it becomes ugly and unwieldy.
Minor Update again.
- Moved Sword Worlds, to be more consistent with the universe's history
- Added a whole bunch of labels
- Added the two pulsars that should be on this map (I think they're the only ones in the covered volume of space)
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