Near-Solar Space

[bartmoss]

In a way I have found that science fiction was a lot more fun 50 years ago when the cosm was still a big unknown. You know, back when we could still dream about FTL and exotic aliens two worlds over.

At least some uncertainties remain, and it's not only brown dwarfs. I know that we're getting pretty good about pinpointing stars but there's still a lot of error margin in those positions.

Now, as for jump routes: I haven't really decided on my FTL mechanics yet. I definitely will go with a Hyperspace of sorts, and obviously non-free movement. FTL drives can also be used for intra-system "microjumps", and a tentative speed would be 0.5 - 1.5 ly/day. The later depends a LOT on how windy the routes will end up, of course.

[bartmoss]

More stars, I stopped when I hit the 300 mark.

starchart-relative-sample-03.pngmap-try2-0016.png

[Hungry Donner]

Ah ha! This is where the high definition images are so I can actually read them!

It's fascinating to see how a difference in perception results in very different maps. In my setting Eta Cassiopeiae and Earth are considered close neighbors, in yours you can't even get thar from here This does bring in the sharp forcus the fact that I need to nail down the specifics of travel however.

It's a shame these pictures aren't searchable. I suppose a PDF (or maybe an SVG?) would allow that but I'm guessing they wouldn't be easy to set up.

[bartmoss]

Sure, I can do PDFs:

map-try2.pdf

And:

starchart.pdf

[Hungry Donner]

Very cool, thanks!

I guess that was easier than I expected

[bartmoss]

Yeah, the program I use for the "flowchart" can export to pdf directly and for all other program,s well, there's pdfcreator.

[bartmoss]

Managed to connect one of the minor "clusters", you'll see that the arm in the upper left of the chart has expanded a lot:

starchart-017.pdf

The "normal" map is getting more and more confusing, this is still with only 1/8th of the stars so I wonder how big this map's actual utility will be in the long run...

Print map-try2-017.pdf

[Hungry Donner]

It should get interesting as you expand as the number of known red dwarfs and brown dwarfs will decrease rapidly. Obviously at these distances you're free to make them yourself wherever you want but then the number of stars will increase even further.What is your ultimate scope in term of distances?

[bartmoss]

The list I have is about ~75 light years, or about 2600 stars. I now have about 400 of those on my map, currently working through those at about 35 light years. Beyond 75 light years I will just start making up stars; mapping real world stars is becoming fairly tedious already.

[cfds]

What dataset are you using? And does a machine readable version exist?