My Wormhole Map: Traveller

[Thomas Bowman]

This is my current map that I'm working on
https://orig00.deviantart.net/1bf8/...map_sol_sector_by_thomasbowman767-dcabbcv.png

The link above this map will take you to a full sized version of it. On the upper right quadrant of it is a chart of the various star systems I've generated, I used die rolls to determine the random values. I could get a computer to do it, but then I would have to go back and correct all the errors the computer has made, and since I want to put some human thought into each entry to make sure it makes sense, for example using die rolling and following the rules of Mainworld generation, I could end up with a negative number for hydrographics percentage, and I'd just assume roll physical dice by hand and correct such errors as I encounter them rather than generate a page full and then have to go through each one to make sure the buggy program didn't make any errors.

For example with physical dice I generated the Mainworld of Crius, it is a world slightly larger than Earth, it has a class A starport, 79% of its surface is covered with water, it has a Dense but breathable atmosphere, a population of 9 billion people, A non-charismatic leader, which I'll say is a monarch, either a king or queen, a law level of 9 which means very restrictive gun control, and a tech level A which is Interstellar, meaning this society could create a new wormhole if it wanted to. Most of the wormholes in this setting were created by a prior civilization which existed millions of years ago, but Crius could build a new one, both ends of it would start off close to each other, and one of those ends would have to be transported by a slower than light starship to get to its desired location and then that wormhole would have to be expanded to allow passage of a starship., relativity would mean that the transported mouth would be in the future. Wormholes in any case are very difficult and expensive to make.

So you have my latest map, what can this software do that I have not already done? I have all the wormholes on my map. Below is the map I started with, and I basically rolled a 1d6 for each wormhole connection and if I got a result of 3 or less, I eliminated that wormhole, and that is how I created my map, then I rolled for a random system, using the 188 existing systems, and when I rolled a key number I looked it up on the list of near stars in the lower white quadrant of my map, and that is the system I put in that hex, the name of the system is below the hex, and the name of the Mainworld is within the hex. I then looked up the solsystem entry for each system to find a good location for my wormholes, and I placed it and whatever stars are in the system on a logarithmic distance chart. Below is the original black wormhole map that I worked from:
https://orig00.deviantart.net/0413/f/2018/120/b/e/wormhole_map_by_thomasbowman767-dcabcya.png

 

[Thomas Bowman]

This can also be used for Alternity, or Star Frontiers.

 

[practicalm]

The Graphiz program can handle your map if you have multiples of the same star in different hexes.

To clean that up you would just need to define all the pairs.

The other programs allow for more customization of the map (such as clusters and size of clusters)

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Not sure what I want to do with them, they could be the same star system at different points in time. Part of the point of this map is to allow for incidental time travel as well. The situation is an alien race set up these wormholes a billion of years ago, and over a long period of time, a time differential developed between the ends of these wormholes due to their different gravitational potential, and to the speeds these wormholes were transported at, highly relativistic speeds. Originally the aliens had a home world, and they build wormholes, they accelerated one end of each wormhole towards the system they wanted to colonize and explore. The didn't mind that when they traveled through the wormhole they were also traveling into their local future, and they fact that they could also travel back into the past where their home world was located wasn't a problem either. These aliens set up machines to build and transport their wormholes, so they could colonize other stars, and the machines spread out building more and more wormholes, even outstripping the original aliens ability to colonize those place, those wormholes expanded beyond their home galaxy, and the machines kept on reproducing themselves and building more wormholes in an outward expansion waves radiation away from the aliens' original home world. the wormhole network now forms a sphere about one billion light years in radius centered on what used to be the alien's home world in a different galaxy. That species of alien is now extinct or they evolved into something else, all that is left is their automatic wormhole building machinery that even today continues to build ever more wormholes connecting ever more star systems. Over time the stars have moved in their positions in relation to each other, now the wormholes seem random as the stars have moved around the galaxy and changed their positions. Some human colonies have gained sufficient tech to build their own wormholes and transport them, but their is very little reason for them to do so, as their are already so many wormholes all throughout the galaxy. Because of the time differential, we have humans from the local future meeting humans from the past and causing multiple timelines to appear due to the time paradoxes that are created through such contacts. Few of those wormholes actually connect directly to Earth's past, but a slower than light spaceship can reach them from the nearest wormhole opening in the networks. This usually involves a journey of several years for the fast starships or a journey of several decades for the slower ones.

Fusion powered spaceships can only reach 10% of the speed of light when allowing for remaining fuel to slow down again, or they can reach 20% of the speed of light when they don't slow down. Some faster ships are available but expensive. Antimatter is very expensive to produce. Another type of drive is a black hole drive. Black holes are produced by focusing a lot of laser light into a tiny portion of space thereby producing a black hole. Small ones with the mass of a cargo tanker on Earth's oceans will radiate their mass away in the form of Hawking radiation in a matter of years, and the black holes are usually discarded after wards so they can explode at a safe distance away from the ship.

