Jeff Zeitlin writes,
> Or, just strap on wings and fly in the empty space. I remember
> reading a "kid's" SF book where one of the recreational
> activities on the moon (which is hardly 0G) was just this.
> Damned if I can remember the name of the book - or the author.
> Just that the protagonist's boyfriend's name was "Jeff Hardesty."
The short story was "The Menace from Earth", by Robert Heinlein.
Dane Johnson writes:
> The X-Y-Z group should maintain the "current" XXYY grouping, giving us
> Terra/Solomani Rim (1827ZZ G867975-8 etc...), thus requiring little
> variation on existing data and file-formats, and making the resulting data
> files useable by people who want to maintain 2D orientations...
I'm not sure how valuable this would be. 3D starmaps look very
different from 2D ones, and the resulting trade routes and political
boundaries would be quite meaningless.
I've done some analysis of a near-star catalog (*), and it doesn't
look as though the standard Traveller jump drive price and size
hierarchy makes much sense in three-space. Now, in the Spinward
Marches, there is approximately one star every other square parsec,
leading to the wondrous Spinward Main. Approximately half of the
stars in a 40x32x(1) parsec rectangle are reachable by jump-1, and
most of the rest by jump-2. The extra jump distance mainly provides
speed. On the other hand, each star has (at most) six neighbors
within 1 parsec, 12 within 2, 18 within 3 and so forth.
In the 25-parsec radius around Sol, there are 2250 stars in ~1750
star systems. Ignoring the possibility of drop-tanks for now, here
are tables with the number of reachable systems in 'real life' and
in the Solomani Rim sector in Traveller for set distances.
'Real Life' Traveller
Distance Systems Distance Systems
1 0 1 0
2 4 2 all but a few
3 1027 3 all
4 1720
Breaking down the 2-3 parsec range (because with this degree of
detail the numbers can be broken down any which way), 'real life'
looks rather gradual:
'Real Life'
Distance 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.0
Stars 4 88 190 299 326 561 723 842 1027
In fact, this gradual nature is more of a product of not using
gridsquares rather than of using a 3D representation. But it also
means that the size of your jump drives/fuel tanks also determines
where you can go _at_all_ as well as how quickly you can get there
to a much greater degree than in standard Traveller. A
Beowulf-class Free Trader won't get much business with just Jump-1
drives, even if they do get enough fuel for two jumps!
One of the reasons, for me, that 2300 feels different than Traveller
is that star travel is constrained. They seem to have cunningly
picked a limit of 7.7 light years ( <2.4 parsecs ) in order to give
space a degree of texture that allows Terran national governments to
dominate space. Perhaps also, to avoid overwhelming players with
choices, which could happen given their limited display
abilities...
Going back to 3D Traveller, I don't think it would be very valuable
to use 2D subsectors in 3D games, and vice versa. A 3D map will
assume that it has six borders, not four, and will have trade routes
coming in from the subsectors above and below. Furthermore, for the
same number of stars, it will be of different dimensions. (more
like a cube 5 parsecs on a side). If Z-coordinates are arbitrarily
removed, the star systems will be in different positions, leading to
different relations between them, and an entirely different
political and economic situation.
This also applies to the large scale boundaries of empires. Being
3-dimensional entities, they will have borders that follow the
contours of their stars, rather than those of a flat map. As such,
they will probably be smaller and more spherical than indicated on
the standard Traveller maps.
I believe that it would be a mistake to assume that 3D can be added
to Traveller simply by layering subsector sheets on top of each
other, because the original mapping was highly unrealistic, and
many of the assumptions implicit in it are not portable. 3D
Traveller sounds like fun, and I'd like to work on a universe using
it. However, anything related even remotely to astrography would
need to be reworked in its entireity. As such, it's unlikely to be
Classic Traveller + 3D.
Jack Dietz
// [email removed]
(*) Royal Observatory Annals number 5: Catalogue of Stars within
twenty-five parsecs of the Sun (Herstmonceaux, 1970). Almost the
same catalog as GDW used for the data from 2300 (Gliese 2nd Edition,
also 1970). The raw data is available from arc.ames.nasa.gov, I
believe, and a processed version is available for FTP somewhere.
(Sorry I'm so forgetful, but I had to rebuild my filesystem recently
and I've lost a lot of back mail.)
- --
Jack Dietz, Southern Research Labs, Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow.
* Little. Yellow. Different. Sol. * [email removed], [email removed]