My Wormhole Map: Traveller

[Thomas Bowman]

This map is for a home brew variant of Traveller rpg, any edition, alternatively it could be adapted to any space opera RPG. the nub is, this setting uses wormholes, also called stargates instead of an FTL drive, such as the hyperdrive, the Jump Drive, Warp Drive or whatever.

Wormholes have certain features,
1) they don't travel with what they transport
2) each wormhole has two ends or mouths
3) this type doesn't require a stellar mass or anything approaching the mass of a star.
4) this type doesn't have an event horizon and is two-way
5) you can see through a wormhole, light and other stuff does pass through
6) it takes a finite amount of time to pass through a wormhole, and such passage is not instantaneous
7) in its natural form, its mouths are spherical, but an artificial wormhole has a number of flat faces, such as on a dodecahedron which allows passage through without undue tidal effects.
8) Wormholes have the mass of at least a medium-sized asteroid, a few tens of kilometers wide, but the but the throat of such wormholes is a few hundred meters in diameter, so a spaceship has to be skinnier than the throat of a wormhole so as not to be torn apart while in passage.
9) Another problem is that wormholes will decay if not maintained, and passage of objects through a wormhole that are more massive than the wormhole will cause an explosion as the mass of the wormhole will convert to energy, this is the reason these wormholes aren't found on the surface of a planet, not that they couldn't be maintained there, but if containment fails, the wormhole will fall into the planet's surface and ingest an amount of matter greater than its mass and then explode causing an extinction level event on the planets surface, and this is generally not desired, so wormholes are based in space. Each system in my map has up to 6 wormholes leading to other places, generally they are kept in the outer star system, to minimize the hazard to populated areas should a wormhole explode.
The lines shown connecting the hexes indicate which wormholes lead to which other systems, The hexes contain the information on each system, this map is blank as I have not added systems to it yet. There is a sidebar to the right where I plan to add additional information on each system which will not fit in each hex. Also the positions of these hexes on the map indicate these hexes relationships to each other through wormholes only, they do not indicate their actual positions in space, and they could be in 3 dimensional space rather than the standard Traveller 2-d flat maps, this is one of the advantages of using wormholes rather than FTL drives.
Without further ado, here is my map:
This can also be found at: https://orig00.deviantart.net/0983/f/2018/108/9/5/my_wormhole_map_by_thomasbowman767-dc96gh9.png

 

[Maelish]

they don't travel with what they transport

Are you saying the wormhole wouldn't chase it's own tail?

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Just that the wormholes aren't part of a starship, they are external, a starship travels through them. Another advantage of this set up is you can have stars in three dimensional space, yet represent them on a two dimensional map, as this map only shows the systems and the connecting wormholes, this is representational, not a physical relationship shown on this map.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

This is my latest Traveller wormhole map, which I think I'm going to use in a Buck Rogers in the 25th Century type of campaign:
https://orig00.deviantart.net/76c5/...map_sol_sector_by_thomasbowman767-dc9ipl3.png
It uses real world star systems as described by solsystem. some have planets, but they are connected on this map by wormholes, also some are connected more than once, there is also some time displacement by various wormholes, some are in the future while others are in the past. A many worlds interpretation prevents causality violations between them. A change in the past causes a split in the timeline, but the wormholes still connect both ends of the split. There are also ten tech levels respresented here, I simplified them to the following:
0 - Stone Age
1 - Bronze Age
2 - Iron Age
3 - Renassaince
4 - Age of Reason
5 - Industrial Age
6 - Atomic Age
7 - Information Age
8 - Fusion Age
9 - Interplanetary Age
10 (A) - Interstellar Age. (Wormholes)

 

[Derren]

If wormholes can be artifically created I would expect that there would be "Highway" connections which would allow you to travel to other parts of the map in a single jump.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Well in this campaign, wormholes connect two points, if you want to go somewhere else from the same point, you would need another wormhole. The wormholes on this map are tame wormholes, that means instead of having spherical mouths they have flat mouths and are contained by stargates. A stargate can have up to 6 wormholes leading to 6 different places. What one sees when one approaches a stargate is a regular solid corresponding the shapes of six polyhedral dice, if there was one wormhole, the stargate would be a ring, if two wormholes, a tetrahedron or 4-sided die shape would serve. If there were three wormholes, the stargate would be cube-shaped with six faces. if four wormholes, then the shape of an 8-sided die would serve. If five wormholes, then the stargate would have the shape of a 10-sided die, and if 6 wormholes, the stargate would have the shape of a 12-sided die or a dodecahedron. There are twice as many faces as their are wormholes, because you need a face for each direction. The wormholes are each two-way, but you don't want starships crashing into each other within a wormhole throat, so at any given time, traffic moves in one direction through any particular wormhole. And when I say their are six wormholes leading out of a system, what I really mean is their are 12 wormholes. For every two systems connected by wormholes, their are two wormholes, one for each direction, like a two-lane highway through hyperspace, except in this case there is no crossing over the double yellow line.

Most of these wormholes were built by ancient aliens, the aliens had long ago uploaded to electronic form, they build machines that constructed wormholes and they continued building wormholes, following their programming long after those aliens were no longer around. AI machines maintain the wormholes, they are non-free willed and adhere to their programming. Most stargates are located on the fringes of each star system. There is a stargate in the Kuiper belt in the Solar System for example, it was only discovered with an invading force came through the wormhole and attempted to invade Earth in the mid 21st century. A battle ensued in low Earth orbit with a lot of nukes being detonated on the invading starships, the result was a junk belt was created which prevented further space travel from Earth for the next few centuries. The invading force originated from the star system called Sigma Draconis, the aliens were actually extraterrestrial humans called Draconians, and they come from a world called Draconia. The people there are descended from colonists from Earth a few thousand years ago. This Sigma Draconis is actually 2000 years in the future from 25th century Earth, but the wormholes cover spans of time as well as distances in space. Draconia did not progress much technologically during their 2000 years of history since its founding, it is a very traditional society ruled by an emperor named Zhu Han, he has a number of children, one of whom is a very ambitious daughter names Ardala.

