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Sun is shining – here are much better close-up photos of the star map: 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.
I decided to release the following image under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Please credit me with a link back to http://www.enderra.com – Happy mapping!
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.
Got the A1 version of my star map. Again, as with the small test version, the photos simply don’t do it justice, but I had to post some anyway.
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:
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.
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So, I’m finally done. I created my own star map, covering Human Space as I will cover it in my science fiction series. This image was scaled down considerably; the original is at 200dpi – 6622×4677 pixel. It’s 72MB in … Continue reading
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.
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…
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.
