My 3D Sector

[Lapthorn]

Just uploaded a screenie of my 3D sector in the Maps section of the gallery for your diversion and amusement.

It took me about 15 minutes to get NBOS's Astrosynthesis (AS) programme, with the Traveller System Modifier (TSM) available from NBOS's website, to do the tedious generating. (If the TSM author is around here, I take my hat off to you sir.)

1) I used AS to generate a 50ly sector with planetary systems*. 423 systems in all. This took seconds on my midrange machine. At this point, the stars (and other objects - it generates black holes, neutron stars etc.) are named simply by their coordinate location.

2) I selected all the star systems with a "4" in their name (59 of them), and used TSM to populate them. This took a few minutes. Using '4' to select them was completely arbitrary. I just didn't want all 423 systems getting populated.

3) Next I selected all populated systems and got AS to link them with 9.7ly routes. 9.7ly seems to work well as a J2 distance in terms of generating nicely Traveller-y routes.

That took care of the generation. Since then, I've been doing the fun stuff - naming and coming up with backgrounds for the systems, allocating the sector capitol and bases, scoping out the trade routes etc. I had a broad idea for the kind of setting I wanted, but I find random generation helps get the creative juices flowing!

Background point - the routes are "established" ways of getting between systems. There is nothing to stop you jumping into uninhabited systems, but the Navy don't necessarily go there very often.

Voila - Eshum Sector, population 42 billion sophonts - and falling.


*OK, really a 20ly sector; I then used a separate mod you can download to inflate it out to 50ly, a solution I've eventually hit on for resolving the ridiculously high system density thrown up by AS.

 

[Peter Schutze]

you can lower the density setting in generation but that "inflation" trick sounds very useful

it also helps lower system densities if you go thru and delete all the "funny stuff" systems and then kill off about half the useless systems like brown dwarf (type T and L from memory)

you will probably also find it helpful during the game to have the j-1 and j-4 (xboat) routes mapped .... you should be able to toggle the routes visibility off and on before printing maps

 

[Lapthorn]

I find even the minimum system density is too high by a factor of 2.5, relative to the RL stellar density I took from GURPS: Space.

Someone has written a little mod called "movem" that expands the sector by a factor the user can specify. Problem solved!

 

[Peter Schutze]

>RL stellar density I took from GURPS: Space

I dont thing Gurps space accounts for anything smaller than M v stars whereas AS does include them which is part of the reason i suggested

Astronomers are expecting to find more small (M, L and T) stars within 25LY of us

 

[Kilgs]

Since you've already generated it, this won't help much. But you can change the displayed distance to parsecs when you first generate the area. The distance you type in are still in LY but the jump routes would display in parsecs.

One of the ways I've come up with to destroy the density is to build smaller subsectors one at a time and then run around deleting random ones.

I haven't used the Traveller mod yet, I take it that it works well?

 

[Lapthorn]

The movem app does the density-reduction job cleanly and with minimum effort. It's also customisable.

Interesting point about the type L stars and impact on stellar density. Just aesthetically, I still find unmodified AS maps too "busy".

The Trav system mod available from NBOS website works wonderfully at generating systems according to CT Book 6 rules. You get UWPs for inhabited worlds in the notes tab. I only just got my CT CDROM and haven't read Book 6, but output looks pretty similar to MT (and usable with MGT, although lacks some MGT trade codes). One oddity is I find I have to run it twice to generate the UWPs; first run just gives trade codes and bases. But that just takes another 30 seconds or so (for about 60 systems on my midrange PC).