Galaxy
(Copied straight from .XML 'backup' file, needs formatting and corrections. ZM User (talk) 20:15, 22 April 2024 (PDT))
Galaxy
How accurate do we have to be?
Names stripped off but the following is the relevent posts in the thread.
31 January 2009 23:41:48
> I think that's a bad idea. There are too many high-tech types who would call us on any kind of goofs we make.
Hey! I resemble that remark.
But really, folks just need to avoid using identifiable star systems unless they know where the stars involved actually are.
31 January 2009 23:01:26
Not exactly. It would probably get us in trouble with people that actually KNOW about astronomy.
I was just responding to those who were asking for a local space map, so that we can locate bases and colonies.
31 January 2009 13:57:27
This is a really cool map, but the scale is far beyond the reach of the Swarm Cycle. It's possible that the Sa'arm region occupies more than one hex, but the 10 year cycle will limit us to a sphere no larger than 1200 ly. Even that would be 6 months out and 3 months back for a transport.
31 January 2009 13:30:35
I think that's a bad idea. There are too many high-tech types who would call us on any kind of goofs we make.
31 January 2009 09:54:19
Hhhmmm... I think he wants us ta be accurate on locations and names of systems...
31 January 2009 04:21:13
This is true. The Sa'arm are within 73 ly of Earth and our colonies, for the present, are within 200 ly of Earth on the opposite side. There are some outposts and specialty colonies that may expand the Earth influence. The Orion Spur is 3,000 to 4,000 ly across with Sol on the galactic center edge of the arm. I would take 15-20 months for a colony class freighter to cross the spur from Earth.
30 January 2009 19:18:41
Somewhere, probably linked through the potentially hazardous asteroids section of SpaceWeather.com, is an orbit projector (I think NASA NEO page) that allows you to rotate and tilt the diagram. It would probably be more than a little bit entertaining to have a tool like that to look at these maps, and, perhaps, show what a jump to a particular star within the dataset (I've seen that before though it seems a very long time ago) and an ability to look back. I probably should, when I get another chance, dig through the various astronomy apps that come w/ Linux, though a web-based version would be nice and "platform agnostic"... And I mis-typed "A Star is Burn"...
30 January 2009 19:17:21
> Any thoughts about expanding the plot to 3 dimensions?Perhaps a +/- value along with the hex?
As noted, at the scale of this map (1200 light years per hex) the galxy is a bit less than a hex *thick* until you get to the core (which won't have any sort of usable planets anyway)
30 January 2009 19:09:44
> The big problem with this is that the entire "Human Sphere" fits in a PORTION of ONE HEX. Our area of influence is only about 280 lightyears in diameter. (Per Thinker and/or Kevin) So that's about 1/4 the diameter of one of your hexes.
But the confed and Sa'arm areas may be a few hexes. And it'll give us something. :-)
30 January 2009 16:49:49
Ah, yes, "A Star if Burn"...
Thanks for these links, all...
30 January 2009 06:26:42
First, Google Galactic neighborhood. Lots of nice maps and pictures M-Way 2 and here have some nice maps
For those of you too lazy to do that, I have included some maps for 12.5 lightyears, 20, 50, and 250 Also some area maps for 120 and 500 with a key and one for the entire galaxy. The 'atlas of the universe' site has names and types of the stars in the given areas (for the smaller maps)
30 January 2009 05:48:27
The big problem with this is that the entire "Human Sphere" fits in a PORTION of ONE HEX. Our area of influence is only about 280 lightyears in diameter. (Per Thinker and/or Kevin) So that's about 1/4 the diameter of one of your hexes.
30 January 2009 03:40:42
That's right. Sol is along the edge of the spur, isn't it.
