Cities in Three Dimensions

[Acatalepsy]

So, I play Eclipse Phase. It's a creative commons RPG, it's pretty amazing, and it's available here for free. I am currently in the process of purchasing some city maps for various locations around the solar system.

However, when it comes to certain cities, there are some design problems I'm not quite sure how to resolve. An O'Neill Cylinder, for example, is a curved object - difficult to represent on two dimensions, and a bit boring as well - I'd want any map to convey a sense of what it's like to be in a place where you can walk in a straight line and end up above where you started.

Other cities are just hard to figure out how to divide them up or draw them. Such as cities shaped like cones or teardrops (aerostats in the Venusian skies, icicle cities anchored underneath Europa's glacial crust), and others have no defined shape at all (massive cluster habs of lashed together with rings and spars). How to represent these places concretely, where going up or down (if those terms have any meaning in zero gravity!) is just as valid as left or right?

Thoughts, or better yet, examples?

[Obbehobbe]

Something like this came to mind! Google on "impossible pictures" and you'll end up with a few. However, creating a city like that would certainly be a challenge!

[Corilliant]

Haha, I read your signature quote after your comment, Obbehobbe. It would be somewhat appropriate here

[Acatalepsy]

That, uh. May not have been what I intended?

[Larb]

I imagine for something like an O'Neil Cylinder it would just be a bit like unwrapping a projection and mapping it though I'd also include a small graphic showing it was in a cylinder too. So the map would just be a rectangle or whatever. Some of the others... well they seem to get increasingly complex. (mapping a space habitat would probably make for a fun monthly challenge though)

[Malicious-Monkey]

The easiest to map will be the cylider, but I know what you mean by an unwrapped square version being a bit boring. At least by itself, that is. If you were to map the whole thing to a square, then make some regional maps in perspective, curves and all, and put them all together in a nice looking layout, it would really showcase the shape of the habitat while still being informative.

[Larb]

I've not done a great deal of sci-fi mapping but I did do this sketch of a habitat for a story I wrote that I planned to map (I'm not a physicist or engineer so I don't know if that station would actually work but it fit my mushroom theme =P). It had individual mushroom cap shaped habitat modules (appropriately called Pileus Alpha/Beta/etc) that could be replaced. I was going to draw the ring part in profile and then a plan view of the habitat parts. Because they are modular you wouldn't need to draw every single one if they were constructed to a couple of set designs - just a map of one or two.

For the hanging icicle cities I would probably just draw the whole city in profile with a plan view of only important areas. I suppose it depends how much detail you need.

I once wanted to draw Freeside from the book Neuromancer as it is a favourite book of mine. I think that was a spindle shaped O'Neil cylinder or something.

[Gamerprinter]

Yeah, I'd say unwrapping a cylinder into a large square where one side of the map geomorphically matches its structural graphics with the opposing side is your only realistic option.

I've been thinking about doing a map of a large Stanford Torus, which would essentially be a long narrow map, best probably sliced into equal size pieces, where both ends of the map geomorphically lines up with the previous slice and the next slice. Of course, I'm not talking about something as small as the torus space station in 2001 a Space Oddessey, rather something with a population in the 10s or 100s of thousands, with perhaps 3 defined communities, with parkland and residences between.

There is no practical way aside from unwrapping the colony shapes to create a flat map.

[dataAce16589]

I'm not sure if it is a still picture kind of environment, but my guess for a cylinder would be a Rectangle + Semi Circle (Bottom) + Full Circle (Top) to create a cylinder. Just an educated guess though, I'm very new so my Opinions/Ideas/Comments might be useless.

[Acatalepsy]

I think that unwrapping cylinder is going to be necessary, but it seems like you should also include a side view, something that shows a cross section of the cylinder so you can see the size of buildings compared to the structure as a whole, and get a sense of how far away the "other side" is.

More problematic are cluster habitats like Locus, which is "the largest cluster hab ever created, an eleven-kilometer-wide irregular sphere with thousands of habitat modules docked to its skeleton of rings and spars. A conical cutaway with a base about 8.5 kilometers wide (1/4 of the overall circumference of the sphere) runs all the way to its center, forming a 5.5-kilometer-deep central area that is open to space and off limits to large ships. By tradition, the base of the cone is kept pointed toward Proxima Centauri, Sol’s nearest interstellar neighbor."