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23xx's galactic neighbourhood

R

rfmcdpei

SOC-12
While I was contemplating the minor terrors of what lies beyond the NSL, I decided to eyeball maps of the areas surrounding known space.

As this map makes clear and this view of Taurus and Auriga shows, the Pleiades lie almost directly between Sol and the Galactic Rim.

Further, I managed to find this detailed map of the galactic neighbourhood. I don't have the 23xx conventional coordinate. It looks like, leaving from the neighbourhood of Denebola, a reasonable course towards the Pleiades would have taken the Bayern close to Aldebaran, Elnath/Beta Tauri and the Hyades, further away from Sol passing near Eta Aurigae towards Bayern's final destination. Unfortunately, Geminga is too far away, although Bayern might manage to go just a bit further towards T Tauri if it had the time. The Little Guys presumably hailed from a system located near this or a similar route.

Thoughts?
 
The existence of the Little Guys also poses further, worrisome, questions.

Within the area of space 30-50 light years in radius explored by humanity, there are seven sophont species including homo sapiens sapiens. Of these, two (the Pentapods and the Ylii) have been starfarers for an extended period of time, another two (humans and Kafers) have been starfarers for hundreds of years, one (Sung) was probably on the verge of the stutterwarp when they were contact, another (Eber) were descended from survivors of a civilization-ending holocaust that de-Ebered two neigbouring planets, and two (Xiang, Klaxun) unlikely to become a technological species.

Let's arbitrarily say that contact with the Little Guys occurred midway through the expedition, when the Bayern was a bit more than two hundred light-years away from Earth. Since the module didn't mention any other alien encounters, it seems reasonable to conclude that no more were intended.

If that is what was intended, then the Bayern didn't encounter anyone else, no low-tech civilizations like that of Komoran, no sophisticated system-size pocket empires like that of DM+4 123, no large and even growing interstellar communities of one or more species. Bayern might well have missed the low-tech and system-size communities, but what are the odds against it missing larger multi-stellar communities? As things stand, the only thing known between 23xx's space and AGRA at the Pleiades is the war-devastated home system of the Little Guys.

Um.
 
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rfmcdpei said:
...As things stand, the only way between 23xx's space and AGRA at the Pleiades is the war-devastated home system of the Little Guys.
Click to expand...

The module was so sketchy, it barely qualified as a framework - a journey of that magnitude, the farthest-reaching expedition humanity had ever undertaken, could have/should have merited a much heftier tome than the 48 pages that were in Bayern. The writer even calls the material the 'basis for a campaign' and states that "a brace of sample adventures have been included to help the referee get started."

So you could pretty much add what you want to what is along the "Bayern Corridor" - at least up to the 2320 'chokepoint' beyond which travel is not allowed.

Did the Bayern just happen to miss the outposts of the Ach*pui Empire? By not flashing the correct 'stutter recognition code' on its engines as it entered the DM +99 9999 system, did the Llewllynnllynn'lynn listening post go to 'silent running' mode for the duration of the Bayern's transit?

You decide!
 
rfmcdpei said:
If that is what was intended, then the Bayern didn't encounter anyone else, no low-tech civilizations like that of Komoran, no sophisticated system-size pocket empires like that of DM+4 123, no large and even growing interstellar communities of one or more species. Bayern might well have missed the low-tech and system-size communities, but what are the odds against it missing larger multi-stellar communities? As things stand, the only way between 23xx's space and AGRA at the Pleiades is the war-devastated home system of the Little Guys.

Um.
Click to expand...
I have a theory on that. One related to the true identity of the Xiang... ;)
 
The maps of our galactic neighborhood seems to be 180 degrees rotated to the usual NSM position. But they squash the 3D distances, which can be pretty significant. Fun to see that the American Arm corresponds well to The Local Fluff :-)

Some pretty neat posters here: http://www.projectrho.com/smap12.html
As well as a way of converting NSM coordinates to galactic coordinates: http://www.projectrho.com/smap04.html

I wonder if there is anything special about our location right in the middle of the local bubble? Suppose that there is something here that makes civilisations emerge, but not between or in other bubbles? Seems unlikely, but weirdness should be expected in explanations to the Fermi paradox.

Let me guess that Colin's theory is that the Xiang are really The Ones Behind Everything (like I think the Pentapods are behind everything, which is just what the Klaxun wants us to think).
 
The true identity of the Xiang is 2320AD canon. However, I haven't made anything more official than that concerning their role in the local neighbourhood. My theory is really just a theory, idle speculation. For the purposes of the game, I don't intend to expand on their role.
 
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I don't really think the AGRA intelligence is honestly a threat. We're like ants (or probably more like lichen) to them. That means they might exterminate us if we were near their homes (if that term can really even apply to such beings) it doesn't appear we are. We're really no more interesting or relevant to them as an ant's nest near a place where they're installing an antenna for cellphone service. "Hey Joe, check all these ants." "Nice, watch what they do when toss an orange slice to them..." "Oops, lunchtime's over. Back to work."

Colin said:
I have a theory on that. One related to the true identity of the Xiang... ;)
Click to expand...

Tease. ;)
 
Colin said:
The true identity of the Xiang is 2320AD canon.
Click to expand...

I thought so. The lines simply haven't been drawn between the two dots, correct? The pictures look awfully similar, but it's the description that confirmed it for me. Especially the part about it having ten legs.
 
My guess is that the Xiang and the Medusa are one and the same.

What's interesting about that is that there seems to be a pattern developing of interstellar civilization dieback in the local area. Medusa two million years ago. Ylii 100,000 years ago. Ebers 4,000 years ago. Aquilans 350 years ago. Little Endians 120 years ago.