Wormholes can also be used as a propulsive device. A civilization can make a small wormhole, place it in a spaceship, and the spaceship comes with a supply of matter to use as fuel, it doesn't matter what kind of matter. the ship pumps the matter through the wormhole, and on the other side of the wormhole on the home base, a particle accelerator fires a relativistic beam of charged particles at nearly the speed of light in the opposite direction through the wormhole where the matter is being pumped, in that respect the mass-energy flow of matter through the wormhole is balanced, matter is pumped at a low velocity through the wormhole towards the home base, and a giant particle accelerator many time the mass of the starship fires a highly relativistic beam back through the wormhole, achieving a very high efficiency of thrust that would not otherwise be possible with a self-contained starship. This lasts until the starship runs out of mass to push through the wormhole, but a very high fraction of the speed of light can be obtained through this method. the wormhole can then be slowed down again and the two ends can form a time machine which connects two different points in time. Wormholes are expensive to make, just like black holes and antimatter, the main difference is that wormholes are reusable while black holes are not, and of course once the antimatter us expended its gone.

Since their are many worlds from different times in different parts of space, then 25th century Earth can encounter worlds that have been colonized by humans from Earth thousands of years ago. Intelligent aliens are scarce, non-intelligent ones are more common. Humans typically encounter other humans through this wormhole network, some from the future, and sometimes they reach out to some humans who are living on a past Earth. the only Earth that is connected directly by wormholes within the same star system is 25th century Earth. if you want to travel to Renaissance Europe for instance, you need to find a nearby star system on the wormhole network and then use a slower than light starship to travel across the gap in light years. For civilizations that can make their own wormholes, they can carry one end of a wormhole to this past Earth and then once there, they can use it as a two-way gate to this past Solar System and interact with the inhabitants of this past Earth, and this changing history along the way, producing another timeline that is nevertheless connected to the original one by the wormhole thus created.

It is expensive to do this however, so there needs to be a good reason for people to visit this past Earth in what becomes another universe. Most of the time variation is +/- 10,000 years from the current present Earth of the 25th century, this no dinosaurs can be encountered, the ringworld in the future might have some however, whether they are from Earth's past or genetically created by the ringworld builders is another story. It appears the ringworld builders of this alternate version of the Solar System were not aware of wormholes existing, so they instead built this artificial ringworld with a surface area millions of times that of Earth's surface which they could settle.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Regarding my map, I already done some work on it by hand rolling some dice, the wormholes are already placed, so that part is done already. If you want to do some maps on the side connecting to mine, you can use a program to do those. Right now I could use some automatic dice rollers to generate some mainworlds on the fly, such a program probably needs to be debugged, I have assigned star systems already, I need to make sure those main worlds are in physically possible places, if the nature of the system excludes that I need to make some adjustments, have a frozen mainworld outside of the habitable zones and have it covered with ice for instance. Usually things like a brown dwarf don't have main worlds, because the only sort of world that could be generated is an uninhabitable world, but the system could still have a starport. the most obvious place to put a starport is right outside the wormhole opening. A starship would stop there to refuel and get maintenance if the intension is to go on through the wormhole over to the next destination. I'm going to assume that on average a single journey through one wormhole takes a day, part of that is the traffic of starships waiting to go back and forth, as you must realize their will be lines of starships waiting to use a given wormhole, and it will take some time for each starship to get its turn. The starship captain pays a toll for using a wormhole, and if they pay more, they can skip ahead in the line, so they can make their journey quicker!

 

[dragoner]

Interesting, I have made a similar setting where Traveller ship's jump drive is a wormhole, and the maps are emulating 3d space out to about 25 light years from the Earth; I have a pdf of it if you want to see.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Sure, I would love to. The thing about wormhole maps is that wormholes don't have to connect the closest system, you could put the other end of a wormhole on the other side of a galaxy, or even in another galaxy if you wanted to. If you create a wormhole, the two ends start out close to each other. You create both ends simultaneously, their close proximity to each other causes the ends to connect with each other upon creation. After that, you can do anything with them. With electrical charges you can move the various ends of a wormhole around. You could move one end of a wormhole and leave the other end behind. You can't move either wormhole end faster than the speed of light, and the same rules or relativity apply to the wormhole ends as with anything else you are moving close to the speed of light, but the effects of time dialation do not hold through the wormhole, only from the outside. To give you an example. You could quickly accelerate one end of a wormhole to near the speed of light, and you could move it to a location 100 light years away, and then slow it down. Because one can't exceed the speed of light, time dilation comes into play, it will take longer than 100 years to travel 100 light years, so the end of the wormhole you have moved ends up over 100 years in the future relative to the end of the wormhole that remains behind. Now relative to the wormhole being moved, it could take only 10 years from the point of view of the moving wormhole to travel that 100 light years. 10 years would pass for the moving wormhole and 100 years would pass for the rest of the universe, and through the wormhole, only ten years has passed for the wormhole end that remained being and everything on the other side of that wormhole as seen through the wormhole.

