Storm Raven
First Post
I have a copy of this starmap, which I have laminated and use in gaming. It has about 224 stars on it, and while the distances between the stars are not apparent at a glance it is possible to discern which stars are near to a given location in a few moments. You glance at the dot that represents your current location and note the last of its co-ordinates. Then you glance at the nearby dots and check the last of their co-ordinates. If it is very different from the number you mentally noted you dismiss the star as not all that near. The same approach works using the Astrogator's Handbook, which divides space within 75 light-years into 63 sectors and represents each with a map like this.
Sure, it's not as easy as judging distance on a map of something flat. But that's because it is representing something that is intrinsically more complex. You can't suppress that complexity without losing the essence of Space.
When I first started playing Traveller years ago (using the little black books complete with the old map of the Spinward Marches) I was worried about the 2D nature of the map too. I made a system for representing 3D space pretty much like the one in the starmap you provide.
And I found it just didn't add much to game play. The 2D map isn't perfectly realistic, but it does what is needed for the game to work, and does it reasonably well. Adding the third dimension to the map is a lot of extra work, and it doesn't represent as well (people are good at judging distances by eye, but not so much by adding a mathematical calculation to the mix) and it doesn't add a whole lot to actual play, which is primarily concerned with what heppens in a system, and not so much with different systems (other than just jumping from one to the other).