Adventures in Space Mapping, Dispensing with Reality

[icosahedron]

No matter what you do, you have a fundamental problem in representing 3 dimensional space on a 2 dimensional map. I feel that tying the map view to the constellations as viewed from the Earth simply adds another layer of unreality.

Hai-Etlik's projection is one way of going about it, but in all such maps the difficulty arises not in measuring the distance of each star from the Earth, but in measuring the distances of stars from each other.

The only explanation of 3D to 2D compression I've seen that makes any sense is the one I heard mooted for Traveller - basically it said that 3D space is like a crumpled up ball of paper and the 2D jumpspace map is simply 3D space 'opened out'. The distances between stars in Jump space is a related only by the random folds of space and bears little relation to the 3D distances - especially as those distances increase.

Any other attempt at relating 3D space to a 2D map is probably doomed to failure.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't attempt it.

[wormspeaker]

Any other attempt at relating 3D space to a 2D map is probably doomed to failure.

I would say that it depends on the scale that you are representing. Displaying an entire spiral galaxy should not be a problem since they are generally fairly flat and wide. So if you are looking down from galactic north you would see a disc that is something like 100,000 light years in diameter and only 1,000 light years in depth. (a ratio of 1:100) So you could conceivably notate stars of interest with their distance from the galactic ecliptic (positive or negative) if you needed to, but otherwise the depth that the star is at is not really as important at this scale as its distance from the galactic center.

However if you are trying to represent a cubic area of space, then yeah, you run into a lot of problems trying to display a field that is just as deep as it is wide.