30 January 2009 03:31:01
> Back in early August Thinker, Kev, Mike and I worked out that typical freighters could travel 150-200 ly/mo and warships a bit faster, whatever that means. 800-1000 ly/mo is more that 'a bit faster', but plausible for really fast warships. Until recently, Earth's wet freighters were about 1/2 to 1/3 the speed of capital ships. Having warships 4-6 times as fast as the colony ships may be pushing things, but typical commercial airliners fly between 450-550 knots. Most bombers are in this same range, but a few hit 3 times that speed for 20-30 minutes before running out of gas. The SR-71 isn't 10 times the speed, but significantly faster than whatever is in second place.
Ok, that means that cleaning up and re-orienting that scan might be worth the trouble. It'd definitely be more a map of "known space" (ie stuff that is years away on the edges). Still useful for very general plotting purposes.
Might be a thought to pick a spot for the Sa'arm to have spread from and a general idea of where they habve spread *to*.
Good thing is that at that scale, we can draw vague lines and bot have to move them. :-)
30 January 2009 03:30:56
But we can extrapolate the center from the curvature of the arc. Or if we can't that says the center is a *long* ways off.
30 January 2009 02:19:29
I wouldn't mind having a copy of that map. It would also be helpful if it showed the Confederacy and the Sa'arm areas and projected human colonies. Is this doable?
30 January 2009 01:20:57
5 light-years per day is consistent with 150-200 ly/mo and just going from one side of our 'spur' to the other will take a very long time. I don't have my references with me. Since the Sa'arm ships are 'significantly slower' than the Confederacy freighters, they will require more ships to explore the same volume. Assuming that they have reached the void around the spur, the the have two directions to expand a circular front: toward Earth and away from Earth. At the moment the volume occupied by the Sa'arm is not known to the humans.
30 January 2009 00:53:06
Back in early August Thinker, Kev, Mike and I worked out that typical freighters could travel 150-200 ly/mo and warships a bit faster, whatever that means. 800-1000 ly/mo is more that 'a bit faster', but plausible for really fast warships. Until recently, Earth's wet freighters were about 1/2 to 1/3 the speed of capital ships. Having warships 4-6 times as fast as the colony ships may be pushing things, but typical commercial airliners fly between 450-550 knots. Most bombers are in this same range, but a few hit 3 times that speed for 20-30 minutes before running out of gas.
29 January 2009 23:47:41
Alas, maps on a smaller scale *have* to be 3d. And data on what is out there drops of radically once you get more than a few dozen light years out.
That's because most stars are dim red dwarfs and we can't *see* them unless they are close. So the data from farther out is very much "selective".
If you have a spare $76 laying around, you can buy a 3d starmap of our neighborhood starmap
In any case, at that speed, we *do* get into serious galactic geography issues. The Sa'arm will be unlikely to spread across the rifts (several months travel) unless forced to. And that means we'll have two "waves" spreading up and down the arm from their point of origin.
There are also a couple of "nearby" spurs that may prove quite instructive as to what happens when a Sa'arm expansion wave hits a choke point (sort of like army ants heading down a peninsula. At some point they either run out of resources or try to find a way across the water)
29 January 2009 21:42:45
It definitely gives us a place to start, but if I remember, the official top speed of the Confed ships make it so that 75-80% of all current colonies are within 1-2 hexes of the Sol hex. I think the speed topped out at 800-1000 ly/month.
29 January 2009 21:26:05
I had a flash of inspiration and scanned part of the map for SPI's old Outreach wargame. The map covers about 3/4th of the galaxy (and is something like 22x34 or bigger).
But the section around Sol fit on the scanner ok. Each hex in the image is around 1200 light years (400 parsecs). At this scale, the galaxy is only one hex thick.
The center of the galaxay is way off to the top & right.
The yellow hexes are high stellare density, the gray ones medium and the black ones are rifts between arms.
I figutred that this could give us something like consistent "geography" without getting into fine details that'd bog things down or cause problems.
If folks are interested, I'll check and see if (as I have heard) Kinko's has scanners that can handle the whole map.
Obviously we can't stick the scan up on the website, but it'll still be a handy ref for authors.
(Someday this will be a navigation template. It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links. Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))
