3 Dimensional Space

[Renaissance Man]

The dilemma is this. 3D spacemaps just look freakin' hot.

But they are unwieldy to use, and even for computer programs like Astrosynthesis 2.0, the scuttlebutt is that they are hard to use and the back end is complicated as hell.

But a part of me still wants to generate a few subsectors with that boyo, and see what the PC's end up doing.

 

[tim_manley]

Yeah, I can see that would be an annoyance. But it doesn't require trigonometry.

Never said it did, was just a quote from one of my players I found humerous.

When I ran SO, I just used a little table that had all the distances between every world calculated and listed, a look up chart. Later, I did it using a spreadsheet. Only had to do the math once and the players could just look it up. Even easier than counting hexes.

never did that... I programmed the calculator to do the math work and never thought it hard. My players on the other hand were irritated by "math" that wasn't basic.

The dilemma is this. 3D spacemaps just look freakin' hot.

But they are unwieldy to use, and even for computer programs like Astrosynthesis 2.0, the scuttlebutt is that they are hard to use and the back end is complicated as hell.

But a part of me still wants to generate a few subsectors with that boyo, and see what the PC's end up doing.

Even though I spoke agin' it, I still love 'em! I tend to lean towards the complicated. My players finaly mutinied when I started making them keep track of man-days worth of air and water...

 

[tim_manley]

want to add that I started running a campign that took place in just our solar system. no FTL, I downloaded all the bodies from NASA and was trying to work up a program that I could put the date in and they'd tell me the x,y,z coords of each body. Then I wanted to punch in the ship's capabilities and get travel time... never got that done though.

I ended up running the game that lasted about 6 months before work started interfering with my players. I ended up just "guess-working" it and the players never really knew the difference.

But, I still wanted a honkin big prgram, no graphics needed, just pick body a, body b, date and ship stats and get travel time and location....

 

[Daneel Olivaw]

I have an excellent astronomy program called Starry Night which includes a 3D simulation of our solar system. You can enter a date and it'll position the planets, moons, asteroids, etc. accordingly. You can select a mouse pointer tool which shows the distance between any 2 bodies. I use this and a spreadsheet to calculate travel times for spacecraft, although it doesn't take into account the movement of the destination body while in transit.

A freeware program called Celestia will plot the positions of the planets for a given date, and it's a beautiful program in any case. You can determine distances using this as well.

 

[sfchbryan]

I have never understood WHY anyone was interested in 3D maps. As one of my players put it:

"We don't travel from point A to point B, We jump & ignore all of the space in-between."

 

[Icosahedron]

A 3D universe has a different geography. In a 3D universe, you can have 4 stars equidistant from each other, in a 2D universe you can't.

This doesn't matter so much if you have a completely fictional universe, but anyone who uses near-Earth settings can't get the mutual separations of real stars anywhere near right in a 2D universe. eg, you might have Vega and Sirius the right distances from Earth, but are they the right distance from each other? Hence how many weeks does it take to jump between them?

 

[Agemegos]

I have never understood WHY anyone was interested in 3D maps.

It isn't all that mysterious. Space really is three-dimensional, and that's all there is to it. Suppose that I were running a modern campaign set in the USA. Naturally, I'd want a two-dimensional map. A one-dimensional map with all the cities placed on a single interstate running from Boston to Los Angeles would not be adequate in any way.

 

[Daneel Olivaw]

want to add that I started running a campign that took place in just our solar system. no FTL, I downloaded all the bodies from NASA and was trying to work up a program that I could put the date in and they'd tell me the x,y,z coords of each body. Then I wanted to punch in the ship's capabilities and get travel time... never got that done though.

I ended up running the game that lasted about 6 months before work started interfering with my players.

Can you elaborate a bit on your Solar System campaign? I am putting one together myself and I'm eager to hear anyone's take on this sort of setting. I often struggle with the feeling that such a campaign would feel too constrained by the physical limits of the System, the number of locations, proximity to Earth, etc. Of course, one could develop the setting in enough detail to provide numerous distinct locations & scenarios (scenarii?).