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Map of Galaxy in Traveller?

Hecateus

SOC-12
I am a newbie to Traveller, so please correctme if I am wrong here at all. Looking at some of the maps made for Traveller, they all seem to lack any refference to the real galaxy iteself, apart from the placement of Sol.

Where is everything? (Magellenic clouds, Core, Coal Sack, etc.

Any nice maps showing generalities et al?

Thanks
 
You've put your thumb right on a big one.
The maps are also 2D.

Ducks as the purists vs. the realists are likely to revive their old debate any moment.
 
Hecateus--

Welcome! There is a very generalized map of the Third Imperrium's 'charted space' in the GURPS Traveller book, in Library Data A-M and Library Data N-Z, both available in the Supplements reprint from FFE and (goes and checks book..) in the Book 0-8 reprint.

The Core is usually 'north' on Traveller maps, with 'south' being rimward and 'west' being spinward. Given the scale of Traveller's 'charted space' the actual core is some fourty or so sectors off the top of the map.

Most local stuff is in the Solomani Rim sector - I believe Chris Trash has a table on his website as to which stars in the Solomani Rim correspond to which 'real' stars.

Deneb is in the Deneb Sector, Antares in in the Antares sector and Spica is in the... you guessed it... Spica Sector. The Pleides are three or four sectors rimward of the Solomani Rim sector. The Coal Sack would be two or three sectors 'north northeast' of the Solomani Rim sector. Probably out past Crucis Margin somewhere. I doubt it's astrographically worth mentioning on the sector map concerned.

The Magellenic clouds are so far off map as to be completely irrelavent. It's a BIG galaxy and those clouds are outside of it. On the grand scale of things a couple hundred parsecs really isn't all that far.

And YES - squashing a full dimension out of things certianly causes some distortion - but then there's that whole silly notion of playability.

Still, Traveller gives a much stronger nod to astrography and astrophysics than certian wildly popular 'science fiction' franchises in movies and television that I could name... but then you *DO* have to (at least) be able to read and add dice pips together to play Traveller
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HTH

--Michael
 
Core (as in Core of the Galaxy?) is way off the top of existing maps, past the vargr Extents. Core (as in where Capital is, IIRC?) is sort of in the rimward/middle of the Imperium.

Magellanic clouds are outside the galaxy, and therefore not on the maps. They're way too far away to be mappable. And they're below the galactic plane, which means you won't see them on the 2D map anyway.

Dunno where the Coal Sack is... I think the Helix nebula should be a few sectors to Trailing of the Spinward Marches though.

If you want an idea of what a closer to realistic universe looks like, install a copy of Celestia on your computer. It's not actually a Traveller thing, it's a star viewer that uses stars from the Hipparcos catalogue, so it's good for a few thousand lightyears, and you can add nebulae to it and planets. You'd have to translate that info into Traveller hex coordinates yourself though.

But otherwise... don't expect that degree of realism from Traveller. It's based on what was known in the late 1970s, and can't be updated to be closer to what we know of reality without making a lot of canon-nuts go totally bonkers.
 
> map of the Local Bubble < is more of what I am thinking of, with 'known' Traveller sectors 'super-imposed' over it more or less. Keep in mind the galaxy is about 307 parsecs thick here, and Sol is about 13-14 parsecs above the galactic plane.

Thanks for the help though.
 
I wish "they" would print a realy big fold out map to put up on a wall, better yet print GIANT ones of the different sectors!!!...I would PAY for them!!!! :eek:
 
Originally posted by Hecateus:
> map of the Local Bubble < is more of what I am thinking of, with 'known' Traveller sectors 'super-imposed' over it more or less. Keep in mind the galaxy is about 307 parsecs thick here, and Sol is about 13-14 parsecs above the galactic plane.

Thanks for the help though.
Yea, I've played with those maps (although for some reason mine are labeled in German - but it's not hard to figure out what Kholensack means). Fairly easy to grid and oriented the same way as the Traveller maps as well. Basically the local bubble' map on the bottom of the page is everything within about 3 sectors of Sol. All of the 'local fluff' is in the Sol or Vega subsectors.

I was actually going to use those maps as the basis of my own campaign until I decided to take the easy way out and run in the OTU. Also figured that if I was going to go all the way I'd need to do it 3D and that was more work than I was prepared to put forth for an RPG.

If you're really keen to see those gridded out with subsectors and sectors, I can make copies and snail mail them to you - my e-mail is in my profile.

HTH

--Michael
 
Originally posted by trader jim:
I wish "they" would print a realy big fold out map to put up on a wall, better yet print GIANT ones of the different sectors!!!...I would PAY for them!!!! :eek:
Such things exist - Swordy gets them in from time to time: http://www.travellertrader.com/ or you can always check e-bay and ppay too much ;)
 
Originally posted by Hecateus:
> map of the Local Bubble < is more of what I am thinking of, with 'known' Traveller sectors 'super-imposed' over it more or less. Keep in mind the galaxy is about 307 parsecs thick here, and Sol is about 13-14 parsecs above the galactic plane.

Thanks for the help though.
Chris Thrash did some work on this not too long ago. Check his site, and look under Traveller Know Stars list.
http://www.io.com/~thrash/

The difficult part is that once beyond the Solomani Rim sector, the correspondence of real stars to Traveller Stars is, well, random chance at best.

The other difficulty is the 2D nature of Traveller maps vs the 3D nature of real stars in space.
 
Originally posted by tjoneslo:
The other difficulty is the 2D nature of Traveller maps vs the 3D nature of real stars in space.
The best in-game theory I came across for this little anomaly (and I wish I'd thought of it), is that the 2D hex thing represents how the routes between stars connect up in hyperspace, rather than where they are in realspace. There are vague correspondences between the two in most cases, but because of the distortions in mapping a 3D volume onto a 2D surface (which may itself be curved/distorted across higher dimensions), it's never exactly the same.

It's the perfect have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solution. Only those freaks who like STL drives will worry about 3D maps. ;)

Regards,
Andrewthotep
 
Originally posted by trader jim:
I wish "they" would print a realy big fold out map to put up on a wall, better yet print GIANT ones of the different sectors!!!...I would PAY for them!!!! :eek:
Hello Trader Jim.
How big and are the maps Copyrighted (Berka).
BYE.
 
My favorite theory is that there are jump planes, parallel planes of jump space that are squished together at the Galactic Core and slowly spread out as you go towards the rim (curving up or fading out, eventually?). There are possibly other civilizations on other jump planes, but only STL drives can go "up" and "down".

If the planes are far enough apart, then there wouldn't be much point in travel from one to the other, though there might be slow communication as civilizations chat back and forth, but even that might be considered not worth the effort.

Bolie IV
 
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