One can therefore start at the remain behind wormhole and step through it, and travel 100 light years and more than 100 years into the future, one can also step back through the wormhole and go back to your original location and over 100 years would not have passed. If you are through the wormhole and 100 light years away, you can't travel back to the past outside that wormhole it would take over another 100 years to go back through the outside universe. If you brought that far end of the wormhole as you traveled back to your starting point, over 200 years would pass in the external universe from the point you began that first journey out to the stars. If you put those two wormhole ends together again, when you end up with is a time machine which allows you to jump forward and back in time by increments of over 200 years.

Now their are different ways to handle the time paradoxes that result from travel in the past, the approach I am going to take with this setting is the "Many Worlds Hypothesis" A new timeline is created where ever communication with the past in the same area that you are in. Effectively we have a bunch of star systems connected together that are all in a number of different parallel universes with different timelines due to communication within one's own past light cone.

Now lets suppose this wormhole network was created by an alien civilization millions of years ago, it is then possible to travel into Earth's own past and then alter it creating a new timeline. Chances are this already happened many times by the time humans in each system have discovered the wormhole in their system.

For example in Timeline 1, the first wormhole was discovered in the Sigma Draconis system in the year 4450 AD, by humans who have traveled there in slower than light starships a couple millennia ago, after settling their system, they discovered the wormhole, and found it connects to wormholes in other systems, they discovered a bunch of other systems and then found one that leads to Earth in the 21st century as 2050 AD, they find an Earth where its people are just getting into space, the ruler of the Sigma Draconis system just can't resist, there are 8 billion people living on this Earth and he wants to conquer them and thus be the master of all humanity, he sends his fleet through the wormhole, and he surrounds the Earth and demands that they surrender to him, they refuse and respond with a barrage of nuclear weapons in orbit, a few of the Sigma draconic fleet are destroyed, the rest retreat to a safe distance, a junk belt then surrounds the Earth from all that debris created by detonating nuclear weapons, the EMP radiation shorts out the power distribution networks and fries electrics across the surface. The Draconians do not want to damage their ships by passing through the orbital junk belt, so they settle the rest of the Solar System instead, leaving the Earth humans to their own devices, they make claims on Mars, and the Earth humans cannot stop them. The Draconians terraform Mars, and crown princess Ardala becomes the local rule of that planet by the 25th century.

if you haven't guessed by now, this setting is based on some of the ideas from the 1970s television show Buck Rogers in the 25th century. In that setting there were stargates connecting the various systems, they weren't explained very much, people just used them, they were in space, so you needed a spaceship to use them.

In a Traveller version of this, the set up is much the same wormholes are in remote parts of each star system for safety, because of the theoretical possibility of a wormhole exploding and releasing a tremendous amount of energy. There is evidence of wormholes having exploded in the past, as not every star system has all six. Each wormhole connects to one other system. the wormholes are usually bunched together in close proximity to one another, so it doesn't take much time to go from one wormhole to another. It takes about a day to travel through each wormhole, but any sort of ship which can fit inside a wormhole can travel through one, a space fighter could, as could a life boat, a shuttle, or even a man in a spacesuit. The difference between a starship and a small craft is someone academic as their are no independent jump drives. The standard ships exist, they just don't have jump drives or need jump fuel, that space freed up can be used for something else. Maybe I should make the maneuver drives more fuel hungry to compensate, if I did that however the smallcraft would have less fuel capacity. the rule of thumb is to have each maneuver drive consume the same amount of fuel in four weeks of operation as would a jump drive of the same number would in making a single jump equal to its rating. The maneuver drives use the jump fuel as reaction mass, as they aren't reactionless drives, they have separate fusion fuel to power the power plant, but without the reaction mass, the ships can't accelerate, they could still fire laser weapons and do other things that require power however, just not accelerate.

 

[Yaztromo]

Sounds like a nice campaign!

 

[tomBitonti]

So ... a uniform 2D map would either need to flatten the galactic disc, or would have to give up putting nearby stars (in real space) close to each other in the stargate graph. Or, the map could give up uniformity, say, making “panes” of close regions, but assembling the planes randomly, or by having a single designated center which began with nearby stars being close in the graph, but more and more separating stars as 3D volumes overwhelmed the 2d space available to fill. Flattening the galactic disc would look random locally, but would put a cap on the ratio of 2d distances relative to 3D distances.

Thx!
TomB

 

[dragoner]

Sure, I would love to.

Here it is as a download link, it is meant to be near future, realistic star map around Earth (over 100 star systems) all plotted and stat'd out with UPP's -



It's a work in progress, but it will be my next campaign I run with Classic Traveller/Cepheus Engine or M-Space.

I loved that Buck Rodgers TV program as a kid, and it seems like you have highly detailed your setting, next is probably adventure hooks for it?