I have more of a sequence plan for making them and putting them up on my web site than I used to have. I think. So if that does work better, the same number of sectors, about 30, should go somewhat faster than before.
Hmm... I don't put lots of planets in every sub-sector... so I wont go gray haired before, wait, I'm already gray haired.
Anyway, I typically put 3 to 7 planets per sub-sector, and this wont be all 16 sub-sectors in a sector. Just going to get an X-Boat path across each sector. While this still makes for lots of planet maps, its not going to be as many as it first sounds.
You could have some 'dead' systems for a bit of variety. There are a lot of real solar systems that only have one or two gas giants which have eaten all the inner planets
I do have nebulae and some small nova areas. And some unexplored areas with maybe one star on the edge of that area. Some planets are all water, some are all ice, some are like Earth, some are mostly desert with 10% to 30% of water on the surface. FT3 is able to make lots of different planets. While making a solar system map for many of these, I don't see doing it for most or all of them, that would be too much of an intense project.
I have two sub-sectors done for this. Each Sector is 4 sub-sectors across and 4 tall. 16 planets to give more than one path. Ones I did last year have just a line of stars across or up. Mostly what I'm mapping are the X-boat paths.
Here is the first Sector map. Reduced in size a bit, 81% of total.
Symetric ? Yes, they like everything to be symetric. They discovered millenia ago that mountains, rivers, bays, continents, etc. didn't lend themselves to being symetric. But they figured they could offer free symetric surgery to visitors. Well, the first one is free...
Well. I found some differences between my spreadsheets and my info on my web site.
Starport differences, etc. So, my mapping is on hold until I get all the universal world profiles, etc. to match between online and offline. Just 1,175 planet articles to check left. Eeesh.
On spreadsheet is okay, list of planets in alphabetical order. The one where I have the planets listed by Column, Serctor, then Sub-Sector are where most of the problems are. And I found a planet article link that worked, but it had extranious info in the link... fixed it.
I would have no idea in how to tie such a database between my blog and my home computer. I'll most likely stop work on this current checking when I get tired of it, make some maps, then go back to it.
1024 planet profiles added, checked, or edited. About 550 pages/articles left to check. Not all of them are planets, some are just info on various things.
Found a number of map errors in my Breloss Star Cluster, fixed many of them. I may take a break and do some mapping as I found text errors today in places I had edited just last week.
I've been drawing a very large multilevel building all day long. I think I was a bit tired when I scanned your last comment. I thought it said you had checked 1065 plants!
1173 planet profiles checked, edited, etc. out of 1265 on my site. I realize this is likely boring to most here, but when I get these done I'll be back to mapping.
This just got weird. A search on my site for UWP: gives me 1219, a search for Planet: gives me 1265. Well, 1274, but thats planets with extra pages for a planetary survery. But when I count the number of articles left to check, I get less than 30. There are 1642 articles on my site. I have part of page 2 and part of page 3 article listings to check, each article list shows a maximum of 100 articles. I must have skipped some accidently. Oh, not all of the articles have to do with planets. Some are Sub-Sectors, Sectors, star ships, info about various non-human races and empires.
I'll just compare the spreadsheets with no UWPs in them, and compare that with the articles on my site.
And Textpattern calls them articles, while other blogs/cms systems call them posts.
No big deal. I think I'll work on dungeons for my Tunnels and Trolls site on Thursday.
Well, I decided to look for all errors and typos. I found way more than I thought was there. The first paragraph is me mostly grouching about the disparity in uwp counts.
And my computer is acting flaky today, no updates, so I'm checking for viruses. I'm just now able to get online... been trying for around an hour.
I have 1234 universal world profiles, and 1265 planets. All planet pages have a UWP. I double checked with my alphabetized spreadsheet of planet names. Nothing missing there now.
Discrepency of 22. I can look for them later, it may be the lines in the spreadsheet where I just have a planet name, is one of the ones with no UWP. Maybe I'll check this over next month.
Off to mapping I go !
edit: 1244 profiles, not 1234. Found a few typos going back through my site. Editing so it wont bump up just for text.
I finally got it all straightened out. The site software search searches the title of each post/article and the body text.
Couting them by hand, and noting in my spreadsheet which planet has a uwp, I found there are 1246 of each. The number of planets was being miscounted by the blog software search. It looks like it looks at 'Planet:' and discards the ':' in the search.
