Milky Way Galaxy

[bartmoss]

I've been thinking about this lately, especially about the suggestions to make this map somehow 3d, and I just can't come up with a workable solution. Indeed, I have arrived at a crisis point in my universe building: The space-volume covered by this map should contain several dozen millions of stellar systems. That's not only way too many to map, it makes micro-managing the setting utterly impossible.

I could drastically decrease the volume of the setting; a sphere of roughly 100 light years (averaging 1200 stars) should be fairly managable. Of course, this loses any sort of "galactic empire" feeling.

I could just do what I do now, live in an imperfect fictional world and just map "important" systems, then treat all the other systems with narrator's fiat. The downside is that I won't be able to provide "complete" maps of the setting.

I could "cheat". Traveller quite successfully used abstract 2d maps. Some other settings use "jump lane maps" of one sort or another. The problem with this is that it's hardly "realistic" at all.

I am a bit stumped. I guess I#d like a "complete" map that is "realistic", and a "galactic empire" type setting, and I just can't work out how to combine the three.

Anybody got any smart ideas, or even just opinions on a good solution?

[barrataria]

I think you and I are going to outlive our respective sci-fi mapping projects! And mine foundered on similar problems. I ended up working with Traveller-style quadrant maps but found some CC3/Cosmographer templates I like too. And ended up running a d6 Star Wars game when I realized I liked that universe better anyway. Which brings me to...

I could just do what I do now, live in an imperfect fictional world and just map "important" systems, then treat all the other systems with narrator's fiat. The downside is that I won't be able to provide "complete" maps of the setting.

Reading this thread and others here made me appreciate the Traveller flat maps. But as I said I ended up back with Star Wars anyway, and conveniently enough they just released a fantastic atlas. Which does just what you say, including "important systems" on the galactic map. I pasted that into my CC3 and hotlinked to zoomed images of quadrants of the galaxy, and then hotlinked to smaller maps of various "important" sectors. Which in SW isn't saying much because the sectors are composed of jillions of systems, many of which are assumed to be uninhabited.

SciFi mapping has made me acknowledge the limitatiions of human knowledge and more importantly human ability to express a giant universe. Hand-waving may be lazy, but it's sure fun.

[mearrin69]

Eh. No. LOL. Trying to provide complete maps for a galactic-sized setting will just make you insane. You can't even do it if you reduce the size of the setting to a 100ly sphere, IMHO. Take a look at the Alternity Star*Drive campaign setting. It took a relatively small volume of space but was only able to detail a small number of the systems in a fairly large setting book. I say keep it big and focus on the most interesting systems, hinting at the others. Can't see how you, as a human, can do much more than that.

I personally love your map. 3D's a gimmick and nobody is presently capable of viewing and referencing a true 3D map in a useful way yet...even if you did bother to make it.
M

[geamon]

3D's a gimmick and nobody is presently capable of viewing and referencing a true 3D map in a useful way yet...
M

Not unless you got your 3D GLASSES!!!!!!

[bartmoss]

Eh. No. LOL. Trying to provide complete maps for a galactic-sized setting will just make you insane. You can't even do it if you reduce the size of the setting to a 100ly sphere, IMHO. Take a look at the Alternity Star*Drive campaign setting. It took a relatively small volume of space but was only able to detail a small number of the systems in a fairly large setting book. I say keep it big and focus on the most interesting systems, hinting at the others. Can't see how you, as a human, can do much more than that.

A 100-light-year sphere is a daunting task, yes, but do-able. Most of the worlds would be very, very sketchy, for sure, and you'd likely have to use random generation for most systems, but that in itself is not really a bad thing.

To add to the problem - Did I mention I will, overall, cover about 5000 years of human history? Stars shift quite significantly relative to each other during such time spans. ;-)

I guess don't I really mind to cheat, since I know I have to for this type of setting. At the same time I am creating a setting, and not a novel. I can't just have spaceships travel at the speed of plot to convenient places, I have to deal, somehow, with the space in between too.

And I just can't figure out what compromise might work best.

[tovette]

I make galactic maps for my science fiction universe and what I did to solve that is just show the systems that have colonies and omit the ones that don't. Problem solved.

[moriturimax]

Can you do what I am going to do on my galaxy map? Add small icons or bubbles on the galaxy map that have several travel lines entering it at various points, that bubble is a composite representing 10s, 100s, 1000s, or millions of stars that aren't "major" stars. You can modify the size or color of the bubble, perhaps with some single-digit code inside it that points out an important feature.

It's almost like an adventure "nugget" from Megatraveller, you have some generic thing set up for when the players get to a specific point in space. You can have a series of things made up that you run when they get to that bubble.

Just an idea.

[bartmoss]

As you may have seen I've attempted to create a "near Earth" 3D-based map in another thread.

Using "bubbles" - Yes that would work - once you go with an abstract "flowchart" like map, you can easily create arbitrary groups - let's call them Clusters - to remove unneeded detail.

You still need to first map out all those stars to know WHAT you are abstracting, though.

In the end, however, I returned to a flat map, and at a larger scale. I agree with barrataria, in that creating a detailed 3D map of anything bigger than, say, 30 light years in diameter (15ly radius) quickly becomes unmanageable and detracts rather than adds to a gaming/fiction experience.