Yes, yes, these are not professional either, but I am sure you’ll agree a far cry from the blurry shots I took in low-light conditions.

But, yes – it would be possible to map the entire Milky Way Galaxy this way. Any takers?

Click on the thumbnail above to get the original size at 4096×4096 pixels; it’s 6MB as a PNG file.

The image is based on a NASA image of the Milky Way Galaxy.

You can see some dice in one pic, and the small test print in two others, to compare the size. And, yes, I really need better lighting in this apartment.

But I’ve also learned two lessons more to the subject matter:

1. I am very happy I did not edit the image – the test print seemed dark and the labels hard to read; on the A1 map both the color and the readability of the labels are absolutely perfect in my opinion.
2. It was an excellent choice to go with matte photo paper, over the glossy stuff.

I’ll get two A3 matte versions printed in a few days (Saturday) as well. One is going to go to Lex Mosgrove, because he claimed that he wanted one.

• Vectorized playing card faces – You never know when these may come in handy!
• The Free RPG Blog talks about – you guessed it – free RPGs.
• Worldbuilder’s Journal is another writer’s worldbuilding and fiction blog and IMO definitely worth checking out.

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.

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:

Note the CD for size comparisons.

I will take new photos on the weekend – during daylight – and of course once I get the poster.

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!

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…