It's almost like a countdown.
 
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oletheros said:
I thought so. The lines simply haven't been drawn between the two dots, correct? The pictures look awfully similar, but it's the description that confirmed it for me. Especially the part about it having ten legs.
Click to expand...

No comment. :D
 
epicenter00 said:
I don't really think the AGRA intelligence is honestly a threat. We're like ants (or probably more like lichen) to them. That means they might exterminate us if we were near their homes (if that term can really even apply to such beings) it doesn't appear we are. We're really no more interesting or relevant to them as an ant's nest near a place where they're installing an antenna for cellphone service. "Hey Joe, check all these ants." "Nice, watch what they do when toss an orange slice to them..." "Oops, lunchtime's over. Back to work."
Click to expand...

Yes, the Bayern probably met a bunch of technicians updating a local hyperspace router.

Hmm, the Pleiades cluster is crammed with big B stars. They will start going nova in about 30 million years. Since they will still be close together it is going to become an impressive show for a few tens of million years, with a nice expanding gas bubble around them. It would be bad to be too close to the neighborhood then (the sun will be far away; too bad about all those possibly habitable brown dwarf, G and F star systems that fill the cluster). However, there is an unusual number of hard-to-explain white dwarfs in the cluster - what if the AGRA installation causes premature aging of the stars as they power whatever they power? Maybe the anthill will be fried by the cellphone antenna.
 
The stars of the Plieades Cluster are almost all too young to have planets, especially Garden worlds.

Even though the G and F stars are similar to the sun, they are still only about 150 million years old. It takes about 1 Billion years for things to settle down enough for life to develop and take hold permanently (at least that's how it worked on Earth). HOWEVER, some of the stars might have planetismals and planetoids that are still forming into planets. These worldlets would be VERY rich in heavy metals and radioactives (like Lanthanum and other TransUranics). It's a long way to go for that stuff, but once you got there, you would be rich.

Also, not every star in the Plieades Cluster was actually formed in that cluster. You will still have pretty much the normal distribution of stars under the Cluster stars, so SOME stars in there will be more normal aged, providing some Garden worlds.
 
The Hyades would be a much better target (and also on the way to the Plieades). They are older (about 650 Million years old) which means SOME of the stars will have fairly stable planetary systems, even if life is unlikely. But they will also have the higher abundance of heavy metals. At only 150 ly away, they are a much better target for exploration/exploitation than the Plieades would be.
 
jcrocker said:
So you could pretty much add what you want to what is along the "Bayern Corridor" - at least up to the 2320 'chokepoint' beyond which travel is not allowed.
Click to expand...

On this subject (which is actually related to the topic of the thread), is there an official answer to the question of "where is the Bayern corridor?" If there was a map, I missed it.
 
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Anders said:
Hmm, the Pleiades cluster is crammed with big B stars. They will start going nova in about 30 million years. Since they will still be close together it is going to become an impressive show for a few tens of million years, with a nice expanding gas bubble around them. It would be bad to be too close to the neighborhood then (the sun will be far away; too bad about all those possibly habitable brown dwarf, G and F star systems that fill the cluster). However, there is an unusual number of hard-to-explain white dwarfs in the cluster - what if the AGRA installation causes premature aging of the stars as they power whatever they power? Maybe the anthill will be fried by the cellphone antenna.
Click to expand...

I've always had this rather sinister idea that whatever they're doing make those stars nova sooner, but in a controllable regular fashion. They're doing this elsewhere in the galaxy as well.

Why?

In some tens or hundreds of millions of years, the novas will be visible from other galaxies. It's a kind of semaphore code. A sequence of twinkling lights, spread out different points of the pinwheel and over time to send data. They've been holding a conversation over the course of millions of years with beings similar to them in other galaxies. Now they're getting ready to send their reply. In a few hundred thousand years, their reply will be spooled up and stars in this galaxy will start nova'ing.

They're fourth dimensional beings, but unfortunately, they ride gravity to manifest themselves in the universe of our perception, so they can't really travel between galaxies. So they hang around this one, communicating with the others. Once their reply is set up, they'll go and retreat to the black holes where they can use the extreme time dilation near the event horizon to make time "speed up" and wait out the hundreds of millions of years it'll take to send their reply, the others to muse over their reply, and the time it'll take for the reply to come back. For beings like this, a year really is as a day, and a day as a year...

The sullen fires the Bayern contactees reported seeing were actually the AGRA's way of showing them who they're talking to by way of explanation of what they're doing, similar to how some of us will use a convenient pet dog, cat, or fish to think aloud to. We know they can't really understand it, but it's better than just talking to yourself.

Oh, did I mention it generally takes about 270 million years to send and receive a reply?
 
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oletheros said:
On this subject (which is actually related to the topic of the thread), is there an official answer to the question of "where is the Bayern corridor?" If there was a map, I missed it.
Click to expand...

There were never any map, since we do not currently have enough star data to make anything like the NSM for the route. However, we can make a good guess.

The route would start near Ross 627. From there they wound their way through Pentapod space and likely went through the 61 Virginis cluster. Beyond that they would have continued "upwards", passing close or through the Hyades cluster and then to the Pleiades. The corridor is likely winding along a string of potentially interesting bright stars like Aldebaran.

If there is any interest I could make a sketch using the HYG database of likely stars along the way; in practice it is enough to make them up.
 
I'd be interested. I always wanted to have a map of the Corridor, but never had the time to do anything about it.
 
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