Near Star List hex map - a few random thoughts

[sudnadja]

Taking a little inspiration from the Challenge Magazine #75 attempt at a 2d hex map derived from the NSL. This is never easy, once you select more than three stars and attempt to dimension reduce it into two dimensions you will lose distance information between any star that is not your central star.

In this version, the NSL is rotated into the galactic plane (that is, +Z is galactic north rather than the NSL default of the equatorial north), distance to the star in question normalized, then the position of the star scaled by that norm. Thus, the distance from any of the stars to Sol is accurate, but they are not accurate between the stars. A good example of this is DM+59 1915 to 61 Cygni. They're right next to each other on the map but about 6 LY distant in 3d.

A refinement I am adding is a hex grid in light years as well as the main one in parsec, allowing for a little more "space" between the stars.



Has anyone else had any luck building a 2D hex NSL?

 

[LiNeNoiSe]

Has anyone else had any luck building a 2D hex NSL?

Sadly no. Andy Slack wrote the Challenge article. All he did was take the stars from the map and transfer them to a subsector map. He didn't bother checking distances.

A good example of this is DM+59 1915 to 61 Cygni. They're right next to each other on the map but about 6 LY distant in 3d.

It gets even worse. I ended up with a couple of American worlds inside the Kafer Sphere and a couple of Kafer worlds on the American Arm.

 

[Fovean]

Stellagamma Publishing has a product called Near Space which is a sector map centered on Earth. I do not know if they used the NSL data but I quite like the map.

 

[sudnadja]

Stellagamma Publishing has a product called Near Space which is a sector map centered on Earth. I do not know if they used the NSL data but I quite like the map.

The use modern data (one version with some hypothetical stars added, one with normal data). I don't know what the source was but it doesn't match my own NSL or the 2300 list.

 

[Clone95]

The better way to do a NSL-> Hex is just to find out the connections from star-to-star and arrange it in such a way that all those connections play out without creating new links. Something similar to Dr. Ganymede's NSL Update but in Hexform rather than railway form.

Titanic effort, though, and certainly not easy to do.

 

[Werner]

Is Van Maanen's star in the near star list?
This is a dim low mass solitary white dwarf, there is evidence of asteroids orbiting it, as there are contaminants on the surface that have not yet sunk to the core, there may also be planets in orbit around it, it is a Type F white dwarf and has been a white dwarf for longer than our Sun existed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Maanen_2

 

[jcrocker]

Yes.

x = 13.3, y = 2.7, z = 1.2

It's on the Chinese Arm, with transits to Haifeng, Rho Eridani, and DM +1 4774, Gateway to the Canadian Finger.

 

[Werner]

Yes.

x = 13.3, y = 2.7, z = 1.2

It's on the Chinese Arm, with transits to Haifeng, Rho Eridani, and DM +1 4774, Gateway to the Canadian Finger.

The thing about that is you could build a ringworm around it out of ordinary material, the star is dim enough such that its habitable zone is deep withing its gravity well, at the optimum distance the gravity is greater than 1g. Its basically an inhabited orbital ring. There is material orbiting it, we know that.