Now I can go back to mapping and maybe make more downports.
I'll estimate that that out of the 16 sub-sectors per sector, on average, only 8 have solar systems in them. Each sub-sector map has 8 rows.
So the 3D map would have to be made or each row. That would make 8 additional maps for each sub-sector to show trade routes, X-Boat (messengers) route, etc. Of course, not all hexes in a sub-sector have solar systems.
One of the 'problems' we discussed is that red dwarf, etc. stars are underrepresented in many maps made before this. I haven't looked at the official map site to see what they did about that. Of the 140 planet surveys I have typed up and uploaded to my site, a few of them are type M stars, most are type G like ours, with one or two F type stars.
Jim, cross-referring to our discussion that rather hijacked this topic elsewhere on the Forum, regarding how to represent star clusters for Traveller on maps, I must admit it's a very long time since I looked at that RPG at all. A friend loaned me the basic books at college, but I lost interest after spending half a day designing characters, only to have them each die before they reached the game-playable stage! Lousy dice-rolling by yours truly, certainly, but to me always a major flaw of the system, and the primary reason why I lost interest and never went back to it. There were others, including the even-by-1980 clunky technology involved, something that also seems reflected in your note that the game seems to imply representing 3D objects like star clusters only in 2D. However, it's not the only science-fiction RPG that seems to make this assumption - plus it's easier to show a 2D layout on a printed page or mapsheet, of course.
I'm not sure I quite followed the hex diagram you showed in that other topic, since I don't know what the three sets of identically-placed numbers-in-hexes represent, but from your notes there about the three "levels", I assume they're somehow meant to show which star-system is where, using the three-level "stack" comprising that basic cluster.
Aside from the use of different colours for the different levels in the cluster we both mentioned before, you also commented on the problem of what happens when more than one system occupies the same (hex?) "space" as seen from the perspective of the 2D viewer (so the more distant systems become effectively hidden by the nearer ones). I'm not sure if the standard Traveller designs would allow this, but the obvious thing - assuming you still need to fit the pattern onto a hex-grid - would be to use the different colours for the different levels, and a slight relative offset for each level, so you can still see the more distant systems. This might mean making the hexes significantly larger than those in your example for clarity (or reducing the typeface for the numbers - if each system has to be shown by a number; as I said, my unfamiliarity with Traveller means I'm not sure about this). I can't imagine that would be a huge problem though, given it's really a scaling matter for the map.
Another alternative for the distance-from-the-viewer indicator would be a simple numerical one, maybe as a sub- or super-script number to the system indicator, to show the level each was on. So the central level in the cluster could be, say, "0", with those further from the viewer "-1", "-2", etc., and those closer to the viewer "+1", "+2" and so forth. I used this method when designing my own galactic map layout, again many years ago now, and that did work quite well, albeit on the scale where parts of a galactic arm or two can be seen, there is a much greater "vertical" condensation of scale than would be apparent in the more-nearly-spherical approximation found in a typical star cluster. I did though use specific light-year values, not just the simplified "level" values here for that, because I wanted to be able to compute direct distances between individual star-systems.
Comments
I have more of a sequence plan for making them and putting them up on my web site than I used to have. I think. So if that does work better, the same number of sectors, about 30, should go somewhat faster than before.
Anyway, I typically put 3 to 7 planets per sub-sector, and this wont be all 16 sub-sectors in a sector. Just going to get an X-Boat path across each sector. While this still makes for lots of planet maps, its not going to be as many as it first sounds.
I have two sub-sectors done for this. Each Sector is 4 sub-sectors across and 4 tall. 16 planets to give more than one path. Ones I did last year have just a line of stars across or up. Mostly what I'm mapping are the X-boat paths.
Symetric ? Yes, they like everything to be symetric. They discovered millenia ago that mountains, rivers, bays, continents, etc. didn't lend themselves to being symetric. But they figured they could offer free symetric surgery to visitors. Well, the first one is free...
Starport differences, etc. So, my mapping is on hold until I get all the universal world profiles, etc. to match between online and offline. Just 1,175 planet articles to check left. Eeesh.
Possibly time for a relational database so you can cascade updates to all the affected files and everything stays in sync?
Just a thought...
I would have no idea in how to tie such a database between my blog and my home computer. I'll most likely stop work on this current checking when I get tired of it, make some maps, then go back to it.
