I made a Galactic Neighbourhood map for space-based games

Lanefan said:

The universe is in 3 dimensions (that we know of); unfortunately your map and all the other maps really only show two. So, what's needed with each star name is a positive or negative number indicating its "altitude" in parsecs or hexes or light years above or below an arbitrary plane that goes through Sol and parallels the main plane of the Milky Way.

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That was one of my first thoughts, as well, when I looked at the maps in this thread.

It also reminds me of something that was discussed in the thread about 'The Last Jedi': Since in the Star Wars universe, faster-than-light-travel requires finding a 'safe' path around celestial bodies, wouldn't it be easiest to make two jumps: one far out from the ecliptic of the (presumably spiral type, i.e. comparably 'flat') galaxy, and the second back in? Using that approach there should be a minimum of intervening obstacles.

Yep.* Kind of like how international flights don’t necessarily travel in a straight line.

Zap “up” out of the plane, zap “down” in the vicinity of the target destination.





* Depending on how achieving FTL is described in the setting, of course.

Thomas Bowman said:

A smaller scale map would have more varied environments. Take for example the Star Wars galaxy. In all the movies of Star Wars you've ever saw, was there ever an occasion for somebody to wear a space suit? Was there ever a planet who's atmosphere was poisonous to humans, and which required special gear to survive on? All Star Wars planets we've ever seen have a few things in common:
1) Breathable Atmospheres
2) Gravity close to that of Earth
3) A day that is more or less the same length as an Earth day.

There is a plausible way to explain this. If you map is the entire galaxy, there are 100 billion stars in our Galaxy, roughly about ten stars for every human living on planet Earth today and then some, if a planet doesn't have the above three properties, it is not on the Galactic Map If the Galaxy is 50,000 light years in radius, and if you made a map that was 100 squares by 100 squares of the Galaxy, Each square would be 1000 light years on a side. Now remember that map I showed you, it was 50 stars within a 5 parsec radius or a 16 light year radius, 1000 light years is 60 times as big with 216000 times the volume and about 10,800,000 star systems. Now If you are going to pick one planet out of 10.8 million, wouldn't you pick one that was pretty close to Earthlike? You wouldn't pick a vacuum world or a world with a poisonous atmosphere, this would be the best world for human habitation out of almost 11 million! It seems that a Galactic Map would feature planets that are all pretty similar to Earth.

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Well, then that wouldn’t be a map of the structures of the real galaxy then, would it?

I’m not really clear on where this is going. Are you trying to persuade me to make an entirely different map? That’s not on the cards, I’m afraid.

Morrus said:

Well, then that wouldn’t be a map of the structures of the real galaxy then, would it?

I’m not really clear on where this is going. Are you trying to persuade me to make an entirely different map? That’s not on the cards, I’m afraid.

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Just trying to get your thoughts on the matter. A typical Traveller map has a scale of one hex per parsec. the problem is, its two dimensional. if I wanted to have a three dimensional map, I think I could go out to a 20 parsec radius, it would have about 3000+ star systems, you probably could not make a meaningful map of this, so you do what the 2300 RPG game does, have a near star list with x, y, z coordinates and a distance formula to determine the distance between any two stars, there is a limit to how far you go out before the number of stars becomes unmanageable. I guess you could map out the structures, and link a bunch of smaller scale maps together and map a corridor between them, this basically shows the star systems you pass when going from one location to another, you could call it a trade route map or something like that.

I think one of the dangers of trying to start a game (or fictional universe in general) in local space (er, local, relatively speaking) is that we keep learning more and more about it which kinda negates the possibility of there being habitable planets. At least ones humans could live on.

Like say, Epsilon Eridani was a popular choice to put one, because its star is close to our own. But almost certainly not from what we now know. (Not to mention its age also makes it a poor choice). Or Tau Ceti, which apparently has two planets in its habitable zone, but both likely much too big to be inhabited by humans. There seems to be a lot more Super-Earths in the galaxy than Earths

As neat as maps like this are, I think we might need to go to vaguer maps on a larger, simply so we aren't contradicted in the near future.

trancejeremy said:

There seems to be a lot more Super-Earths in the galaxy than Earths

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Well, that we can see. Large planets are easier to see than small ones. As our technology improves, the more smaller exoplanets we’ll start to see.

I think the idea of a Galaxy spanning Empire is impractical, and a setting which covers an entire Galaxy like the Star Wars RPG, was thought up by people who had little idea of how large a Galaxy typically is, and in a movie such as The Force Awakens has some inconsistencies to it. Remember Coruscant?

That was the capital of the Old Republic and the Empire. The New Republic had a bunch of planets that Starkiller base destroyed, and that all by itself was enough to topple the New Republic and leave only the Resistance to fight the First Order. Forgive me if it does seem to me that the screenwriters of the Movie didn't seem to know about the scale of a Galaxy. Galaxies have hundreds of billions of stars. The United Federation of Planets was a more realistic interstellar government as it occupied only a small part of the Galaxy. My question is simply this: Why do people need a Galactic setting when something much smaller would give you plenty of planets to adventure in. A Galaxy is simply mind-numbingly large. Also how exactly did Starkiller Base get turned into a star? It was certainly not a normal star, as stars don't come that small unless they are white dwarfs.

Star Wars is space fantasy, not science. If you don't buy into that premise, you're probably not going to get much out of it. But you're on forum for tabletop RPGs, so I'm gonna guess you're generally OK with fantasy.

Morrus said:

Star Wars is space fantasy, not science. If you don't buy into that premise, you're probably not going to get much out of it. But you're on forum for tabletop RPGs, so I'm gonna guess you're generally OK with fantasy.

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Sometimes I just like to be a smart Alec, but sometimes they really push it with the dumbing down of science, you have to admit that. Stars are a lot bigger than planets, if you didn't know that, then you might buy into the notion of a planet turning into a star. I also think it was interesting how totally unprepared the Republic was in governing a galaxy, if it could be taken out so easily by the Starkiller base. I am a fan of science fiction, and I also know something about the science behind the science fiction, I've watched shows such as Cosmos, and I know that galaxies are really really huge! I think you can do a galactic map, but you got to realize that you are not going to map everything in it. What you want to do is map the location of the key worlds that are important to your campaign, and you basically have to ignore the millions of star systems that are not shown in each map hex. You are helped by the fact that the chances of getting all the variables right to have a life sustaining planet are very small, so you end up passing over a lot of non-life sustaining planets to get to those garden worlds.

In a Galactic Campaign, I think the first assumption to make is that people have been traveling in space for a very long time Asimov's Foundation Series was in a Galaxy that had been settled for at least 12,000 years, the planets that supported human life were deliberately engineered that way through terraforming, that on the face of it is not an unrealistic scenario considering the Fermi Paradox and all of that. Robots were neatly set aside in the Robot Novels. So the Foundation Series was set in a Galaxy without robots and aliens for the most part.

All the maps here are cool. They are also eyeball-benders. (Space is BIG!)

I'm trying to compile a list of all stars out to 50 LY from Terra, and all known exoplanets to the same distance.
What sites are good to keep an eye on?

(Future headache: use Traveler: Scouts and 2300AD to reverse-engineer the rest of each star system from the IRL-known facts.
And my fingers hurt too when I think about all the calculator-punching and scribbling.)