My Star Trek game quest continues: MAPS!

Morrus · Feb 20, 2013

Previously on Morrus' Star Trek game quest: Miniatures for a Star Trek Game? and FASA's Star Trek RPG.

In today's episode, we tackle the problem of star maps. Not hex grids for starship combat (I have tons of those), but actual maps of the Federation, preferably poster sized and on hexes. Like those Traveller maps you can get. I want to be able to use a large map which players can use for navigation.

Google image search reveals a lot of Federation maps of varying quality, but not what I'm looking for. I briefly contemplated building one myself in Hexographer before I realised just how big and tedious a job it was.

Anyone know of anything suitable?

Morrus · Feb 20, 2013

I found this map. Would need to do some work, though!

CarlZog · Feb 20, 2013

This map is all over the web:

I'm pretty sure it's originally from the Star Trek Charts Atlas. Check out these guys' work on expanding that. If you're more interested in strictly TOS universe, there's the old Star Trek Maps. I don't know how readily available either of these old products are on ebay these days.

If you're less concerned about canon, you can also check out the campaign maps for the Star Fleet Universe, which is the original extended universe for Trek, created for the Star Fleet Battles game before any of the movies or later TV shows came out. It's really pretty cool, but it's got a lot of empires, races and cartography that is not acknowledged by later ST stuff.

Morrus · Feb 20, 2013

I managed to put a hex overlap on the above map.

Morrus · Feb 20, 2013

CarlZog said:
If you're less concerned about canon,

Far from it - the Star Trek RPG is very non-canon. They designed it all before TNG started, and TNG pretty much contradicted everything FASA did.

CarlZog · Feb 20, 2013

That's a lot of hexes! What's the movement scale you're hoping to use with this?

EDIT: Didn't see the scale in the corner. Two light-years per hex.

CarlZog · Feb 20, 2013

Morrus said:
Far from it - the Star Trek RPG is very non-canon. They designed it all before TNG started, and TNG pretty much contradicted everything FASA did.

Yeah, it contradicted everything SFB did too. Frankly, I think both FASA's and SFB's are better than a lot of the disjointed universe details that were cobbled together in the wake of TNG.

Morrus · Feb 20, 2013

Central Federation area cropped and then enlarged. I just printed it to fill a single sheet of paper and it looks pretty good!

Morrus · Feb 20, 2013

CarlZog said:
That's a lot of hexes! What's the movement scale you're hoping to use with this?

EDIT: Didn't see the scale in the corner. Two light-years per hex.

Yeah. I figured Alpha Centauri was 2 hexes away from Earth/Sol, and I know it's 4 light years away. I doubt it'll hold up accurately for some known stars on there, but it'll do!

Morrus · Feb 20, 2013

One problem this map has is that it doesn't have FASA's "The Triangle" area between the Fed/Rom/Kling borders. That was always the best campaign location.