Just a few links this month:
So, I’m finally done. I created my own star map, covering Human Space as I will cover it in my science fiction series.
Final Star Map: Overview
This image was scaled down considerably; the original is at 200dpi – 6622×4677 pixel. It’s 72MB in size as a PNG file. Here are some 800x800px crops from the main map:
Star Map: Region around Terra
Star Map: The Sword Worlds
Star Map: Empire
Star Map: Federation-Imperial Border
Star Map: Seals
I’ve worked on this map on and off for three years, taking some detours in between. In the end I learned a whole lot, and I think i can honestly say, improved as a mapmaker and graphics person. I will never compete with the true professionals, but just consider these early versions of the map:
First Version: The Milky Way Galaxy. This was actually a trace of a NASA image, and I was really just experimenting.
How it all began: At first, I attempted to draw a basic Galaxy...
Second Version: Zooming In. An entire Galaxy is an awful lot of real estate. So I began to zoom in on the Region around Earth. It was still a very crude map.
Spiral Arms: Closing in on the Target
Third Version: The Orion Spur. At this stage I began to nail down the setting. You see an early draft of the political situation in this image.
Orion Spur: Early design of the interstellar nations
Fourth Version: Human Space, Revisited. As the old map wasn’t really working out, and was ugly to boot. I started a new version from scratch. It was based on a solid timeline and a detailed setting design. At this stage, the map was very basic.
Human Space: The Next Generation
Fifth Version: Let there be Color. The next two images are just later versions of the above; as you can see I added a great deal of detail over time. The second map probably has 200 named star systems – that’s a guesstimate, I did not recount them.
Human Space: With Colors
Human Space: Colorful and detailed
Sixth Version: Near Space Distraction. At one point, I began to doubt my design – and decided to go more small scale. I began to map out individual star systems near Earth based on Hipparcos data. In the end, I abandoned this approach – the setting wasn’t bad, but I felt it did not really match what I had in mind.
Near Stars: A New Attempt
Near Stars: Overwhelmed by Data
The Near Star Map’s styletests, of which this was the last, showed me that I wanted a map that was not just functional. Working on the style tests taught me a lot.
Near Stars: Style Test v7
Seventh Version: Back to Square One, Just Prettier. After I discarded the Near Space idea, I reset certain things, changed some assumptions, and experimented with a galactic map. This was the result.
A New Milky Way Galaxy
A New Milky Way Galaxy Zoomed In
Eight Version: Full Circle. I liked the techniques I was starting to develop, but as in the very beginning, decided that an entire galaxy was just too much space. I zoomed in and concentrated on the Orion Spur. The rest, as they say, is Galactic history. Here is an early version of the map that I completed this week:
The Orion Spur, Again
And the future?
This map is done – but that doesn’t mean I won’t work on it. The settings needs to be built, detailed maps for at least some regions need to be produced, and of course the entire thing will continue to evolve. In another three years this map will probably not look the same.
The test print of my star map came out really nicely. I went ahead and ordered an A1-sized poster. I did order Matte instead of glossy paper, and I hope this doesn’t change things too much. At worst I’ll be 20 Euro poorer. The small print, by the way, was a mere 4€.
Unfortunately, my apartment is too dark and my only camera – an iPhone – is not really that great, so the photos didn’t come out so well:
I will take new photos on the weekend – during daylight – and of course once I get the poster.
Astronomycast #246 deals with the question: What if something was different? What if any of the parameters of the universe was different, what if we were further out in the galaxy, what if we didn’t have gas giant, and similar topics – this is of great interest to a world-builder because it gives you a good basic framework of what does and doesn’t work in your fictional universes. AstronomyCast is a good podcast at any rate, I recommend it highly.
Phew. Another long, long evening working on this map. It now has 401 named systems, I’ve also added a bunch of other stuff since the last update.
And a cropped zoom:
I do not even want to think about how much time this took me to create. But I am really happy with how this is turning out!
I’ve remarked on Piper’s inconsistent travel times before. Most of the times when Piper gives us “distances” for travel, he actually uses hours spent in hyperspace. The problem with this is, we can never be sure if he means “real” time, or shipboard time. Shipboard time is also inconsistent:
Four Day Planet:
Belsher’s been on the ship with Murell for six months. Well, call it three; everything speeds up about double in hyperspace.
Uller Uprising:
“Well, it takes six months for a ship to go between here and Nif,” Prinsloo considered. “Because of the hyperdrive effects, the experienced time of the voyage, inside the ship, is of the order of three weeks.”
We can of course assume that he usually means “real” time. There are problems with this, too. For example, in Space Viking, Trask remarks of his crew:
“They’ve been in hyperspace for three thousand hours.”
It’s quite clear that he means real hours, because a ship logs a light year an hour and Gram and Tanith are three thousand lightyears apart:
“The Duke of Wardshaven,” Harkaman reminded him, “is on Gram. We are here on Tanith. There are three thousand light-years between.”
If time speeds up in hyperspace, Trask’s men would have spent 1500 hours in hyperspace – as this was used as a reason for their shore leave.
Piper probably dropped the “hyperspace time speedup” in later works, after all it doesn’t really add anything and makes things more complex. Space Viking in particular throws a lot of travel times around, as an essential element of tracking down Dunnan. Adding the time difference would have made the story needlessly complex, probably to the point that it might be impossible to follow.
It still means that, if I wanted to really stick close to “canon”, I’d have to revisit every statement of travel times and attempt to infer from context whether it’s “shipboard time” or “real time”.
The more time I spend with this, the more I begin to doubt the feasibility of actually creating any kind of canonical star map for Piper’s universe – what I used as the basis for my star map project is probably as good as it’s going to get…
Nuclear power is the stuff of our dreams. It promises clean and safe energy – no greenhouse emissions, no dependency on foreign oil sources. At the same time it was devised as an ultimate weapon, and thus has become the stuff of our nightmares. The iconic picture of a mushroom cloud is firmly burned into our collective cultural consciousness. Nuclear accidents, nuclear terrorism, nuclear war – each has the potential to keep you awake at night, if you are prone to worry about such things at all.
As a consequence, all things nuclear have crept into our pop culture wherever you look. Indeed, it stands to argue that nuclear war created post-apocalypse as a genre. Nuclear power can be a powerful element of a story, whether for a game or for fiction.
Nuclear war, the prevention and consequences of it, are basically their own sub-genre of science fiction. It’s pretty much beyond the scope of a Plot-A-Day post to tackle it in its entirety. Some ideas, though:
Spent probably six hours updating this thing, and looking at it I wonder… why did that take me so long? I did experiment a little with regional / sector labels; and of course placing all those stars is actually much more work than it looks like.
Closeup:
And the entire map, downsized from the original:
Both were saved as JPG as well, so there’s some loss of detail from that as well.
As always, I’ve also updated the thread on the Cartographers’ Guild.
Updated WIP. I’d love to hear your feedback on the “sector names”:
Also, here’s the entire map:
Still needs work… much work. But it’s “getting there”. By the way, there’s also a thread on the Cartographers’ Guild for this map.
What do you guys think of this?
The star systems are only temporary, and this is just a section of a larger map.
Uses brushes by Sakura.