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  1. #10
    Guild Journeyer
    Join Date
    Feb 2009
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    SC
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    Considering the expected distribution of stars by mass, it would be exceptionally unlikely that there aren't at least a hundred undiscovered brown dwarf stars on a map of this scale. We just can't detect them very far from Earth at the moment. (We discover them at the moment almost exclusively by the influence they have over the stars that we can see.)
    I was writing some code to generate a starmap/jumpmap for a strategy game I was working on and I ran into a similar problem with the distances and linking groups of stars while keeping a relatively tree shaped distribution. I ended up making the maximum distance of a jump link a function of the masses of the stars to be linked.

    So two high mass stars would have a maximum distance between them for a jump link much larger than a high mass star and a low mass star, and much much longer than two low mass stars.

    I never settled on exactly what the distances would be, I generated hundreds of random maps testing out different parameters. The last time I was working on it, I was leaning towards a function/algorithm that made low mass stars have only 1 to 4 links of very short distance and high mass stars many many links with greater distances. Which gave natural choke points/trade routes between the high mass stars and either long and cumbersome routes to avoid those choke points using the low mass stars. I should check to see if I still have the code around here somewhere.

    Edit: I can't seem to find the code for the most recent version of the stuff I was working on, but here are a few screen shots of an early version of the software.
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    Last edited by wormspeaker; 04-27-2011 at 12:19 PM. Reason: Added Screen Shots
    “Maps encourage boldness. They're like cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible.”
    -Mark Jenkins

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