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…

As stated in Part 3, H. Beam Piper’s Nu Puppis – the star around which Niflheim orbits – does not match current understanding of the star’s position. I’m inclined to move Niflheim to a star that’s closer to Earth, matching the Piper-Nu Puppis as much as possible, but there’s also a reasonable argument to just go with the in-fiction-truth.

Let’s look at the math to see what both mean to the Piper universe.

First, we need some numbers. Piper’s Nu Puppis is described as:

The planet named Niflheim is the fourth planet of Nu Puppis, right angle 6:36, declension -43:09; B8 type star, blue-white and hot, 148 light years distant from Earth.

Doing the math this works out to:

That’s in parsecs, with Real Nu Puppis shown for comparison. Dist is distance from Earth.

Piper’s Uller is described as:

It is the second planet of the star Beta Hydri, right angle 0:23, declension -77:32, G-0 (solar) type star, of approximately the same size as Sol; distance from Earth, 21 light years.

Again, doing the math, we get:

That’s a parsec off, too, and gives us a new question to ponder: Do we use Real Beta Hydri or Piper Beta Hydri? I guess if we accept Piper Nu Puppis we must also accept Piper Beta Hydri. Of course, my “favorite” Nu Puppis replacement is Epsilon Hydri. It has almost the same spectral class (B9) as Nu Puppis (B8), and both are Giant stars (class III). Epsilon Hydri’s position is:

Distances between these stars are these:

Note how beautifully Epsilon Hydri’s distance to Earth and to Beta Hydri match the distances of Piper’s Nu Puppis to Earth and to Beta Hydri. Let’s visualize:

The little gray shadow of Beta Hydri is the Piper Beta Hydri, almost a Parsec closer to Earth than the real Beta Hydri. The numbers attached to stars are their z-Coordinate.

I still think that Epsilon Hydri would provide for a better “outgoing” vector than Piper’s Nu Puppis, but from this simple map it’s clear that Piper’s Nu Puppis is not in an absurd position (which for example the other side of Terra would be).

So where’s your Niflheim at? If you want to stick to the Piper “canon”, it’s clearly where he says it is, at a Nu Puppis that doesn’t really exist. If you want to consolidate Piper’s material with real star data, Epsilon Hydri is the way to go. Since switching Niflheim to Epsilon Hydri only violates the star name mention in Uller Uprising, and fixes more problems than it causes, I will assume that Piper made a mistake in the star name.

In the end, since everything else we know about Piper’s Terran Federation is very, very vague, it won’t affect the final map much in either case.