I am working of a Travelleresque campaign. I will be using real stars to some extent and a 3-D star map.
A couple years ago, I wrote a program that used Hipparcos data and other data along with invented stars to select the relevant stars for my campaign. To build polities, it would start with one star, and then pick or invent nearby stars. Since my base jump is 30 parsecs, I divided space into 30x30x30 parsec cubes and assigned those to polities. A cube would typically have 1, possibly 2, remotely 3 or more relevant stars belonging to the polity. Additional stars would be invented to connect stars that wound up more than 30 parsecs away from the last star generated. Sol is considered to be in cube 0,0,0 (the cube coordinates for a star is {floor(X/30), floor(Y/30), floor(Z/30)}). The program will also generate connections between polities, inventing stars if necessary (but preferring real stars even if they are unlikely candidates for habitation - which actually is best).
So taking that idea of 30x30x30 cubes of space, I'd like a simple way to given a data base of cubes and some characteristics for the cube, create a simple 3-D visualization. My thought is to plot all the cubes that contain O/B stars along with some other cubes, and then decide where to place polities, and maybe even shape some of the polities and their connections.
One thought for a model I had was just to spit out some coordinates of cubes, and try and use LEGO blocks to build a real model, but it would be nice to have a computer based tool.
The ideal tool will make it easy to see what cubes of space are occupied by certain objects and how those cubes relate to other nearby cubes.
My preference for tools would be first an open source tool that can run on Linux, second a free tool that can run on Linux, third a free tool on Windows XP.
Thanks for any ideas
Frank
A couple years ago, I wrote a program that used Hipparcos data and other data along with invented stars to select the relevant stars for my campaign. To build polities, it would start with one star, and then pick or invent nearby stars. Since my base jump is 30 parsecs, I divided space into 30x30x30 parsec cubes and assigned those to polities. A cube would typically have 1, possibly 2, remotely 3 or more relevant stars belonging to the polity. Additional stars would be invented to connect stars that wound up more than 30 parsecs away from the last star generated. Sol is considered to be in cube 0,0,0 (the cube coordinates for a star is {floor(X/30), floor(Y/30), floor(Z/30)}). The program will also generate connections between polities, inventing stars if necessary (but preferring real stars even if they are unlikely candidates for habitation - which actually is best).
So taking that idea of 30x30x30 cubes of space, I'd like a simple way to given a data base of cubes and some characteristics for the cube, create a simple 3-D visualization. My thought is to plot all the cubes that contain O/B stars along with some other cubes, and then decide where to place polities, and maybe even shape some of the polities and their connections.
One thought for a model I had was just to spit out some coordinates of cubes, and try and use LEGO blocks to build a real model, but it would be nice to have a computer based tool.
The ideal tool will make it easy to see what cubes of space are occupied by certain objects and how those cubes relate to other nearby cubes.
My preference for tools would be first an open source tool that can run on Linux, second a free tool that can run on Linux, third a free tool on Windows XP.
Thanks for any ideas
Frank
