Milky Way Galaxy

[bartmoss]

I've been thinking about this lately, especially about the suggestions to make this map somehow 3d, and I just can't come up with a workable solution. Indeed, I have arrived at a crisis point in my universe building: The space-volume covered by this map should contain several dozen millions of stellar systems. That's not only way too many to map, it makes micro-managing the setting utterly impossible.

I could drastically decrease the volume of the setting; a sphere of roughly 100 light years (averaging 1200 stars) should be fairly managable. Of course, this loses any sort of "galactic empire" feeling.

I could just do what I do now, live in an imperfect fictional world and just map "important" systems, then treat all the other systems with narrator's fiat. The downside is that I won't be able to provide "complete" maps of the setting.

I could "cheat". Traveller quite successfully used abstract 2d maps. Some other settings use "jump lane maps" of one sort or another. The problem with this is that it's hardly "realistic" at all.

I am a bit stumped. I guess I#d like a "complete" map that is "realistic", and a "galactic empire" type setting, and I just can't work out how to combine the three.

Anybody got any smart ideas, or even just opinions on a good solution?

[barrataria]

I think you and I are going to outlive our respective sci-fi mapping projects! And mine foundered on similar problems. I ended up working with Traveller-style quadrant maps but found some CC3/Cosmographer templates I like too. And ended up running a d6 Star Wars game when I realized I liked that universe better anyway. Which brings me to...

I could just do what I do now, live in an imperfect fictional world and just map "important" systems, then treat all the other systems with narrator's fiat. The downside is that I won't be able to provide "complete" maps of the setting.

Reading this thread and others here made me appreciate the Traveller flat maps. But as I said I ended up back with Star Wars anyway, and conveniently enough they just released a fantastic atlas. Which does just what you say, including "important systems" on the galactic map. I pasted that into my CC3 and hotlinked to zoomed images of quadrants of the galaxy, and then hotlinked to smaller maps of various "important" sectors. Which in SW isn't saying much because the sectors are composed of jillions of systems, many of which are assumed to be uninhabited.

SciFi mapping has made me acknowledge the limitatiions of human knowledge and more importantly human ability to express a giant universe. Hand-waving may be lazy, but it's sure fun.