Ardala has taken a particular interest in conquering Earth, she believes that if she can accomplish that feat, she would inherit the throne from her father. Zhu Han has many children, and he decides who is next in line to the throne, and many factors goes into that decision, including that of military success. Earth is the ancestral home of humanity, so Ardala feels that if she can conquer Earth, that would be a great propaganda victory for her empire and she would be made queen, so she is very ambitious and ruthless in pursuing her goals.

 

[Guest 6801328]

The thing I don't like about this particular 2D representation is that systems only connect to "neighbors". If wormholes truly transcend spatial dimensionality it seems this map should be a lot...messier, with some lines jumping across the map.

If you have some basic coding chops you might try creating a force directed graph in D3.js. That would allow you to represent much more complex systems. It's pretty simple in D3 to add mouseover popups, which could contain system information.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

The thing I don't like about this particular 2D representation is that systems only connect to "neighbors". If wormholes truly transcend spatial dimensionality it seems this map should be a lot...messier, with some lines jumping across the map.

If you have some basic coding chops you might try creating a force directed graph in D3.js. That would allow you to represent much more complex systems. It's pretty simple in D3 to add mouseover popups, which could contain system information.

well its more of a "subway map" the positions on the map don't correspond to positions in actual space. Two adjacent hexes might actually be hundreds of light years apart, and thousands of years separated in time. There are a lot of extraterrestrial humans and they all originated on Earth. The Earth on this map is the Earth in the 25th century, this is a Buck Rogers campaign after all. In this version, Buck Rogers is a United States Space Force Pilot, he is out in space on patrol when the forces of Sigma Draconis attack, the Earth Space Forces put up a brave defense, and the Draconians are ultimately thwarted, but the result is a cascade of satellite collisions in low Earth orbit produce a deadly junk belt around the planet. Captain William "Buck" Rogers us caught on the wrong side of that junk belt out in space. The Draconians retreat back through the wormhole from whence they came, as their is nothing else in the Solar System they are currently interested in, but they do eyeball Mars. Buck Rogers has no choice but to enter the low berth on his fighter, its an experimental emergency system so save on life support when travelling long distances in his space fighter. The humans are stuck on Earth for a century at least, as the junk in low Earth orbit slowly decay and reenter the Earth's atmosphere clearing out the space so ships can pass through that region once again. The Earth in the meantime builds arcologies on the Earth's surface. The Draconians have managed some limited nuclear strikes on the Earth's surface, cities have been devastated. The Draconians settle and terraform the planet Mars, by moving atmosphere from Titan to Mars using orbital rings and mass drivers. Mars is inhabited by Draconian colonists once Earth goes back into space once again.

The Draconians own history comes from a different timeline, in that timeline the Earth doesn't discover those wormholes until much later, the planet Draconia in the Sigma Draconis system is settled by Earth colonists in slower than light generation ships and sleeper ships. Using a wormhole discovered in the Sigma Draconis system, the Draconians settle other neighboring worlds and get into conflicts with other human colonies in neighboring systems, over time they have build an empire through these wormholes, as they were the first ones to discover them. The wormhole in our Solar System was discovered by Earth Humans when Draconian forces invaded through it, this of course changes history as a Draconian invasion never occurred in the 21st century of the Draconian timeline, so basically by building its empire, the Draconians created a bunch of separate timelines parallel to their own, their empire has lasted subjectively for them a few thousand years since their home planet was colonized by Earth humans.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Sigma Draconis is a real Star System, this link has some information on it:
http://www.solstation.com/stars/sigdraco.htm The planet Draconia is squarely in the habitable zone of this star and the descriptions matches this entry from the solstation article:

Habitable Zone
Estimates provided by the NASA Star and Exoplanet Database indicate that the inner edge of Sigma Draconis' habitable zone could be located around 0.557 AU from the star, while the outer edge edge lies around 1.016 AUs. According to the SIM project, the distance from Sigma Draconis where an Earth-type planet would be "comfortable" with liquid water is centered around only 0.65 AU -- between the orbital distances of Mercury and Venus in the Solar System. Assuming that Sigma Draconis has 89 percent of Sol's mass, such a planet would have an orbital period under 203 days -- just a bit over half of an Earth year -- at that distance from the star.

Actually it is a good candidate star to look for habitable planets in, the assumption in this campaign is that one was found and Earth colonists took slower than light starships to settle it and start a colony in Timeline 1, the 25th century Buck Rogers Earth is in Timeline 2, a timeline affected by the Draconian invasion. The Draconians manage to track Buck Rogers whereabouts, and a princess named Ardala revives him for her own political purposes, as part of a gesture to indicate the Draconians want to live in peace and wish to help out their "Earth brothers" this is of course a ruse.

 

[Guest 6801328]

well its more of a "subway map" the positions on the map don't correspond to positions in actual space. Two adjacent hexes might actually be hundreds of light years apart, and thousands of years separated in time.

But even so there's adjacency. There is no way, for example, to pick two hexes in your map that are currently far apart and just arbitrarily decide there's a wormhole connecting them. For a given number of star systems, the vast, overwhelming majority of all possible "maps" are not possible with this representation.