The Orion's Arm Universe Project Forums

Full Version: Proof-reading EG
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.
I'm trying to make a Google-maps type map of the Terragen Sphere, which would show all the locations we already have plus as much real galactic data as possible. This would be a top-down map, as seen from Galactic North, but each location would have an indication of how high above or below the galactic plane is. Even using this map it would be difficult to determine how far apart two particular locations are, unless you are able to do a lot of trigonometry.

This can be done in Celestia, but it often requires you to create an addon for one, or both of the objects you are talking about. Galactography is hard.

It would be really nice if the map function we eventually have has a distance-between function as well, but we might have to write that ourselves.
Here's a Celestia plot of the Black Acropolis and Rak Mesba
Hey guys. Was reading the page on the planet Jilunan, and it says it was colonized in 10925 AT, a good three centuries in the future.
Should be 8925, according to the Fubas entry. Fixed.
(12-20-2015, 11:50 AM)Bear Wrote: [ -> ]It's really frustrating to me that given a location, it's very very difficult to figure out what is 'nearby' to it, or given two or three things you want a story setting to be close to, it's very hard to figure out where it has to be. Or if you want something to be isolated or connected having to figure out whether it's close to a known wormhole, where the beamrider networks connect, etc.

In a general way, this is a long running problem that we've yet to figure out a good solution to. The setting is simply so large that there doesn't seem to be a practical way to take any two (or more) points within it and demonstrate their relation to each other. At least not with anything at the level of resources we as the OAUP are able to command.

We might eventually be able to do something like the 3D maps for all stars within 20ly or something, but things would get very unwieldy very quickly as we went further out into space.

Given that there are millions of wormholes and around a hundred million beamrider accessible places, in many cases you can pretty much make up whatever you want and it should work.

Getting back to the problem itself, perhaps we should give some thought to alternatives to maps as a way of representing where things are? Perhaps some kind of graphic that centers on Sol and shows where the top 20 most important places in Terragen space are in relation to it or something? Some other method, perhaps? Thoughts?

(12-20-2015, 11:50 AM)Bear Wrote: [ -> ]It's still ridiculous that looking over the 'Black Acropolis' entry and the 'Rak Mesba' entry I STILL CAN'T TELL which of the MEECs within terragen space those are. GRRF!

Actually, since both the Black Acropolis and Rak Mesba were derelict/abandoned when discovered (or at least appear to be, the jury's still out on Rak Mesba), neither of them would count as an MEEC since they wouldn't have been radiating any organized signals. They might only have been radiating waste heat from their local stars.

Todd
(12-19-2015, 08:59 PM)chris0033547 Wrote: [ -> ]http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45cfcf367a09f :

Quote:Even members of this the last group may still attack if they perceive an actual or even a potential threat.

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47646874c1b82 :

Quote:The Red Dwarf Kings weree an [..]

This articles mentions "nanoplagues":

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/486fe40528701

If one clicks on "nanoplagues" it leads to a page with the title "The Nanodisaster". But I don't know, whether these articles have already been scheduled for an update. Nevertheless I thought, I should mention them.

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/52290a7ea6a0b :

Quote:Among the new colonies that have so far made contact with the Nexus reciever stations [..]

These have all been fixed.

Thanks!

Todd
Well.... I could, I suppose, make maps my "thing" in terms of primary attempted contribution.

On the down side, I've got Celestia installed but no darn idea how to make "addons" for it.

On the plus side I've got Gimp, and know very well how to use it; I could make transparent maps so it would be very easy to overlay them on one another to make maps that show relative locations.

One thing would help more than you might think, and ought to be fairly simple to do; could we agree to always put the direction toward the center of the milky way at the top of the map, the same way terrestrial maps do with North?

Oh ... w/r/t 3-space trig? I can bang out code to do that in about an hour. I'm doing stuff *WAY* more complicated than that with n-space trig and n-space partial differentials and n-space correction vectors (for N in the thousands or hundreds of thousands often as not) for my job. 3? 3 is EASY. The hardest part for me would be figuring out how to get it onto a web page.
I'm very much in favour of standardising maps in terms of which way anything in the galaxy is. Our maps at the moment are quite confusing without this.
I can help make Celestia addons, and share the ones I have (including a vast addon of galactic locations adapted from the Galaxy Map Page)

I have a spreadsheet that converts RA, Dec and LY distance into galactic XYZ locations; this last notation seems much more useful than the RA and Dec, unless you are looking at the galaxy from Earth.

Here it is, if it is any help;
(12-20-2015, 11:50 AM)Bear Wrote: [ -> ]It's really frustrating to me that given a location, it's very very difficult to figure out what is 'nearby' to it, or given two or three things you want a story setting to be close to, it's very hard to figure out where it has to be. Or if you want something to be isolated or connected having to figure out whether it's close to a known wormhole, where the beamrider networks connect, etc.

So, I was thinking about this today...

Would it perhaps be helpful (and doable) to set up some kind of three dimensional coordinate system within the setting that would allow us to establish the location of every star system or other relevant thing if/when we felt like doing so?

I realize that astronomical coordinates are somewhat like this, but seem to be very centered on Earth and on locations in the night sky. Perhaps, these could work if we added a page explaining them. Or maybe we could set up some kind of Quadrant/sector/XYZ coordinate system or the like?

On a related note, in the course of my travels, I came across this page, which might prove useful as a source of ideas if/when we ever decide to create a 3D map of the OA universe.

Just some thoughts,

Todd