Two new stars discovered, only Jump 2 from Earth

[Peter Newman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_1049-5319

Right ascension 10h 49m 15.57s
Declination −53° 19′ 06″

It's tough to map 3-d coordinates to 2-D jumpspace, but where should they go on the map?
[Assuming you put them on at all, which is another question.]

 

[BlackBat242]

Unless you are playing Traveller 2300, your Traveller star maps have no resemblance to reality.

 

[77topaz]

Well, they do have some resemblance to reality, but most likely reality as it was perceived in the 1980s or so.

 

[BytePro]

The star maps? :file_19:

Only if reality was perceived as 2D in the '80s! :file_21:

Even blatantly ignoring the 2D aspect - the OTU starmaps don't come close to representing reality by any reasonable stretch of the imagination... the systems were randomly generated after all, not taken from star catalogs!

(The 'science' of Classic Traveller is really nothing above grade school level texts from the 60's and 70's. Which is just fine for the entertainment purposes it was intended for. Though placing earth into the OTU starmaps and timeline was unnecessary and rather comical, IMO...)

 

[GypsyComet]

Now now. Earth is only lost in a couple classic SF settings, not all of them.

 

[Peter Newman]

The star maps? :file_19:

Only if reality was perceived as 2D in the '80s! :file_21:

Even blatantly ignoring the 2D aspect - the OTU starmaps don't come close to representing reality by any reasonable stretch of the imagination... the systems were randomly generated after all, not taken from star catalogs!

But the location of the stars near Earth (for a subsector or so) bears a close semblance to real distances (but not really angles) and stellar types as known then. For instance Prometheus (Alpha Centauri) and Barnards Star are both Jump 2 from Earth. These should be too.

Canonically Earth was undiscovered by the Vilani because it is hard to get to Earth in a Jump 2 ship coming from Coreward. Therefore another star Jump 2 from Earth could seriously alter that canon if it were placed Coreward. Maybe hex 1729?

Anyone using the 'Jump Space is 2-D and that's why the map is flat' explanation still has to either add them to the map or explain away them away. Adding to the map strains my sensibilities less than 'Grandfather pulled them into a pocket universe.' or 'This is a parallel dimension where reality plans a closer resemblance to what we thought it was like 35 years ago'.

 

[SpaceBadger]

What I read was that these were not real stars w planetary systems, but rather brown dwarfs. Since those are never mentioned in any Traveller materials of which I'm aware, maybe they never developed the equipment to detect them?

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

But the location of the stars near Earth (for a subsector or so) bears a close semblance to real distances (but not really angles) and stellar types as known then. For instance Prometheus (Alpha Centauri) and Barnards Star are both Jump 2 from Earth. These should be too.

I'm no astrophysicist, but I was always under the impression that brown dwarfs are substellar objects, not stars -- or if they are stars, it's more in the same way that dwarf planets like Ceres and Pluto are to big-boy rockballs like Earth and Mars. Even assuming these two bodies are star-worthy, that's no reason to assume that they automatically go on the Traveller map just because of that. AFAIK there are plenty more stars that exist in a region of space than are on their corresponding section of the Traveller map; it's only the ones worth visiting that actually show up on it.

Canonically Earth was undiscovered by the Vilani because it is hard to get to Earth in a Jump 2 ship coming from Coreward. Therefore another star Jump 2 from Earth could seriously alter that canon if it were placed Coreward...

Not really. The Vilani who reached the Solomani Rim sector were not the intrepid explorer type by any means. They were completely uninterested in discovering new worlds by that time, and only used scouting activities for insuring that anything within a few parsecs of their official frontier was clear of potential rivals. And even that activity ceased within a few centuries into the Ziru Sirka era. Keep in mind that there already is a Jump-2 route between Vilani space and Terra -- the Vilani simply hadn't bothered to climb up the beanstalk far enough to reach us. Earth was just a hair too far -- and too technologically off the grid -- for them to give a damn about.

 

[77topaz]

Even blatantly ignoring the 2D aspect - the OTU starmaps don't come close to representing reality by any reasonable stretch of the imagination... the systems were randomly generated after all, not taken from star catalogs!

Not everything was randomly generated. For example, in the Solomani Rim, one can find numerous star systems visible from Terra/Earth, roughly the right distance away from Terra.

 

[leo knight]

I had tried to create my own near space setting years ago, using info given to me by the director of the local planetarium. Mapping 3D onto 2D was quite a challenge. This was before the Solomani Rim supplement came out, BTW. By my scheme, a few star systems wound up in the same hexes, Sirius and Procyon come to mind. I kept track of the multiples, and kept the brightest, most colony worthy system. Where I had two famous systems, as above, I moved one to the closest adjacent hex. I toyed with the idea of stacking star systems vertically, but eventually decided against it. If I were to start over, I'd keep my stacked vertically scheme, and WISE would be in the same hex as Wolf 359, only "below" the plane of the map.

A lot of the stars near us are small and class M. Most of them don't show up in the canon map, anyway. I'll try a few in-game rationalizations. Perhaps they are too small and resource poor to bother with. Perhaps the OTU is an alternate universe similar to, but not one-to-one congruent, with our own. Or maybe the official map only shows the major systems, the way a road map only shows major towns. Plenty of room to add your own!

 

[BlackBat242]

Canonically Earth was undiscovered by the Vilani because it is hard to get to Earth in a Jump 2 ship coming from Coreward. Therefore another star Jump 2 from Earth could seriously alter that canon if it were placed Coreward. Maybe hex 1729?

Not really. The Vilani who reached the Solomani Rim sector were not the intrepid explorer type by any means. They were completely uninterested in discovering new worlds by that time, and only used scouting activities for insuring that anything within a few parsecs of their official frontier was clear of potential rivals. And even that activity ceased within a few centuries into the Ziru Sirka era. Keep in mind that there already is a Jump-2 route between Vilani space and Terra -- the Vilani simply hadn't bothered to climb up the beanstalk far enough to reach us. Earth was just a hair too far -- and too technologically off the grid -- for them to give a damn about.

Remember, according to Supplement 11 Library Data N-Z page 29, the Vegans got jump drive from "Vilani-influenced" traders in -6,000, and were officially absorbed into the first Imperium in -4,404... AD 117 on Terra.

The Solomani (Terrans) "invented" jump drive in -2431 (AD 2080), which means that the border of the Imperium was within 14xJ2s of Terra (Sol) for 1,973 years, and they never made that trip?

We started beaming high-power signals at nearby stars in the 1960s (unintentionally at first)... over 100 years before we went out to find the Vilani were our neighbors.

Since we were 8 parsecs (26.08 light years) from Vega, they had to have known a technologically-advancing civilization was nearby for almost 70 years... and WE had to go to THEM???


It took only 1,600 years from "first contact" between non-affiliated traders who had contact with the Vilani (not even the Vilani themselves) to Vilani absorption of the Vegans... and in 2,000 years they never made it the other 14xJ2 to Sol. Sad, really.