Flattening RL Starmaps

[Golan2072]

My Solar Triumvirate astrography is based on a manually-"flattened", eyed-through version of a list of the stars within circa 50 lightyears from Sol. I did the "flatenning" because the comfort of using a Traveller-style flat universe, a comfort I'm still in favor of (a reduction in realism for the sake of gaming ease); however, I did it VERY amaturishly and not so methodically.

Has anyone beside me try to "flatten" the stars within 25-50 lightyears from Earth into a Traveller-style map? Is there a high-quality "flattening" available online? What about programs capable of doing such a thing to raw GLISE data?

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi !

Hmm, kind of.
I simply assume jump space to be quite flat, so that regarding to jump distances and jump maps everything appears to be kind of 2D.
Apart from that I mapped my favorite parts of the TU to real star (Hipparcos) data.
I choose Spinward Marches here because of greater freedom in OTU->real star mapping. Sadly the CT/MT mapping and naming around Earth is scrambled, so its not easily possible to stay in canonical or in real star mode.
Thanks to Mal I was able to transform ra asc and ra dec values into galactic x/y/z coordinates, so that flattening is fairly simple done by leaving away the z-axis information.
Via flattening you get pretty star densities, so that there is at least one star, which fits to OTU supllied data quite well.

regards,

Mert

 

[Border Reiver]

Andy Slack pulled together a nice 2D Traveller map of the space around Sol using 2300 near star list. I'll see if I can find the link.

 

[Plankowner]

I used the RA and DEC values for known stars, converted them to Distance and Angle in the Galactic Plane, using Galactic Center as ZERO. Then I plotted them in 2-D. This kept the distance to Earth/Terra, but destroyed the relative distance between the stars, which I considered OK for a game. I then placed each star in the closest Hex. If there were multiple stars within the same hex area, I gave myself + or - 1 Parsec slop. At some point, about 5-6 parsecs, you cannot plot every star because the 3D to 2D conversion puts too many stars on top of each other. At that point I started picking and choosing. I tried to keep any star that I recognized the name of and then randomly added other stars to fill in the desired density.

Once you get past about 10 parsecs on any of the near star lists, most if not all of the M class stars disappear, which means that they cannot be detected, not that they aren't there. Once past the about a sub-sector, I only worried about the brighter stars (Fomalhaut, Arcturus, Spica, etc) since if it was only a number in a star catalog, I could ignore or use as desired.

For the Spinward Marches, I wouldn't even bother with a real star list, I would just make them all up and not worry about it. MAYBE there is ONE or TWO known super-bright stars, but probably not.

 

[Golan2072]

Originally posted by Plankowner:
I used the RA and DEC values for known stars, converted them to Distance and Angle in the Galactic Plane, using Galactic Center as ZERO.

Could you please post the formula for this conversion? I'll try to use it and see the results.

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi !

You might extract them from Malenfants site. He offers a spreadsheet here:
http://www.evildrganymede.net/rpg/traveller/mapping.htm

The result is Sun-centered, but conversion from x/y/z to galactical polar coords is perhaps easy then...

Regards,

Mert

 

[Golan2072]

Thanks; I'm going to "flatten" all of his layers into one and probably ignore multiple stars per hex.

 

[Plankowner]

Originally posted by Employee 2-4601:
Could you please post the formula for this conversion? I'll try to use it and see the results.

HERE is a link to a GREAT website that can help you convert to X, Y, Z galactic.

I used a simple arctangent function of X/Y to get an "angle". Just remember that if you are doing this on an excel spreadsheet, that if the Y value is negative, you need to add 180 degrees to the result of the arctan function.

Distance and angle were good enough for me.

If stars fell on top of each other, I picked the most recognizable name, or the most intersting.

ANY near star list will be incomplete, so I just filled in the rest of the sub-sectors and went on. We are finding lots of K and G stars in the 10-20 Parsec range even now, so I didn't worry about any additional stars.

 

[graymask1120]

This is a link to a piece of astrology software I found: http://www.zaytsev.com/downloads.html

It has a very cool starmapping function -- I just haven't had the time to try and integrate it to Trav