Found a number of map errors in my Breloss Star Cluster, fixed many of them. I may take a break and do some mapping as I found text errors today in places I had edited just last week.
Whew.
"To Infinity and Beyond !"
Then I'll start work on mapping downports.
That's a pretty big greenhouse, I thought. LOL!
Good luck with the downports
I really have to stop watching Billy Connolly stand up comedy videos on youtube... I keep reading the posts here like he is speaking them.
This just got weird. A search on my site for UWP: gives me 1219, a search for Planet: gives me 1265. Well, 1274, but thats planets with extra pages for a planetary survery. But when I count the number of articles left to check, I get less than 30. There are 1642 articles on my site. I have part of page 2 and part of page 3 article listings to check, each article list shows a maximum of 100 articles. I must have skipped some accidently. Oh, not all of the articles have to do with planets. Some are Sub-Sectors, Sectors, star ships, info about various non-human races and empires.
I'll just compare the spreadsheets with no UWPs in them, and compare that with the articles on my site.
And Textpattern calls them articles, while other blogs/cms systems call them posts.
No big deal. I think I'll work on dungeons for my Tunnels and Trolls site on Thursday.
You do seem to have an inordinate number of problems with this just lately. I hope you get them all sorted out soon
And my computer is acting flaky today, no updates, so I'm checking for viruses. I'm just now able to get online... been trying for around an hour.
I have 1234 universal world profiles, and 1265 planets. All planet pages have a UWP. I double checked with my alphabetized spreadsheet of planet names. Nothing missing there now.
Discrepency of 22. I can look for them later, it may be the lines in the spreadsheet where I just have a planet name, is one of the ones with no UWP. Maybe I'll check this over next month.
Off to mapping I go !
edit: 1244 profiles, not 1234. Found a few typos going back through my site. Editing so it wont bump up just for text.
Couting them by hand, and noting in my spreadsheet which planet has a uwp, I found there are 1246 of each. The number of planets was being miscounted by the blog software search. It looks like it looks at 'Planet:' and discards the ':' in the search.
Now I can go back to mapping and maybe make more downports.
edit: fixed some typos.
But I got it done.
So the 3D map would have to be made or each row. That would make 8 additional maps for each sub-sector to show trade routes, X-Boat (messengers) route, etc. Of course, not all hexes in a sub-sector have solar systems.
One of the 'problems' we discussed is that red dwarf, etc. stars are underrepresented in many maps made before this. I haven't looked at the official map site to see what they did about that. Of the 140 planet surveys I have typed up and uploaded to my site, a few of them are type M stars, most are type G like ours, with one or two F type stars.
I'm not sure I quite followed the hex diagram you showed in that other topic, since I don't know what the three sets of identically-placed numbers-in-hexes represent, but from your notes there about the three "levels", I assume they're somehow meant to show which star-system is where, using the three-level "stack" comprising that basic cluster.
Aside from the use of different colours for the different levels in the cluster we both mentioned before, you also commented on the problem of what happens when more than one system occupies the same (hex?) "space" as seen from the perspective of the 2D viewer (so the more distant systems become effectively hidden by the nearer ones). I'm not sure if the standard Traveller designs would allow this, but the obvious thing - assuming you still need to fit the pattern onto a hex-grid - would be to use the different colours for the different levels, and a slight relative offset for each level, so you can still see the more distant systems. This might mean making the hexes significantly larger than those in your example for clarity (or reducing the typeface for the numbers - if each system has to be shown by a number; as I said, my unfamiliarity with Traveller means I'm not sure about this). I can't imagine that would be a huge problem though, given it's really a scaling matter for the map.
Another alternative for the distance-from-the-viewer indicator would be a simple numerical one, maybe as a sub- or super-script number to the system indicator, to show the level each was on. So the central level in the cluster could be, say, "0", with those further from the viewer "-1", "-2", etc., and those closer to the viewer "+1", "+2" and so forth. I used this method when designing my own galactic map layout, again many years ago now, and that did work quite well, albeit on the scale where parts of a galactic arm or two can be seen, there is a much greater "vertical" condensation of scale than would be apparent in the more-nearly-spherical approximation found in a typical star cluster. I did though use specific light-year values, not just the simplified "level" values here for that, because I wanted to be able to compute direct distances between individual star-systems.
A bit like a 3D chess board?